Tuesday in Xiamen

Tina and I woke up slowly this morning while Mark headed off to work. We've been bustling around all weekend so it was nice to sleep in and not have a tight sightseeing agenda for the day. Waking up slowly here is a bit different from the experience at home: there's the street cleaning truck that plays an ice-cream-truck version of "happy birthday", and the local kindergarten children get together in the courtyard of Tina and Mark's building to sing. This morning the song of the day seemed to be the hokey-pokey!

I got up around 9am and went for a jog around poo-poo lake (it's actually quite a beautiful back bay area in the "Marco Polo" district of the city -- some of the expats named it poo-poo lake and that name has unfortunately stuck...) The run took longer than I anticipated because certain parts of the path were closed off and I had to take detours, but I got to see a lot of the city and lots of fisherman and locals out enjoying the perfect weather.

Tina spent the morning doing Tai-chi, catching up on her Chinese online learning sessions, doing laundry and dropping off the dry cleaning. She runs a tight ship here and the Wichmann B&B!

The best part of the day was wandering through the markets and back alleys of Xiamen. We took lots of pictures and picked up some DVDs that I wanted for my fam back in Chicago. On our way home we bought some baozi and chili/scallion pancakes. I can't get enough of the baozi! Tina ordered it yesterday for lunch and I had to have more today... It's a steamed bread dumpling that's stuffed with pork, scallions and a delicious sauce. We rested our feet for a half hour at home, ate the boazi and pancakes and drank tea.

We then headed to "Me and You 2" to watch the sunset over the water and meet up with Mark. After a few beers, we headed to a restaurant and had a fresh seafood dinner (we knew it was fresh because we picked out our food from fishtanks!). I think I could get used to this lifestyle...

Markets
Boazi
Sunset at Me & You 2
Dinner