Happy Belated New Year everyone! In 2 days I’m off travelling for the best part of a month, so I thought it would be nice to leave a little update of what’s been going on in Xiamen. Not a lot of time for detail but a picture says a thousand words. And the camera adds 10 pounds.
Towards the end of the year it got a little colder but nothing spectacular. So we went ice skating.
Xiamen knows what we need. Though, as it is with every aspect of Chinese life, we were swiftly shown up by 4-year old skating prodigies whizzing around on the ice dressed like Robin Hood.
The same weekend there was a Taiwanese (I think) food market out on Zhongshan Lu.
We went along for such delightful delicacies as fried scorpion…
Chou doufu, the worst smelling food in the world…
And a sort of centipede bug thing.
Paul had previously agreed to eat it in some kind of chou doufu deal but despite his “I’m going to be sick” protestations we knew he was loving it.
Here I am with some perfectly normal guys selling chicken kebab sticks dressed as a monkey and a half-naked person.
Another weekend we had a class trip to the Korean BBQ. Here I am cooking far too much meat with 3 of my multicultural classmates - Thai, Swedish and Japanese. I'll let you guess who's who...
And here's everyone else at KTV.
Most memorable was the bus ride home, where we hit a taxi, took some photos, got off and went to the bus stop to wait for the next bus. As luck would have it, we got on the same one again.
Christmas this year, in comparison to last, was a little too normal to constitute extensive description. There were many parties…
And Santa crashed church.
New Year’s was a dumpling party…
A dinner party at my Russian classmate’s place and a job promoting Apple through the medium of Heineken. Mostly we just drank a lot of tea and Alex played Plants vs. Zombies on iPads.
Most recently it has been my birthday which has involved several nights of birthday parties (both intended and unintended), some fantastic Chinese gifts and the arrival of my good friend Brett. Here I am with poor jetlagged Brett, wearing a few of said gifts.
And here we are in Helen’s, where everybody knows your name.
Oh, and I was in the newspaper!
Somewhere in the midst of all this I also ‘ran’ a half-marathon (there were so many people it was difficult to get beyond a brisk walk at times) and took a few exams. But there aren’t any photos of these events so they’re not interesting.
It’s taken me so long to upload this blog that it is now 2 hours until I leave for Beijing, not 2 days. So it’s probably time to pack. Stand by for Beijing with Brett, Harbin with hypothermia and hopefully a little trek round Yunnan…
