Weekend in Xiamen

It's getting busier and busier at work. Summer is one of the busiest times, along with Christmas/Chinese New Year. Ironically, Memorial Day weekend is nothing special. It is not technically summer yet and no one here cares about American vets. So I took some time off a little earlier than usual because it is only going to get busier.

Ryan came to Hong Kong the last two times, so it was definitely my turn to go to him, but since it was a holiday weekend, at least to us, we decided to do something different. Instead of me going to Fuzhou or him coming to Hong Kong, we went to Xiamen.

We went to Xiamen on our cruise last summer. Ryan hated it. I did not exactly hate it, but I was not all that impressed. What I liked the most was a small grocery store that had a surprisingly large selection of American items. These were actual American groceries made in America by American companies, not the “genuine” “made of USA” things with Chinese packaging and Chinese names you see throughout China.

Ryan misses American food even more than I do, especially since I live in Hong Kong where I can get a wider variety of international food. He lives in Fuzhou where his non-Chinese options are limited. They have plenty of Chinese Italian restaurants, but they are even more Chinese than our Chinese Italian restaurants. I convinced him to go back to Xiamen for the food.

I also told him that if he really hated it that much, we could just stay in the hotel all day naked. It was an empty compromise since I knew he could easily say he hated the city no matter what he really thought and he knew I was never going to spend the entire trip inside a hotel room.

Even though neither of us was all that impressed with the Xiamen stop on the cruise, I knew there had to be more to it than what we saw. We were only there while the shipped was docked, about nine hours. Since then, I have heard a few people say how much they like Xiamen and how much cleaner it is than most Chinese cities. I figured there must be something to it that we missed.

I went to see what else was there. Ryan went for the hotel. We both went for the American grocery store.