An Art Exhibition, the Xiamen Library and the Fitness Centre.

---

My feet are sore. LOL Wednesday, I spent over 3 hours walking or hiking. Today, I bet I walked for at LEAST an hour and a half. The 3 amigas, as we like to call ourselves, headed out shortly before noon to meet Rich and Diane at the School. We decided to be brave today and do something that really scared us, just to prove that we were alive...we crossed our street at the crosswalk. Now, in Canada, that is not a big deal....here, it is a miracle to arrive alive on the other side. The cars/trucks/bicycles/buses/taxis, they don't slow down. You step tentatively out from the curb....they whiz past you while you slowly advance....frozen stiff in fear and when the coast is clear in each lane (there are 4 of them in each direction just out in front of our place) you get the hell outta dodge! My fingers almost went through Joyce's arm, poor woman! Yikes. It is extremely unnerving to see people in the middle of the road with traffic whizzing past them as they move hither and yon, seemingly oblivious to the motorized monsters moving quickly past. We have observed very, very, hairy situations and wondered if people here don't seriously have some sort of death-wishes at times? We would never do this sort of thing back home. Well, back home, the traffic stops. Not here. LOL Not willingly, anyway.
Dawna and I have bought 25 admissions to a fitness centre in downtown Xiamen and we took Diane and Rich to see the place while we finalized our purchases. I tried to buy our passes yesterday, but as it turned out, neither my Visa credit card or my bank card would work, so we had to return with cash today. We are very much looking forward to working on the gym equipment, and to some of the classes such as spinning classes, yoga, belly dance, latin dance and zumba to name just a few. After safely tucking our passes into our bags, we jumped back on a bus and headed over to the electronics marketplace (5 floors of tv's, cameras, jump drives, phones, etc. and even several restaurants...omg, it was crazy in there) to purchase a few things. I had wanted a jump drive and for about 50 Yuan or 7 Canadian dollars, I could buy a 4 gig jump drive. As it turns out, I was short of cash and my Canadian visa was not accepted so that purchase just didn't happen and I decided to put it off. We jumped on yet another bus and headed off to the art show and the library. As it turns out, we got a bit lost, and had to backtrack a bit, and ended up walking a fair ways, which is not a bad thing.
The art show was in a large hall, with a sickly beige plastic covering on the floor, very much like what we use at home to cover our gymnasium floor when we have the a Christmas concert, which btw, I am SOOO glad to not have to do this year! Sorry Rob. LOL The art was amazing! Some of the pieces are HUGE. I've taken some shots showing people AND the art so that you can see the scale of the pieces. For about 45 minutes we wandered around oooing and ahhhing and snapping pictures or taking video. Finally, about 3:30 it was time to go have a bowl full of noodles and we sat down en plein aire in a little cafe across the way and ate some spicy beef and noodles for lupper--lunch and supper. Then, it was time to to check out the Xiamen public library. It is a beautiful, if musty smelling, open space, with a garden in its interior, and it was busy, looking well-used. Unfortunately, of the approximately 1000 English books which can be checked out many are what I consider painful reading---the full Somerset Maughm collection (really, like who picked this crap anyway?) Tolstoy......Tolstoy, yeah, I really want to re-read war and peace. NOT! Henrik Ibsen. Really? Yikes. Sigh. And a whole lotta, LOTTA Harlequin romances. YUCK. Totally not me. Harlequins are just garbage books and a waste of paper. There was some Harry Potter, thank GOD, and some Narnia, and quite a lot of John Grisham, which apparantly I will be re-reading and quite a few Stephen King. A wonderful array of MALE writers, except for the sappy nonsense. Upstairs in another section of the library is a place where many non-fiction English books are housed, and some magazines, many of which seemed, for some strange reason to be about decorating, but cannot be removed from the stacks. You may browse/read in-house, but not out of house. Well, that is ok, I guess. We noticed a few Chinese people asleep in the chairs at the library and have also seen "The sleepers", as I call them, in restaurants asleep on the tables and sometimes outside under trees, on benches, really anywhere you can sleep, well, people DO sleep, in public. Apparantly it is quite acceptable to have a snooze at the library (or anywhere, for this matter) if you are tired. Quite amusing.
After a quick shop at another underground shopping mall--many of the malls here are underground, which seems odd to me, but ok, it's not Canada, we scored some Coke zero and some eggs. We have come to value our icy cold Coke zeros after a day in the oven (ie: out and about) and have almost drank our first 24 already!!
Enjoy the pictures of the art show. These are my faves!

---

Comments

[h.h]

art
nice art, careful crossssing

[Suzanne]

Art
Totally love the Arts!!!! Just wandering....Do you do any teaching??LOL!!!

[Spirited Northern]

Response to Suzanne's comment....
Hi Suz, oui on enseigne, mais pas beacoup! We teach during the weekends, and then we teach 2 evenings. We do enjoy 3 full days off/week and the days we work evenings are free, too. It\'s a nice gig, but doesn\'t pay well, but I would recommend it for the experience to anyone! Love ya, miss ya. xoxo CH