Gulangwan Hotel Xiamen

... understand what we needed. They took us from one aisle to the other showing us everything from toilet paper to toilet bowl cleaner and still no one knew what we meant. Finally, while leaving the store, we found one, but it was definitely a close call. The people were very sweet, but definitely new to the tourist trade.

... and ended up with braised lettuce, congee with peanuts and spare rib, spicy beef with turnip and a sort of sweet fried pancake. This was supposed to be a light meal!

Xiamen itself is a very pleasant city considering how modern it is, the smart parts of town are dominated by the coast, where we are taken for a view of Taiwan! They hope for the reunion one day - she says. There is a big university which costs aboout 1500 pounds all in to attend for a year ...

... is coming in the other direction.

In principle they drive on the right here but this does not appear to apply to cyclists and rickshaws who want to turn left for example. In one place they are building a new dual carriagway. Half of it has been laid. The other half has been abraded with a pneumatic drill to make the new surface stick. It's like driving over corrugated iron. Traffic is driving in both directions on both the old and new parts of the carriageway. EEK!

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... high quality worktops, care should be taken against possible scoring with knives or other cutting tools and chopping-boards should always be used. Unlike man-made products, granite is a material which has a natural make-up and beauty which is impossible to recreate under factory conditions. Variations in colour and veining will occur, this is characteristic of natural stone. www.allystone.net

I knew before that China is not a tropical country but it got a little too cold for me. I was having breakfast in my lovely Hangzhou hostel, but everytime someone opened the door, a cold gust of wind was blowing in, giving me a chill down to the bone. The forecast didn't promise anything good either. Daytime temperatures were predicted just above the single digits, and nighttime much colder, and the night falls early in eastern China. The wind made it all even more obvious ...

... to some of the main tourist prepped though spectacular roundhouses by a local Hakka man (the ethnic group who build/live in the tulous) spectacular. The first sight, Tianluokeng, was a group of five houses perched on a hillside amidst a mountainous backdrop. A square tulou is surrounded by four circular/oval tulous to provide a very visually stimulating scene. What is great is that even the tulous that have been ...

... eastern seaboard of China was not good. Unfortunately the weather forecast was right and having left Dongguan on a warm evening, I woke to rain streaming down the windows of the sleeper bus. When I stepped outside in Xiamen at 6.30 in the morning it felt as if I'd taken in a lungful of water. The rain had stopped but everything was steaming and the heavy humidity was like walking into a wall at every step. The night bus had been too short a ...