Practicing our tour guide skills

Over the weekend we had the opportunity to play tour guide since a colleague from Mark flew to China for business, and had some free time. Now that we know more people will be visiting us this year, we thought we should practice our tour guide skills. Ravi was the perfect guinea pig. Saturday was the road trip to Jimei and yesterday we thought we would show him the "old town" . We started off at Huayan Temple and found that it was much larger than we thought. There is a very large park in the back, where people can sit and enjoy card games, read or simply enjoy the view of Xiamen. Later we headed to Zhongshan Lu, where Ravi was quite shocked at the number of people shopping. We explained that this is their favorite sport here in Xiamen. We continued walking through some alleys where one could see how some of the local people live. Many of the older buildings in this area are being torn down as new condos are being built. We will miss walking through some of these alleys as it really gives you a sense of what it must have been like living in China 30 years ago. That being said, it will be better for the people when their living conditions improve. Weaving in and out of the alleys, we made our way to the local market, where you can buy anything from vegetables, to live ducks, goat heads, snake, eel and so on.
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To quench our thirst we headed to one of our favorite spots, Temptations, where we enjoyed a nice bottle of Shiraz before heading out to dinner. We finished our tour with a nice seafood dinner by the harbourfront before saying our goodnight.

We congratulated ourselves on a job well done.