We had already spent a late night at our local hangout and I am more than ready to go to bed. It’s late, but my friend cannot be denied. Grabbing my hand and shoving me into a taxi, I assume that we are going to find a local place to eat nearby, a comforting meal of late night barbecue cooked up to order at virtually any street corner in China.

But as the taxi meter counts steadily upward, I realize my friend is serious. A long time resident of China and a fluent Chinese speaker, his exploratory powers far outshine my own.  As we pull into a chop shop to ask for directions, he tells me how ridiculous it is when people say that our city is small.

Xiamen is home to over 3 million people and covers an area of 1500 square kilometers. By Chinese standards Xiamen is a small town. But the tendency amongst foreigners (myself included) is to stick the easy-to-reach comfortable areas where foreigners tend to congregate. Bars, cafes, and the university are places that are safe and familiar, where foreign faces are expected if not common.

An intense conversation in Chinese with the chop shop workers results in the bewildered taxi driver dropping us off in what seems like the middle of nowhere. The cab fair reads 50 RMB. 50 RMB! I didn’t even know you COULD pay 50 RMB and stay on the island!

As rain dribbles through my clothes I lurch into motion after my friend in the dark as he barks at a series of sleeping shop owners at 3 in the morning in Chinese.

“What’s open?! Where’s the restaurant!?”

The shopkeepers start, muttering and motioning to keep going down the road, promptly falling back asleep as we pass.

It’s so easy to lean back and rest on your laurels as an expat. After all, we’ve moved, we’ve settled, we’ve found the places of interest in the guidebook or the expat forums online. We’ve plumbed the depths.

But sitting at that restaurant, eating the dog and pan fried silk worm larvae as my friend chats with the grinning restaurant owners, I realize again that I’m in a new country. There’s no end to the exploration and when you find yourself in a new culture, there are always hidden depths to explore.

Bikes for rent along the Xiamen coast.

Biju with the Xiamen skyline in the background

Man sitting on the docks in a local park

Relaxing at our favorite local cafe, Helen’s

Yeah, I know the moniker of that Wall they have close to Beijing, but I didn’t think one small section would take hours and hours to climb. I also knew the Forbidden home of the emperor was a palace, but I didn’t really understand why they called it a City, until hours of trekking got us passed multiple squares and castle walls the scope of which simply cannot be described or photographed well.  In comparison, the Summer Palace, with it’s more modest name, was even more grandiose, with temples, pavilions, and a gigantic lake.

Honestly, beautiful views aside, I just ended up getting numb to the gargantuan temples, parks, and palaces we went to – The Jade Temple, The Summer Palace, The Temple of Heaven….great names for big places, added upon by new structures -Tianaman Square, The Water Cube, and The Bird’s Nest.

But what I remember are the little things. Panting up the watchtowers on the Great Wall, happily seeing other foreigners and natives equally as worn out as my own nonathletic self. The call of locals trying to make a buck selling water at a price gouging rate in the Forbidden City. And looking at the faces of Chinese tourists and realizing that these places are just as awe inspiring to them as they are to me, a testament to how big this country is and how interconnected we humans can be, no matter our background, while traveling.

One of my favorite parts about the first year in a new country is experiencing all the holidays and events for the first time.  It’s a bit like having your first Christmas but being old enough to remember and appreciate the day.  This holiday had the same sense of anticipation and buildup as Halloween or Thanksgiving back home.  Stores displayed stacks of mooncakes and the markets were filled with people purchasing ingredients for big family feasts.  Our apartment building even had a community party on the Sunday  before involving a dice game and sodas…that’s about all we could figure out.

What exactly is a mooncake?  I had no idea when I arrived here in China.  I’d heard of them, but I couldn’t have described what one looked like.  As the holiday approached, Biju and I decided we really should sample a few varieties to figure out what all the fuss was about.

Put simply, mooncakes are a small, dense pastry filled with lotus seed paste and a variety of other fillings.  The most traditional type of mooncake houses the yolk of a salted duck egg in the middle of sweet lotus seed paste, with a sugary crust holding everything together.  The tiny and super heavy little pastries (you could seriously use them as paper weights) come at a price.  The four we purchased from a cheap bakery cost $10, but we’ve heard they can go for over $30 each.

Now, with the exception of mangoes with sticky rice in Thailand, I am not a huge fan of Asian desserts.  I’m always finding red beans, corn and sweet potatoes hiding in places where they shouldn’t be, and things that look like they’d taste amazing always seem to lack flavor.  Mooncakes, on the other hand, are almost too rich with a heavy, cookie dough texture, and they can still contain some odd ingredients.  We purchased the four types that were available individually from our local bakery, without knowing what they might contain.  Sampling them was a bit like eating from a box of chocolates…you know the ending.

The first type we tried contained the yolk of a salted duck egg.  The contrast between the sweetened lotus seed paste and the ultra-salted yolk was a bit odd, but I could understand the appeal.

Our second mooncake was a bit harder to identify, but I’m pretty sure it contained jujube, or date, paste.  This cake had a tangy, fruity flavor to pleasantly contrast the sweetness of the crust and lotus seed paste.  The bright purple filling makes this cake the most visually appealing out of the bunch.

The third mooncake, another classic variety, contained a mix of chopped nuts and seeds.  This was Biju’s favorite, and tied for first with the jujube in my opinion. With a steaming cup of coffee, I’d eat a slice of this one any day.

The final variety contained solid green tea flavored lotus seed paste.  Surprise, surprise!  If you’ve ever been to China, you’ll know that everything here comes in green tea flavor.  Green tea eggs, green tea duck, green tea ice cream.  I like green tea, but I’m not a huge fan of green tea flavored things…it always just seems off to me.  This cake was no exception.  It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t something I’ll ever feel the need to eat again.

1. Establish a routine as soon as possible.  Learning Chinese was a huge priority for us during our time in China, and as freelance writers, we had plenty of time to fit in lessons.  One of the best choices we made was finding a tutor and meeting regularly with her from the second or third week we were here.  Because those first weeks and months are so overwhelming and often exhausting, we may never have gotten around to starting had we not done it early.

2. Introduce yourself to everyone.  Biju and I both work from home, so we’re not cursed blessed with coworkers.  When you first move to any new location, your coworkers are often your first acquaintances, and without that social connection, life can feel lonely and isolated.  We’ve found that seeking out the happening spots and making an effort to talk with everyone we can has helped tremendously.  It’s definitely awkward at first to insert yourself into a conversation between complete strangers, but the shared experience of being an expat often makes up for such forward behavior.

3. Hook up with the Couch Surfing group in your city.  The Couch Surfing project is basically a social network of people from around the world willing to host fellow travelers.  We’ve had the pleasure of hosting several people, some of whom are now our closest friends.  Xiamen has a super active Couch Surfing community, and we meet together at least once per month.  If your city doesn’t have an active group, search for other members in your area and start up a monthly meeting.

Biju and Bryce, a friend from Couch Surfing

4. Plan a vacation or getaway around the six-month mark.  We’ve found that both in China and Korea, we really needed a break after those first chaotic months.  This year my family came to visit, and we traveled together around China.  While we didn’t even leave the country, we came back refreshed and ready to get back in a routine.  If you’re feeling frustrated with the language or cultural differences, getting away for a few days can really make a difference.

My family and I at the Great Wall

What I saw was a city that dwarfed almost any other city I had seen. Our large tourist bus trundled along unnoticed amongst the sea of traffic along wide, clean streets devoid of bicycles. Our routes took us through downtown areas (although “downtown” is relative in a city with so many skyscrapers marching without stop across the horizon) filled with behemoth buildings.

I suppose it was the modernness that really shocked me with my static notions of Beijing. Our tour guide told us that back in the day, the mark of a upwardly mobile family was a bicycle and a watch, but that old Beijing was long gone, driven over by sleek new, imported cars. The streets were impeccable, and surprisingly green, hedged by carefully manicured flowers, trees, and grasses.

Rickshaws in Beijing

Yet, the rapid destruction of ancient buildings to make way for new high rises and condominiums has been halted in some areas. Close to the center of the city, we got a chance to take a tour of the traditional extended family houses, the houtongs, which offered yet a different perspective of the city. Riding in rickshaws through the narrow alleys and visiting a houtongs family, we got to catch a glimpse of what Beijing might have looked like before, albeit a tourist-friendly, government subsidized rendition of the past.

Photos courtesy of Jim Darling

Inner courtyard of a houtong

Rickshaw cyclists on a break

Typhoon Lion Rock

My suspicions that something were amiss were quite indirect, since I can’t get my TV to work and in any case the weather would probably be in Chinese. Some friends in Korea mentioned that typhoon Kompasa was about to hit there. Someone else mentioned that there were three typhoons in the area. That was when my Spidey senses started tingling.

Finally I saw a post from people in Taiwan talking about typhoon Lion Rock, a noble sounding name that seemed to foretell the wrath of God. Since Taiwan’s weather is my future, I have resolved from now on to always keep an eye angled at our island neighbor.

According to one news source (not my TV) around ten flights were cancelled at the local airport, a dozen were delayed, schools were closed, as were scenic spots and the ferries to Gulangyu, the mainland, and presumably Taiwan.

Snug in my 20th floor apartment far away from the wet, I pondered only one question – what exactly is the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane?  Apparently, a typhoon is the name of a large storm that occurs in the western Pacific, while a hurricane is the same thing, but occurs int he eastern Pacific and the Atlantic.

In either case, I think I prefer my storms to have cool names rather than ridiculous people names. Like Earl.

After giving him a series of bad directions, I finally saw Pablo as he came chugging along on his bicycle, his third on his trip, weighed down by clothes, camping gear, and a tattered tail of flags, pluming up from the tail end of his bike displaying the countries he had been to. My profuse apologies for the wrong turns were waved aside. When you’ve ridden as much as he has, what’s a few more blocks?

I got the opportunity to interview him, and discovered that he wasn’t some maniacal machine, counting the countries that flew by like some tally of points, nor was he a happy-go-lucky hippy spouting aphorisms exulting a life of no bagguage. He was surprisingly….. normal, something I wasn’t quite prepared for. He talked with longing about traveling with a girlfriend through europe and the middle east, and of missing home, missing cooking, and dogmatically described traveling the way he did as a royal pain, filled with annoyances.

The spirituality, that sense of flow gleaned from thousands of encounters across dozens of countries was there, but I discovered it was a private thing, a thing I had to dig at to discover, and one I found all the more special, more meaningful, than the up front hand waving spirituality  common among armchair philosophers.

In the end we said goodbye to Pablo, his tail of worn flags bouncing buoyantly in the breeze as he sped away from Xiamen, onward to Korea and Japan, to Indonesia and Australia, and finally, his home country of Argentina.

Check out his website HERE.