Xiamen, China - February 22

warming up

15ish, cloudy

The title of today’s tour is “A Taste of Local Life in Xiamen”, in the end that sounds about right.

street squid

The first thing we do is go for a bike ride. Much of yesterday’s tour took us along Xiamen’s seaside road where I noticed many people riding bikes or strolling along. This is what we did first thing this morning. I can’t remember the last time I rode a bike was, but I still seem to remember how. We ride along the seaside on our own for about half an hour stopping every so often to check out this or that or just.

A Tai Chi class is our next activity to taste Xiamen. The location of this class was half of the charm of it as it was right off of the beach. First each of the instructors demonstrated what seemed to be like routines and then the tried to teach us. It was a lot of fun. Much of the fun of this was because the instructors were as interested in us as we were in them. Again, I don’t think they see many western tourists – they were taking as many pictures of us as we were of them.

Next we were back to the tea lesson we had last night. Because many people had done this last night, we were given the option of strolling along the beach – we decided on the tea. It was only 30 minutes and we learned new things we weren’t told last night. We also tried a green bean cake. This was quite good – sweet, mild and not very ‘green bean’ at all, the name’s the worst part.

Our last stop was at a pedestrian shopping area. The most interesting part of this area was the food stall area. Once again squid is all the rage. Squid of all kinds were for sale. I think if we had money we would have actually bought a deep-fried squid on a stick. There wasn’t a money exchange place ANYWHERE. There was one in the cruise terminal, but of course it was closed each time we were there until AFTER today’s tour. This only makes me think they really don’t get many non-Chinese tourists. Each of these stalls had a guy in front where customers would line up exchanging money for an empty food container. Then the customer would give the container to the guy making the food, no money was given to the cooks - interesting.

When we were in Taiwan I mentioned I bought oyster omelet chips. Well…I learned today that oyster omelets are a very popular food here. The guide told us about them and I saw a few stalls making them – again…interesting.

giant oysters with pearls

I have to say, none of the food has yet looked too ‘unusual’. I’m still waiting…expecting some wild looking food. I think it will be for looking only!

Something that was also interesting were pearl stores. These stores were full of everything pearl, including the oysters that they came from. I know next to nothing about pearls and the oysters they come from, but was under the impression that one pearl came from one oyster…not here. The oysters are HUGE, like dinner plate size and each oyster seemed to house 20 or so pearls - wow.