Tuesday 8/31
Happy Birthday Kylie!!
This morning we had a little orientation with Professor
Chittick about what to expect in his class and that we needed to
present our topic to the class tomorrow! How rude! Anyways I was mostly
prepared I just hate public speaking. We went to get some lunch
afterward and we waited in a restaurant for about 45 minutes before we
realized that they clearly were not interested in serving us. During
that time though, I had my first experience with a public bathroom… It
was seriously frightening. As many of you might know, public bathrooms
in China are holes in the ground and normally do not have stalls. This
one on the other hand did have stalls but did not have toilet paper and
was still a hole in the ground. It was pretty sketchy. After we left
the no service restaurant we went to the cafeteria again and got some
really good food, even though it was difficult to actually get through
the lines because everyone was just coming in for lunch. The rest of
the day we all mostly just worked on our presentations.
Later that night though we all went down to Zhong Shan Lu just to
explore some more because that place is huge. We walked down the major
street and found a pizza hut on the highest floor on one of the tallest
buildings in Xiamen so of course we had to go see it! Let me tell you,
if pizza hut in the US was as good and had as many choices as this
place did- I would be there all the time!! They had seafood pizzas,
rice dishes, noodles, delicious desserts, and lots of ice sand drinks.
And the view was awesome! It looked right out over Gulongyu, an island
right next to Xiamen where all the rich people live.
When we were walking around more Des and I found the coolest alley
way with the most incredible looking seafood! Like it doesn’t even look
that good in the fancy restaurants in the states! And every stand had
the coolest food! When we were looking at one place in particular I
think they guy behind the stand really wanted us to stick around so we
“bought” a few beers and just talked for a bit. In China NOBODY drinks
straight out of the bottle, but we did and people would stop on the
street to stare at us, we’re such barbarians! After a while though the
guy brought us out some escargot that was super delicious and he said
“qing ke qing ke!!” which means its my treat!
As we were sitting there a few college age boys sat behind us and
tried speaking a little broken English to us, and pointed to our
escargot and said “very dangerous! Yes ok, dangerous.” We totally
freaked out, but it turns out they confused the word delicious with
dangerous, so funny. They were cool to talk to for a while and we had a
lot of peijiu (beer) which does not get you drunk, there is a very very
low alcohol content in it. After a while they started to get pretty
creepy though so we decided to leave. It was difficult to explain to
them though that we had to catch our bus in an opposite direction of
them. Overall though, it was a great night at Zhong Shan Lu.
