"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!