A trip to Haicang...

I took this Monday off, making up for working last Thursday and Friday while those we know back in the States were stuffing themselves with Turkey. I've still got a lot of vacation time that I need to use up before the end of the year, and we also have a lot of errands that we need to complete before movers come to pack up our belongings and ship them to the back.

Todays main errand was to head over to the mainland, the Haicang area of Xiamen, where there is an artisan-type village. We had a painting that we purchased from our friend Yogi that we wanted to have framed over here at a lower cost. We thought that we would head over and leave the painting with him so that we could pick it up in two weeks - the next time we would be free to head over there again.

Nope, we showed him the frame style we would like and before we could say anything else, or even discuss costs, he had rummaged around his back room and was working at tacking our painting to a frame.
Within 30 minutes he was done and it looked great. He wrapped it all up and then sat us down to have some tea. Then came the price - an unbelievable 60 kaui (about 9 USD).

The taxi rides each took 30 minutes, and the ride there and back cost us a total of 56 kuai. So, not bad for getting our painting quickly framed.

The rest of the day I spend running around the local alleys and markets pickup up all sorts of thing. The most important being buying a new large suitcase, that we are hoping can at least survive the trip home, for 210 kaui (about 30 USD) and getting my shoes repaired at the cobbler for 20 kuai (about 3 USD).

A busy day of running around, but we're slowly making progress.....