Our most recent adventure..

We went with the Kleins to go river rafting and to see the Tulou buildings at Yunshuiyao. It was a pretty fun day.

I don't have any pictures from going down the river. I don't have a water proof camera. But this was our third time rafting. It was fun. They put you in a two person rubber raft and you sit facing each other. You put on an old orange life jacket and a bright yellow helmet. Then they give you a bamboo pole and send you down the river. It was so much fun. That's why we did it three times.

Then we had a yummy lunch at a hotel in the local town and then we headed out to the Yun shui yao Tulou buildings. This is the third location we been to. It was different from the other two. We had a good time.

And now, pictures:

 Our guide - Selena. She put this whole day together. The rafting was in her home town.

 Driving past the banana farms.

 

The tea farms and the mountains.

 The water wheel on the river.

 An amazing old tree. It's a variety of ficus.

 A rivulet. Very picturesque.

 On the step stones to cross the river. We got there during the last hour of daylight.

 It was a beautiful evening.

 The tea trees right in the middle of the buildings.

 The round building is called a "tulou" building. It literally means earth building.

The entrance.

 

Inside. There was a small Buddhist shrine in the middle.

 This one was four stories tall.

 The rice. When it turns yellow it is ready to harvest.

 Working in the garden.

It really was a great day.  We had lots of fun. We are trying to make the most of our remaining time. My next blog post will be about our trip to Fuzhou.

"The Rock"

or the "Sunday Death March." I don't call many things death marches, but this was pretty close. Fortunately it was interesting to help make up for it.

We went somewhere to see the "wind rock." It's a rock that moves when the wind blows hard enough. It's cooler when you see how big the rock is. There is also a shrine. I  had my fortune told there. It was interesting. It is also the location of a very old city. There is an old city wall  that skirts the south end of the island. It was pretty cool.

Here you go!

 The city wall.

 They've turned it into a really nice park.

 The rock.

 Getting my fortune told:

 You draw one of these sticks out (above) and then you throw these two pieces of wood down (down). 

 If the two pieces of wood land one up and one down, then you choose the right fortune. I had to do it twice to get the right one. Then you pay 1RMB and get your fortune and then however much you pay past that, is how good your fortune will be. Daniel paid 5 for mine.

Then you take your fortune paper to this lady. Then she translates it. Only part of it was in Mandarin Chinese and the rest was in the local dialect. Selena could only understand the gist and a few of the specifics. I'm having another friend translate the rest.

Then we headed to the beach to walk around the boardwalk. We saw this really cool staircase:

 The bottom was walled off so it was unusable, but it was cool.

 Then we walked around this out cropping and found a little cave.

There were aspects of that make me think it was "man facilitated." But it was cool.

There was another cave.

 This tree was very old. Daniel told me how old it was, but I can't remember.

Walking the edge of the wall.

The reason it was a death march? The temperature was over 95 degrees with 90%+ humidity. Daniel was moments away from heat stroke, he claimed. I was believing him. It took us over an hour to cool down again. We were all exhausted for days afterword. I think it was because of the heat exhaustion from that morning. We were only there for 2 hours, but it was a long HOT 2 hours. Not doing that again.

But it was a fun weekend.

We only have 6 more weeks here in Xiamen. We will be having a few more adventure and I'll blog about those. We're going to make the best of our remaining time!

Dinner, fireworks, and bobing.

After the afternoon activities, it was time for dinner. The girls did a bunch of prep and then we BBQ'd.Chinese style.

Green onions. They were actually pretty good with the oil, garlic and salt.

 Emily, Susan, and the Sunny Du on the far right. Sunny is one of the three who won a trip to the US with the company. She will be there the first week of November.

 Bread, cucumbers, meat, and potatoes. The potatoes didn't work too well... But the rest was good.

 "Hot pink pork" we called it. I asked about how it was seasoned - because it was really good - but they told us it was preseasoned from the grocery store with "Chinese sauce." Not helpful.

 Rulf. The only guy from the company  - besides Daniel, Matt and the guy in charge. Brave man.

Grilling.

Then Paul (in charge)  had this box of fireworks. He lit it up and then there were like 50 of these things. It was awesome. He said it only cost about $50 US.

 

 The box.

Then: bobing. It's a dice game that is played here in Fujian, only, from what we understand. They play it t Mid-Autumn festival. You roll the dice for various combinations of four.

 Selena. She is Daniel's assistant. She's very helpful.

 The bowl you roll into.

The prizes. The better you roll, the better your prize. For the lowest there was a lottery card, the next was toothpaste (green tea flavor) then various amounts of gift cards for Walmart.

We made out like bandits. I won the biggest prize at our table. Total we got 9 lottery tickets, 2 tubes of toothpaste (that we gave away!) and then 450RMB to Walmart. That's like 85$. Awesome. That's pretty much our groceries for the rest of the time we are here.

It was fun. We were quite tired by bedtime and slept pretty well. We got up and were out at 9 the next morning. On a death march. That's the next post.