Day 6

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Editorial note: Some of the pictures are sideways. I know that, so you don't need to message me. I also have no idea why photobucket uploaded them that way. What I do know is that the Internet is so slow here it will not let me open the menu in photobucket to rotate them back. I'd suggest either using your imagination or cocking your head to the side. As soon as I get a fast enough connection, I will fix the problem.

Since we conquered the mountain a full day ahead of schedule, we decided to take in Gulangyu, which is a small island in the harbor of Xiamen. It's the top tourist attraction around here and all the students were very excited about it, so we were pretty enthusiastic. We started out early in the morning, wanting to get a jump on the crowds. Fortunately, the island is just a short ferry ride away from Xiamen. Unfortunately, services are very cheap here, and we didn't know that for only 10RMB ($1.50), you can get a ticket for a deluxe 40 minute tour boat that takes you on a lap around the island before docking, complete with narration in Chinese. I took this picture as our boat cruised past the actual ferries:



Double bonus: Between the rain and the fog, we couldn't see much of the island on the tour, so we just got a 40 minute boat ride with Chinese narration we couldn't understand. Here's a picture of Scott suffering, Girouard deciding that that means we get 40 minutes to harass Lin about being a bad tour guide, and Lin figuring out that we are going to harass her for 40 minutes straight.



Not a very auspicious beginning, but the day turned out. Gulangyu was originally the site where foreigners were allowed to live while trading at the port of Xiamen. Naturally, they constructed homes in their native architecture, so the island is a mix of various colonial European styles. For some reason, the bulk of the Chinese tourists flocked to the tourist traps so we were able to wander the island largely alone through the alleys and back streets.





We hiked back to the busier area for lunch. This whole area is known for its fresh seafood, so all the restaurants have aquariums and tubs of live sea creatures out front. In this very nice, white tablecloth style restaurant, when we asked for a menu, they pointed us at one such array:



We picked out a likely-looking fish and the waiter scooped him out of the tank, bashed him on the head and then asked how we would like him prepared. We ended up with some kind of soy-based preparation that was just ok. I guess I'm just not a huge fan of bone-in, scales-on fish you eat with chopsticks. I had to fight the urge to just fillet the thing myself. Our lunch concluded with a troop of soldiers marching by. We're not sure how much military presence is on this tiny island, but these guys were carrying targets and looked like they were headed for target practice.



After lunch, we headed back out in the rain to Shuzhuang Gardens, which is a series of gardens built by a super rich Chinese guy who lived on the island. Now they are one of the primary tourist attractions. They are designed to play with the different textures of plants, rocks, and water. In the rain, it was pretty much all water. Here's a picture of water dripping off an especially pretty flower.



A personal highlight for me was seeing a cobra in the wild. Scott was poking around in the rocks ahead of the group, and started yelling my name, so I hustled ahead. Sure enough, this snake was just chilling in a hole in the rock. Upon further inspection we decided it was a cobra so became much more cautious about poking around in the rocks. After a while, he got tired of us taking pictures, and just went back into his hole.



With that reassuring rock experience under our belt, we discovered that the next garden was actually a series of paths down a steep hill, built into the rocks. Figuring it all went down, we scattered into the paths to take pictures. Turns out, the thing is a maze and we all got stuck in it separately. Sometimes we could poke our heads out through gaps in the rock and see each other, though.



We all made it down pretty quickly except for Chris, who at one point was heard to yell "I need an adult". We got the impression his mom might have lost him in malls on occasion, given his panicked choice of phrasing. Eventually he made it down to the water garden at the base of the cliff, which was a bit scary because the stone paths through the water are slick granite with no rails.



After a tiring day of rock mazes, we wrapped up our day at the Xiamen Underwater World, which is the aquarium on Gulangyu. It was a real experience, as it is considered one of the better aquariums in China, and we got to see some fish rarely seen in aquariums, like absolutely huge Arapaima. Also, they have one of those tubes to take you inside a shark tank, like in Jaws 3, but theirs is horseshoe shaped. Here's a closing picture of a crab:

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Comments

[Bruce Girouard]

Who knew?
Who knew that after all those attempts to lose Christopher in malls when he was a child, that as a young adult he would revert back to a defense mechanism he learned back then....calling out "I need an adult". BAG