Relaxing Weekend in Xiamen

The weather is perfect now here in Xiamen, so we took advantage of it to wander through the alleys and over to 中山园 (Zhongshan park) and enjoy watching to locals...
This whole area was filled with people tossing and catching these little balls on their rackets. It was fun to watch, and they are doing it all in this slow rhythmical motion. I think we watched for at least 5 minutes and I only saw one old lady drop a ball, the rest of them were flawless in their routines...
The park is filled with with people playing cards, enjoying a picnic, relaxing and catching up with friends or even just napping.
And it's a great place to hang out with you tiger striped spay painted puppy....

Finally...

Well we finally managed to have a nice relaxing Friday night without any plans.

We went out to a nice all you can eat Japanese meal, which includes two servings of sake each for only 100元 each (our friends Ed and Christine showed this place to us while they were still here), and then wandered home to just relax out on our balcony and enjoy the scenery that we do have...When we sit outside we bring our Bose Sounddock and iPod out onto the balcony so that we can enjoy some good music.
A little more then a month ago one of the blogs that we read, ILoveChina, talked about the Genius option on iTunes and ever since then we've been hooked on it. In addition to creating a playlist off of a song, we also just learnt that there is a side bar that will recommend music that you may also like that you don't own. This is marketing genius, and we like.
So last night, we pulled out the playlist the we made based off of The Dresden Dolls song Coin-Operated Boy. A great way to relax, just sitting outside in the finally comfortable weather listening to a good mix of music, enjoying some more sake and having a nice Don Thomas Honduran cigar.Ah, now that's some good relaxing....

Lots of nothing...

Finally, a relaxing weekend where we were able to do lots of nothing. This weekend is sandwiched between two trips out of the country, and there aren't any birthdays of going away parties that we needed to attend. The rains of the last week, and the last remnants of typhoon, then tropical storm, Fengshen have finally seemed to have passed. It's still cloudy out, and we did have a couple of quick downpours yesterday, but this has also helped to bring the overall temperature down (now only 31C and 62% humidity) which makes it actually bearable to sit outside.

So sit outside we did, and we took to enjoying our balcony. We dragged our Bose Sounddock outside and on both Friday and Saturday nights we relaxed to some nice jazz and blues and talked a lot of mindless nothing.

We also managed to get a little organized with some of our photos and files. We finally loaded the photos from when we went to Wuyishan back in April with Ann over to Flickr, and Tina has added a new blog link onto her favourites. The new link is Thompson Stories, Tina's friends that are becoming foster parents and have decided to blog about all of their experiences, the blog is off to a strong start, we suggest that you check it out.