Xiamen University

I have neglected to post some pictures of my beautiful campus here in Xiamen. Xiamen University is known for being one of the most beautiful university campuses in China, and although I have little to compare it against, I believe it's an accurate reputation.


This is the center of campus, as seen from the 9th floor of my dormitory.

This is the view from my bedroom - the seaside! It's very lovely, but as you can see, it's often quite foggy (smoggy.)

The other direction, still from my bedroom window.

They have lots of statues and sculptures around, including these computer mice on the beach. I think they're so funny - a great touch of whimsy!


Some mornings I run or walk along the beach. The weather is nearly always perfect, and it's fun to watch the Chinese people doing Tai Qi in the morning or taking a swim (even if I would never dare to do so!)

This may be my last post, as I leave for Beijing early Wednesday morning. I should have some awesome pictures and experiences from my time there, but I may not have time to post about it until after returning home.

上海！ (Shanghai!)

ChHappy Thanksgiving all! 10 of my friends and I went to Shanghai for our Thanksgiving break, and I had a fantastic time! Shanghai is a fantastic city - very cosmopolitan and Western. It's already gone on my list of cities I'd like to live in.


Here's a picture of the skyline - the pink building on the left side is the Oriental Pearl Tower - it's a very famous icon of the city.


We ate Western food pretty much over meal except Thanksgiving, oddly enough. This was our Thanksgiving dinner pretty standard Chinese fare, actually. No turkey, or even poultry to speak of. (And definitely no pie, which was the saddest of all.) It was delicious and cheap though, and we enjoyed ourselves.



I actually have some pictures of myself that I thought I would include this time. Here I am enjoying a steaming dish of rice and soy-braised beef. Yum!


We did some serious shopping while in Shanghai. There was an incredible range of options, from the Western brand name knock-offs, to very Chinese jade and pearls, to 9 story malls filled with familiar stores from home. This picture is from one part of a giant street of shops we spent the day at.


Gingerbread lattes at Starbucks are lovely, but we couldn't resist picking up some street food for breakfast on our way to the metro. Shanghai has a great metro system, actually. It was extremely convenient, clean, cheap and easy to understand. I had it figured out by the second day, and the well-translated English signs everywhere were a big help.


As you might expect a city of 17 million to be, Shanghai was extremely crowded. It was also filled with Western ex-pats. It was an off role reversal - normally when we travel in China, we Westerners are stared at by the Chinese people. Here in Shanghai though, we Westerners marveled at the huge amount of other Westerners, while all the natives didn't even bat an eyelash.


Shanghai at night is also quite a sight - lots of gorgeous architecture.


The Oriental Pearl at night - much less gaudy, in my opinion.



One last picture of me, with some of my friends. We're staring at the Oriental Pearl, actually, having just crossed under the Huangpu river via an underwater tunnel.

Temple of Ancestor Worship

Before the main point of my post, I wanted to share with you all how safe I feel in China. It's amazing - besides needing to of course watch my belongings and zip up my purse (pickpockets are a big problem,) I always feel safe. China has extremely low violent crime levels, and I always feel safe walking home after dark from a local internet cafe. When my parents were in town, one girl who was worried about moving to San Francisco for university, was horrified to learn she shouldn't walk home along at night - it's just not something you have to worry about, especially in a place like Xiamen. It helps that everything is open very late here, and there are always people around, no matter where you are or what time.

We visited a series of temples with my Chinese culture class last week. First we visited a local temple to a local, Fujian/Southeast coastal China deity - the Holy Mother. Then we visited a beautiful Daoist temple. The last temple though, a temple for ancestor worship, was be far the most interesting. It incorporated Buddhist and Daoist elements into its style and worship methods, and the decorations were fascinating.



Along one wall were dozens of paintings depicting scenes from famous Chinese moralistic stories. They are designed to teach filial piety. The one I have included above shows the story of a son who, because every night mosquitoes kept him and his family from sleeping well, took off all his clothes one night so as to attract all the mosquitoes to himself and allow his parents to sleep.

I am, unfortunately, not sure who the figures in the painting represent. Venerable town ancestors, I would guess. I just liked the painting, which was on the door going into the temple.


The amazing things about nearly every site we visit in China, whether historical building, temple, or tourist shop, is that they are all inhabited. The temple of ancestor worship had beds along the opposite wall, but here you can see their table and cooking area. This was not in a back room, but simply in the temple proper.



Here is someone's bicycle leaning against part of the entranceway.

A Tribute to Better Internet (with pictures)

Orphanage update: as was perhaps inevitable, I have fallen in love with the children at the orphanage. They are growing up so quickly! Only a couple could walk when we first started going, but now about half of them can walk around, especially with help.

One of my favorites is a little boy who almost never shows any emotion. He never smiles, except that I have figured out if you tickle the bottom of his feet he will just barely crack a smile. Generally though, he sits back and observes what is going on around him. His very serious, pensive mannerisms have led us to nickname his the “little old man” “xiao lao ren,” in Chinese.

My absolute favorite though is a little girl who will be all smiles and laughter if you tickle her. If you smile at her, she will always grin back. She is so adorable – I have to be careful not to play favorites with her. I never used to understand how a couple could choose a child to adopt – how could you choose between so many children? And how would you know which one to choose? But now I think I understand. Don’t worry! I’m not going to bring back a baby from China. I will miss them all though when I go.

More on food: (an integral part of Chinese culture - apologies if I seem like I talk about it too much.) I have tried both silkworms and a fresh coconut, and I must say, the latter tasted much better. The silkworms were stir-fried, I think, and tasted salty and crunchy on the outside, and kind of bread-like inside. Not great, but not completely disgusting either. Given a choice between that and starving to death, I would survive.

Fresh coconuts though are fantastic - I quite recommend them. First I drank out all the juice, then I dropped it to break it open and eat the meat. Not terribly exotic, but I was delighted.

While I'm making very un-Chinese recommendations for your palate, let me recommend a british mini-series for your free time. I have been watching Planet Earth for a few weeks now, and I can't say enough about it! I feel like a hippie after watching an episode, because I'm always so in love with our world - it's such a cool place! Again, not very Chinese, except for the (probably) pirated status of my friend's DVD.

Below are more pictures from my bus tour. We visited a beautiful park, and saw lots of Chinese people doing recreation. It's another custom we really should import.


Here are a group of people being led in song. You'll notice in all my pictures, that the people participating in the activities are adults, very different from what you'd see at most parks in the US.

Here is a group of people playing a Chinese version of hacky-sack. They're extremely good at it!



Here is a father teaching his son some sort of martial arts. In the background you can kind of see some people practicing Tai Qi - also very common in Chinese parks. If I get up and run in the morning, I always see people (generally elderly) practicing Tai Qi around campus.

As you can see, the park was very picturesque. We didn't have time to rent paddle boats, but they looked fun.




This is a phone card that a friend of mine bought, and once I saw it, I had to take a picture. The panda character is one of the 2008 Olympic mascots. To be fair, it's probably just illustrating one of the shooting events/competitions. Probably.

Sadly, still no pictures. I was able to load pictures when I went to an internet cafe nearby yesterday, but just as I was finishing my post my time ran out, and I lost everything. Next time I go back there, I will keep a better watch on the time so I can put some pictures up. For now, I will relate a couple of unrelated anecdotes.

I recently read an article in the NYT that said that 80 percent of the food sold domestically in China is not up to safety standards. Exported food is nearly all considered safe, as the government is working hard to improve its products’ imagery abroad, but the same cannot be said for domestically sold food. Reading that though, I’m surprised by how little trouble I’ve had with the food. I've had food poisoning once, but no other incidents to speak of. Most of the other people in my program haven't had any problems either.

My Chinese conversation partner, Wensha, or Wendy, and I have gone out to dinner together a couple times, and I have since decided that arguing over the bill is my favorite Chinese cultural practice. Of course, this practice depends on sharing dishes, which is not often done in the US. At the end of dinner the first time, I wanted to treat her to dinner, but she wouldn’t here of it. She even quickly whipped out money and handed it to the waitress before I could, as I was also going to try to give me money to the waitress first. Next week when we went out again, I insisted on paying, and she acquiesced.

The wonderful thing about one person treating the other(s,) is that it feels nice whoever “wins.” If I get to pay, I feel so generous and magnanimous (not to mention I, will admit, rather proud of myself for having the cultural knowledge to understand that this is an important gesture) and of course, if I am being treated, well, it always feels nice to be treated to dinner, doesn’t it? Of course, the other advantage of paying this way is that you never have to figure out splitting the check, and paying for a friend ensures you will go out with them again, as they “owe” you a meal.

General China blog

I have been trying to load pictures, but I have not been getting good enough internet lately. I have decided to skip the pictures for now and post anyway. I hope my words alone can keep you all interested!

I thought I would update you all on my life here. It's still quite warm - it gets up into the 80s most days. Occasionally in the evening I need a sweatshirt, but mostly it's just plain gorgeous.

I'm sure you've all been curious about the following:

Chinese bathrooms: not so great. I'm not a big fan of the squatting toilet. On the bright side, there really shouldn't be any bathrooms in the US that will bother me, save perhaps at the State Fair.

The food: great, and not to mention super-cheap. I do miss Western food sometimes, and there are certainly days when all I really want for lunch is a sandwich, but for the most part I like Chinese food just fine. I'm a big fan of bubble milk tea - it's cold tea sweetened with milk, and these little black tapioca balls at the bottom. Odd at first, but extremely addicting. You can buy it at pretty much every other eatery, we find. We have also recently discovered the wonders of street food. There are street vendors along most of the streets selling extremely delicious, ridiculously cheap, and horribly unhealthy food. One night last week we were wandering a street we hadn't been to before, and there were no restaurants in the vicinity, but there were street vendors selling fried rice, dumplings, and other fried lovely things that I don't know the name of. It ended up being one of the best dinners we'd had yet (for about 75 US cents!)

Other students: Living in the international students' dorm, I've met a lot of other foreigners studying abroad in China. Our group often hangs out with a group of students from Holland and another group from Korea. It's especially neat to spend time with the Koreans because the common language tends to be Chinese! They can speak a bit of English, but we actually tend to communicate better via Chinese. It's really cool!

A typical day for me: I have Chinese language class for 3 hours every day, and culture class for an hour and a half Tuesday through Thursday. My homework load tends to be very manageable, and 2 to 3 times a week I try to work out with some of the other people in my group. One guy used to be a professional trainer, so he designs some great workouts for us. It's really fun to work out with everyone, and it's nice to get some exercise.

This Thanksgiving we're going to head to Shanghai for the long weekend, and I hope to have some cool stories to tell.

Unfortunately, I'm having some trouble bringing up pictures from my bus tour of Southern China, so I'm posting a much earlier day trip we took. One of the first places we visited in Xiamen was Gulangyu, also known as Piano Island. It's famous for its piano and organ museums, and high number of piano prodigies. There are also no cars or bicycles allowed on the island, so it's a very pleasant place to visit.


This is a picture of the island. You can see why it's a popular tourist destination - it could hardly be more picturesque!


This picture doesn't pertain to Gulangyu at all, but I thought it was a neat picture of a fishing boat in Xiamen's harbor.


This a statue of three men playing a ball game outside of the ferry station to get to the island.


Gulangyu is also known for its many gardens. This is one that we visited.


Gulangyu used to be controlled by the Dutch, and it was for a while a very international city. There are many different embassies from Western countries on the island, and it boasts an impressive collection of eclectic European architecture, as you can see here. There is no longer a substantial foreign population on the island, ever since the Communist Revolution, but the buildings bear testament to its cosmopolitan past.