In the land of Mao

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After a 12-hour plane trip, a 4-hour wait, and a 1.5 hour plane trip, I finally arrived in Xiamen. It is an island across the water from Taiwan (it's part of the PRC).

The airline, China Eastern, is acceptable, but quite budget. They don't have personal TV's, which I believe is now a violation of certain FAA regulations. They showed "The Ant Bully", "16 Blocks", a French film, and a Chinese film. I didn't really pay attention to any of them.

For lunch they served pork and rice, with an interesting sauce I had never tasted before (maybe it was rancid), a potato salad with tiny shrimp, warm bun, and a soft creamy cake thingy that tasted like caramel. Dinner was a pork and mushroom mixture over thin broad noodles, a salad comprised of lettuce, a cucumber, and a tomato, with no sauce, a warm bun, and a fruit salad with cantaloupe, honeydew, and grapes.

I am now in a decent hotel room, only $20 a night, with an open market and some supermarkets nearby. I hope to be moving into an apartment soon, but I am being lazy about organizing that. Food is ridiculously cheap. I will grow very fat.

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Photos

Window
View from Hotel window.

Room1
Not bad for $20. Has internet too. However, the bed, strangely, is literally as hard as a rock. That is to say, if I struck it with a softer rock, such as shale, the bed would prevail.

Room2
That purple bag on the counter is full of Purdy's chocolates. Delicious.

Bathroom
There is a good shower head.

Food
All this food cost only 21 yuan. That's about the equivalent of $3 Canadian. That is how much the grapefruit juice alone would cost in Canada. And it's tasty. The UFO is oyster sauce flavour. It wasn't very good. The bread thing tasted of coconut and strawberry, and had whipped cream inside. The remaining items are chocolate-stuffed oreo cookies (made by Nabisco, phonetically called "ao-li-ao", which sounds pretty much like oreo), seaweed peanuts (always enjoyable), and french fry flavoured potato chips, which I have yet to eat. $3 for all that.

Another Window
This is a little parky thing outside the hotel.

Another Window 2
In the building underneath that large billboard, there is a big market. Many stalls full of fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat. It was intimidating, so I only briefly wandered through it.

Another Window 3
Not much new in this one. Seems to be a tropicalish climate, with the palm trees.