Xiamen arrival

The train pulled into xiamen around 4 and we made our way out, the first thing we did was join a queue to buy our return ticket! Having successfully asked for a ticket for Saturday afternoon to Cangnan for two people in Chinese from memory i felt quite happy and so we decided to try to travel to the hotel first and that is when the fun started....

Xiamen is an old western trading port and one island used to be exclusively foreigners but now it seems to be mainly Chinese tourists and there is not the English signage you get in shajghai or Beijing. They tried to build a metro in xiamen a few years ago but the strong bus company put a stop to that and this resulted in a brt or bus rapid transit system basically just an elevated metro line but instead of trains they have a private road which these buses run on, and stop only at stations like a metro, very odd.
There is however no English map and since we had no real idea where we were going we just wandered onto the first bus that looked busy guessing that would lead towards the city centre!
Whilst on the bus I downloaded a low grade map on my phone and Chris then spotted we were heading the wrong way back towards the mainland!
Quickly jumping off and blagging our way through the gates to get to the bus going back the other way we started back towards the rough direction of our destination, past the station we started at!
Eventually we reached the sea and the end of the line where our instructions said to catch a bus to the hotel from, unfortunately there was no bus stop that we could see. We decided to hail a taxi and show him the road name and off he went, driving right past the buses we had been looking for! A little while later he dropped us near a tiny pedestrian road and gestured us down it, we walked down and through and eventually came out in a building site....no hotel there.
Next I used the GPS in my phone to try to route us to where I though the hostel to be which worked fine until we realised that the place I though it was actually was someones house a few hundred meters away on a different street! 
At this point Chris called the hotel and after some discussion we walked into a gambling shop and handed them the phone to tell the hotel where we were. They spoke for a few minutes then an old guy wandered in too and joined in, eventually it was explained that we had to go back to the main road and getting frustrated with the young shop employees the older guy gestured for us to follow him and decided to just show us, very kind. I tried to speak a little Chinese but my strange accent coupled with the fact that he only learnt mandarin in later life made it tricky, he mainly uses the local dialect.

He showed us to a taxi and told it to take us to the right place and this time when the taxi pulled up (around 200 meters from our first drop off) there was a girl from the hotel with good English waiting for us.
The hotel is down a tiny back street alley but with some good directions we may have had a chance, without good directions though I am surprised we came so close! We actually walked right past the alley entrance but there aare no signs or suggestions anything is down there...

Once we checked in (using our passport photocopies) we realised why the hotel was a little more expensive and it was worth finding. Each room is clean and well furnished, the twin room we booked is only available tomorrow so tonight we have seperare doubles for the same twin price! Each landing has two rooms of it, an only three floors so it is a very small hotel but each landing is beautifully decorated with comfy chairs and tradional Chinese art and objects including an amazing old radio and other curios.

The girl offered to show us a good place to eat away from the expensive main road and led us into a maze of narrow alleys lined with shops and other random places before taking us into a local resteraunt. She helped us order and then left and I managed to order us a couple of beers to go with our meal.
After we had eaten we walked around the small streets which were gorgeous at night enjoying the cool but no cold weather. We stopped in a cafe for a pearl milk tea and spoke our little Chinese to the young waitress working there which was very friendly.
We eventually found the sea and walked along the beach back to our hotel and a reasonably early night. Up early tomorrow to see what xiamen has to offer, and hopefully visit the island and the town, I quite fancy swimming in the sea if I can but I am not sure if we will have time!

Im glad we came here even if travelling was a bit off a chore. Sitting on my bed it feels wonderfully hard and comfy bu i know chris will complain in th morning, hqrd asian beds destroy his back apparently! Goodnight!