Travel and day one

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Hi there folks. Sorry it took a couple of days to get the first entry up -- Internet is a bit sporadic here and we've been really busy. On the upside, Xiamen is beautiful and the trip's been really exciting so far.

Travel

The trip here was definitely an adventure. First, adding a long flight to Newark from Kirksville and another from Beijing to Xiamen to pad around the 14-hour flight to Beijing really extends the suffering. I was traveling for 30 hours straight before I arrived, and I just can't sleep on planes, no matter how I try. To make matters worse, once I arrived in Beijing, I discovered that Air China had lost my connecting reservation. I was sent chasing around the Beijing airport to four different offices with various levels of English to try to figure it out. At the end of the day, I ended up having to buy a new ticket and wait on standby just to get to Xiamen. Luckily, a seat opened and I made it here around midnight. One of the more helpful navigation signs in the Beijing airport:



Day One

The hotel here is very nice and the campus is gorgeous. The campus is like a small town in the middle of Xiamen, and it has three hotels of its own, so we're staying here. My room has a very nice view over the lake and across parts of campus:



The campus is also right on the beach, which has giant stone statues of computer mice on it. I can only imagine what a future civilization will make of these when they are unearthed:



The first day was mainly spent in opening lectures and orientation to the camp. Robert Trapp introduced a model of the argumentation and advocacy process rooted in citizenship and public sphere theory, and the students really opened up about their relationships to issues of tangible and intangible cultural heritage in their own cultures. We have a very diverse group from around the world, so I imagine we will learn a lot from their experiences.



As always, we dove right in to the local cuisine, starting with lunch on the first day. Younger and Juwen took us to a restaurant on campus for visiting experts, which was very nice and we had a several-course lunch of regional specialties. Most unusual were the lancelets, which are a kind of sea worm chopped up and put in something like jello. You have no idea how hard it is to pick up a tiny piece of jello covered in worm slime with chopsticks, but the taste wasn't bad -- kind of like oysters. I'm proud to say both Girouard and I ate worms on our quest to look local.



The culinary highlights for us tend to happen in less institutional settings, though. While waiting for me to arrive, Girouard and Lin Lu explored some of the city off campus and found an alley they thought we would like, and they were right. There are a bunch of street vendors selling local fruit, and I got to try my first Lychee, right off the tree. We bought a huge bag of them for the equivalent of $2 and chowed down.



Conveniently, there are also a number of local restaurants on the street, including one that we think may fill in for the Red Sky Celebration, which we loved in Daxing. We just park ourselves at an outside table in the alley and enjoy the food and people watch. That night our table was overflowing with food as we tried everything. We picked out a live fish from their tanks (the seafood is VERY fresh on this island), and they cooked him up for us:



We also tried a spicy chicken dish, and they really don't fool around with peppers here:



It may be because we were ordering everything on the menu, but probably just because we were the only Laowai in the alley, we were a bit of a spectacle, and people were very curious about us. There was a large group of tough-looking guys doing something at another table in the alley, and Lin observed that they were pretty scary looking. Girouard's response? Let's make friends. Somehow, without a word of Chinese, he pulled it off. They ended up toasting us and kept offering us cigarettes, so we have a bunch of new BFFs in China. Check out the group photo:

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Comments

[Kevin]

Oh, Girouard
Leave it to Girouard to befriend the local mafia. Well, at least you'll have your backs covered when you take on the Triads. Lychee is amazing, and I bet it's even better fresh off the tree. Sea worms....eh...you can have them guys. Have fun!