Day 1 and 2

Hey Everyone,
I arrived in Xiamen yesterday afternoon (12:30pm my time 12:30am your time) as I walked out of the airport I saw palm trees.... fountains...and mountains-- it is gorgeous! The best way to describe Xiamen is-- it's a cross between California ( the weather, beaches, ocean etc) and New York city ( the tall buildings, millions of people, crazy drivers).

In Xiamen, they built this light rail system (without the light rail trains..it was taking them too long to get approved by the government) and so they have this above ground bridge across the city that is only meant for this one bus company (ex. ttc) and buses come every 2 minutes and they are packed! but very inexpensive to ride; 7-8 cents USD. I had my first experience with street food last night and bought seasoned grilled tofu for 8 cents.

People over here are so friendly and so excited to see foreigners--they get all happy as they don't see many white/brown/other people around. Today I just came back from the largest market they have in the city (its massive!) think of it spanning from dundas to king/front st. and 2 blocks wide. They had live EVERYTHING --regular chickens, white chickens, pigeons, turtles, rabbits, ducks, endangered deep sea crab, eels, and a lot of other fishes, fruits, nuts etc. It was really cool to see but smelly at the same time. There was this one Chinese guy in the market making fresh noodles out of dough. If I can figure out how to post a video on the blog you MUST watch it...you won't believe your eyes.



Over all this place is awesome I really love it so far. It is very hard for me to see China as a developing country but more as a developed country. The city is really clean, maintained and there is a lot going on. Maybe when I travel to other parts of the country I will see a difference.

I tried to write in my travel blog today but found out that the Chinese government has blocked ALL blogs, youtube, facebook, twitter, etc. I have found away around this using a VPN (hence my post)but in the future I may not be able to get a connection.

Hope all is well in T-dot and you're holding down the fort while im gone.

Arzu