Ni Hao!
After a little more than a month bouncing around between Seattle, Michigan, Canada, and Dallas, Alex and I have unpacked in Xiamen, China for 1-3 ish months! It's a small island about 10 miles across right off the coast of southeast China. We're staying at the Westin which is so super fancy I feel strange walking around in shorts and a tee shirt (oh yes, shorts! It's 75-80 degrees here!). A couple things I am excited about:
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I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving and don't forget to eat extra mashed potatoes, and turkey, and gravy, and corn casserole, and now I'm hungry! I'm thankful for you :)
xoxo, Jenna
After a little more than a month bouncing around between Seattle, Michigan, Canada, and Dallas, Alex and I have unpacked in Xiamen, China for 1-3 ish months! It's a small island about 10 miles across right off the coast of southeast China. We're staying at the Westin which is so super fancy I feel strange walking around in shorts and a tee shirt (oh yes, shorts! It's 75-80 degrees here!). A couple things I am excited about:
- Free gelato in the lounge, every. single. day.
- Really awesome fitness center complete with a yoga studio that I will have to visit frequently because of the gelato.
- Going to the beach :)
- Hiking! There are some small mountains/ really big hills here to hike with temples and other cool stuff at the top.
- Christmas shopping China style. Alex is our designated bargainer.
And a few things I am not so excited about:
- Communicating solely with hand gestures and google translate. I was spoiled in Bangkok where most people knew enough English to get by and Thai was relatively easy to learn the basic words. Not the case here, everyone speaks Mandarin and Mandarin only.
- Eating Chinese food for Thanksgiving and possibly Christmas :( I'm on the lookout for a western style restaurant with mashed potatoes!
- Everyone staring at me...creepy! The locals don't see many westerners around here so when they do apparently they feel the need to take a mental picture and openly gawk at me.
- Pollution. Anyone who doesn't believe that we're ruining the planet should visit China. No wonder lung cancer is on the rise here! I was pretty surprised the first morning to look out and see all the smog since this is just a small island, but it does clear up a lot as the day goes on. This was taken around 7am.
But the good news is the skyline is really pretty at night!
There's a river that goes through the island and a really pretty walking path we found next to it. I'm loving all the palm trees and flowers around here.
We also took a taxi over to the beach which has a great 10 km walking/biking path. You can rent tandem bikes along here...pictures to come hehe ;-)
One of Alex's coworkers told me he loves Asia so much because you just never know what you're going to see, and that guy was right! Here's a random Mickey Mouse on the beach!
I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving and don't forget to eat extra mashed potatoes, and turkey, and gravy, and corn casserole, and now I'm hungry! I'm thankful for you :)
xoxo, Jenna
