Loadingdata | Daniel Bos

I’m feel­ing more and more reluc­tant to write, but I fear I would for­get too much if I don’t. This morn­ing I was rudely awak­ened by a phone call from front-desk, telling me it’s break­fast time. To be pre­cise, it was a long mes­sage in Chi­nese, then when I said I don’t under­stand Chi­nese a long silence, and the sin­gle word ‘bleak­fast’. I con­sid­ered this for a moment, think­ing back at yesterday’s break­fast, then decided it’s too early and went back to sleep.

Not much later A. called to ask if I wanted to go out. I also con­sid­ered this for a moment, but still was too tired, and told her we could go later. When it was later, A. unfor­tu­nately was busy, so I watched TV for a while, and SMSed my much missed girl­friend. Even later (after I took a nap) we took the bus to the beach. First to a world-famous Xia­men Uni­ver­sity (I never heard of it), then we had to walk across the cam­pus to arrive at the beach. At the beach, we took a taxi, to another beach, which was less busy, and much nicer.

At first, I thought the water would be cold, but it turned out to be quite warm. Only a pity it was dirty (because of the rain, accord­ing to A.) It was still nice to swim, though the tide was pretty strong. When I went out of the water for around 15–30 min­utes, the sea-level had low­ered for half a metre! And it con­tin­ued this way until the water was so shal­low, I could eas­ily walk to the rocks, about 100 metres off­shore. Then I decided to give up, since it’s not nice swim­ming like that.

The first time I went into the water, I was stunned by two big crabs I came across, they had a shield of about 20cm. When I told A. she asked why I didn’t catch them, so she could eat them.

It must be because of all the rocks, that there are crabs there. Later I saw many peo­ple climb­ing the rocks, to col­lect what­ever it was from there.

After the beach, we went to a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Restau­rant. It was quite inter­est­ing, to see all the pic­tures there, while the wait­ers wore green (army) pants and white shirts. Some even had an army bag! The food was nice as usual. We first had a dish of pota­toes, paprika, some other veg­etable in a nice sauce, soon joined by beef (thin sliced) with pep­per, gar­lic and (of course) union, in a sim­i­lar sauce. Espe­cially this last dish could be pop­u­lar in Hol­land! To top it off, we had corn-pancakes, which was nice, though I missed the syrup. I’m almost start­ing to miss the sweet­ness of west­ern food! Almost.

Back in the hotel, I first took a shower, to loose all the beach-sand. The hotel must be happy with all the sand I brought back! I brought back some of our din­ner, so tomor­row I will have a nice break­fast! I will leave the phone off-the-hook, so my sleep won’t be dis­turbed. There will be a pro­gram about Chi­nese lan­guage and phi­los­o­phy soon, so I will be back to the TV now!

Orig­i­nal Comments:

Did you like what you read? Consider supporting me:
I’m feel­ing more and more reluc­tant to write, but I fear I would for­get too much if I don’t. This morn­ing I was rudely awak­ened by a phone call from front-desk, telling me it’s break­fast...