Xiamen (12/26 - 12/29): The Xiamen X-perience

I am finally able to get a decent connection (I’m in Korea right now) so I’m retroactively posting up these entries from the last week or two.  Enjoy!

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Since the day after Christmas saw the end of the world as we know it (or “no internet” as some people refer to it) I haven’t been able to blog about my adventures with Peter in Xiamen. I will give you the brief skinny here …

Tuesday, December 26:

In the afternoon we walked over to the nearby super-mall (which wasn’t there last year when I visited) and first saw female Kevin at the Burberry store where she works. We invited her to go with us to the Hot Springs but she couldn’t go. So we continued over to the small desert cafe where Stephen’s friend Grace works (she owns it actually — when she’s not in Europe working for Lufthansa) and met up with Grace and her friend Amy.

We made our way to the hot springs (I was driving — since my skillz with the stick shift are second to none ;-) ) and actually made it (in spite of Stephen’s “directions”) just in time for the sunset spa experience.

At the entrance to the hot springs

I will quickly say that this hot spring should be on everyone’s “to do” list when they visit China. hundreds of pools filled with various types of hot spring water (minerals, teas, alcohol, fruits, etc.), beautiful scenery, massage services, a restaurant and the highlight of the experience: flesh eating fish. They are these small fish (which if I had wikipedia i could give you a link for) which feed on dead skin. You spend 20 minutes with hundreds of small guppy sized fish affixed to you and when you come out your skin is smooth as a baby’s butt. It’s quite nice.

After about 5 hours of that, a meal, the fish and all the works we were only down less than 200 RMB / person. That’s around $25 USD or so.

Afterwards we headed back to town and went to grab some food at a small restaurant not far from Pat and Stephen’s. Then we headed out to Old Labomba and hung out there for a few hours. It was actually pretty dead. We could get seats and had elbow room and everything. Very not Labomba-ish. After that we went back home and crashed for a while.

Wednesday, December 27:

When I woke up Peter was playing some Xbox. After a while he put in some classic arcade disk and we ended up playing through some of the levels of Gauntlet 2. Then Pat came out and joined us. Then one thing led to another and we ended up playing for about 3 or 4 hours. Actually, we were assuming that the game would have some climax around level 99 or 100 and would end. It turns out that no such thing happened. When we reached level 101 we decided we had just wasted our entire afternoon and turned it off.

In the afternoon we had ordered some pizza and in the evening we met up with Solo near the almost-new lao fanzi massage place (next to McDonald’s) and ate dinner at a restaurant. I had a sandwich, if I recall.

Peter ordering at the restaurant

Pat and Stephen

After that we walked down the street to Wonderful. It was nice to see it again since it had been over a year since I had last gone, but the dead streak was continuing. There were also about 1/8th the number of people working on stage. But a familiar face was there to greet us — Maggie. It was nice to see her again and we got to watch her dance which is always fun.

After Wonderful we went to Nasa to check out the scene there. Again — super, super dead. We got a table towards the back of the room and ended up hanging out there for most of the rest of the night. I was mostly hanging out with a girl named Dan Dan (her actual name — not her stage name) from Harbin. She was super into basketball and we spent some time talking about Michael Jordan. Her favorite was Dwayne Wade though.

We left Nasa around 4 or 5 a.m. and after we got back to Pat’s place he decided he wanted to go get a massage. I wasn’t really down for it, but he managed to convince us to go down the street to get one. I barely remember mine since I slept through most of it. We left after sunrise, went back to Pat’s and crashed super hard.

Thursday, December 28:

I got a call somewhat early (after 3 hours of sleep) and had to take care of some work for Jet’s blog. By the time I finished other people were waking up and I realized that I was going to be hurting pretty bad later on with the extreme lack of sleep.

Pat, Peter and I went over to Grace’s shop to eat lunch. It was nice there but I was feeling a lot of pressure to finish up some work so I went back to Pat’s while he, Stephen, and some other friends of theirs (including super abs girl from La Bomba) took Peter to the small island next to Xiamen.

I ended up working the whole afternoon. They finally came back and we all got ready for our last night out. This time we headed out to New Generations (the new one) and got a KTV room. This place was a little on the dead side too, but not terribly so. I ended up hanging out with some model girl, but it wasn’t really anything worth writing about. We all just kinda hung out for most of the time there, playing dice games and singing every Beatles song that Stephen could find on the computer.

Then some of the girls from New Generations and us walked next door to New Labomba. This was pretty fun. Again, not super crowded and we got a table next to the dance floor and spent a lot of time hanging out there. After several hours the place cooled down to where it was pretty much just us in the disco, and we decided to go get some food. We grabbed some taxis and headed to a restaurant for some meat and rice.

Girl from Guangzhou

Asher in the house

Girl with big eyes

Peter with another girl from guangzhou

Pat at dinner

It was pretty nice and fun to hang out. After eating it was pretty late / early and we decided to head back to Pat’s to get a few hours of sleep before our flights out the next morning.

Again, I ended up getting around 3 hours of sleep before it was time to get up and get ready to leave for our flight. Pat and Stephen left before us since their flight was earlier and an international one to Hong Kong. Peter and I made our way to the airport, grabbed some food and I slept pretty much the whole way back to Shanghai.

It was a lot of fun hanging out in Xiamen. Mucho thanks to Pat and Stephen for being good hosts again!