Jiuzhaigou, China

While we were in Singapore, our parents went on a separate side trip to Jiuzhaigou, China. It was almost the same group that went to Xiamen 4 years ago.

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Get your own

Jiuzhaigou, though not as popular to Americans as Beijing and Shanghai, is a well-known national park just north of Sichuan. It features some of the most scenic waterfall and lake scenes in the world.

Happy Moon Festival

Related: About.com, Wikipedia

Happy 08/08/08

It's 8/8/8 today and since the 2008 Olympics are in China, they purposely set the opening ceremony to begin at 8:08pm. There's a fixation on the number 8 because it's phonetically similar to the word for "wealth." People from Chinese countries pay top dollar for licence plates & phone numbers that have "888" in it. I'm sure there must've been an overload of weddings today as well. All of those things are controlled though... planned. True luck is something that comes unexpectedly... like childbirth expected in late August or September happening early. Which makes me proud to announce the newest member to my family, the lucky 8/8/8 daughter (to be named) of Julie Christine & Niño Mateo.

Congratulations!

Dragonboat 2008

The Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival was a little different for me this year. Auntie Janice's cousin, Michael didn't participate, so she didn't come with me. Emily was also busy. Charlotte also had some schedule conflicts, but I hope she still finds time to go either later today or tomorrow so I can link to her professional shots. I went by myself early in the morning... around 9:40 and it was already pretty crowded. I got a chance to walk around to all of the booths and take a lot more photos than I normally do. The weather worked to my favor, pouring on before I arrived and right after I left... what luck! Unfortunately, the sky was gray for the entire time, so the photos don't look as vibrant.


I didn't spend too much time watching the races since Michael wasn't in it. Instead, I mostly walked around the festival area and looked for good camera angles. One of the things that amazed me is each sponsor is setup in exactly the same place every year... even the food stands. They're lined up in the same place and same order.

I mentioned that it's best to get food at Main St. instead of getting ripped off at the festival, but I actually tried out a few things just so I could review them. Details can be found in the Picasa album for this post. Just click on Dragonboat 2008 on the lower left of the slideshow.

Donations to China & Myanmar

After the recent cyclone of Myanmar and earthquake of China, a large portion of the world's population were wiped out and that number continues to grow as the threat of plague increases. I've compiled a list of sites you could donate to based on CNN's old list. I personally link-checked all of them to make sure these 2 recent disasters were covered and easy to get to:

• AmeriCares
• ADRA
• American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Inc.
• Church World Service
• Episcopal Relief and Development
• Food for the Hungry
• International Orthodox Christian Charities
• Islamic Relief
• Lutheran World Relief
• MercyCorps
• Medical Teams International
• Operation USA
• Oxfam International
• Plan USA
• Project Hope
• UMCOR
• UNICEF
• World Emergency Relief
• World Relief
• World Vision

Please feel free to republish this post on your own blog. Click here to download the source code for Blogger.

Thank you.

A Great Wall

Story: 6
Action: 4
Acting: 6
FX: 1
Durability: 5

Auntie Janice passed along this DVD to my family after hearing about our last trip to China. A Great Wall is an old movie from 1986 about a computer programmer (yeah they had those back then), Leo Fang who quits his job because they promoted a less experienced colleague based on race. With the time off, he decides to take his family to visit his sister in Beijing. With the two families living together for an extended period of time, there were a lot of comedic scenes and misunderstandings depicting the melding of the 2 cultures. What amplified the humor even more was watching the movie in this day and age because of the additional layer of how far we've gone in 22 years. Short shorts and funny 80's hair always make for a good laugh. I say that knowing that in 2028, we'll look back at 2008 and laugh.

It was a good family movie that we all related to, although the cultural differences were much more extreme in 1986. I felt the story was building up to something very interesting, but ended abruptly without a strong resolution. The acting was OK. The action consisted some well-shot ping pong matches. There were no special effects.

Chinese New Year 4706

Chinese New Year was actually February 7 this year, but since that was a Thursday, we decided to have our family gathering the Sunday after. Going along with traditional beliefs, celebrations should always come after the date hits rather than before. I tend to do this with other holidays and birthdays as well. If my birthday falls on a Monday, I prefer to celebrate it on the weekend after even though the weekend before is closer in time.


Last night, we had a small get-together at my parents' house with 9 people total. My parents' house has a small ground floor, good for an 8-person dinner. Anything over that and we have to eat in the basement. While the ground floor is cozier and warmer, the huge basement has certain advantages too. There's more elbow room and enough space to setup a buffet table. Because there's no TV downstairs, we can engage in deeper conversations instead of watching basketball and making fun of the Knicks. Guests started arriving at 3pm to help out. Those that came around 4pm watched some clips of my just-finished China 2007 - Xiamen DVD.

We had so much food... probably enough to feed 20 people. That actually goes along with another Chinese superstition. If you have leftovers, you won't go hungry for the rest of the year. During dinner, Uncle Bock explained that as child, his family would prepare the feast before the New Year hit. That way on New Year's day, there would only be celebration and no labor. Whatever comes in with the New Year is supposed to be a summary of the entire year.

Frommer's Xiamen

The Xiamen information on Frommers.com came in handy during my recent trip. Since I didn't need the entire China book, I printed out all of the Xiamen pages from the website. Now that the vacation is over, I added some of my photos to the site to give the little city some more visual appeal.

Whenever I'm on vacation, I make it a point to take some nice destination photos aside from the usual family & friends portraits. These look great on DVD slideshows, desktop wallpapers and Frommers.com, now that we have the slideshow feature up.

Click here to check out my photos on Frommer's Xiamen.

Philippine Air

Philippine Air was the exact opposite experience of EVA. The fleet is old and has not been renovated. Service seemed to be very disorganized overall. The food was terrible. I was nervous during takeoff and landing because of the accident record. Philippine Air had 68 reported incidents, but no total crashes like China Air. There isn't much of a choice for travel between Philippines and Xiamen though. There's the tainted Philippine Air or the infant Cebu Air. Surprisingly, both landings (to Xiamen and to Philippines) couldn't have been more perfect... no bumps at all.

Related: Philippine Air, Philippine Air on Wikipedia

Hokkien Majority

I felt at home in Xiamen even though my stay there only consisted of 4 days & 3 nights. It was a strange, but welcome experience to be in a city where everyone spoke Hokkien (aka Fukianese, Fujianese). I normally do a double-take when I hear it because the only people I'm used to hearing it from are family members. In NY, I hear it occasionally, but it sounds different because it's often the Taiwanese version, which is heavily accented. So it felt unreal to hear it from cab drivers, store operators, hotel staff and tour guides.

Can Your Hear Me Now?

It's worth noting that I had a full signal with the Verizon Wireless network in all parts of China. Even the small surrounding villages were in the coverage area. Philippines had no coverage... not even in Metro Manila!

Fujian Roots

For our second full day in China, we headed out of Xiamen to the surrounding villages... about a 2 hour drive. The farmlands in this area looked very much like the province scenes in Jet Li's Fearless. Our first stop was So Village, the original home of my maternal grandfather. There are actually 2 houses under my family's ownership still... the house my grandfather grew up in and the older ancestral house. We then took a lunch break at a local restaurant before heading off to Ang Village. Ang was the original home of my maternal grandmother and Auntie Day's (Mom's cousin from Long Island) father. Auntie Day made an effort to trace her roots during this trip and we were able to find her family's descendants in the village. They were positively IDed when they brought out a photo of her father with a note on the back from 1933 to her uncle.

The trip was physically exhausting as we climbed steep hills and dodged cars on narrow roads, but very rewarding as we all learned about our past and met relatives we never knew existed.

Peony Wanpeng Hotel

Location: 19 Huyuan Rd., Xiamen, China
Phone: (86) 592-2662888
Website: www.peony-hotel.com
Price: Standard Room ($50)
Credit Cards: All major

Rooms: 8
Service: 7
Value: 8
Amenities: 8

Length of Stay: 3 nights

China has some of the best hotels at the best prices. Peony Wanpeng Hotel is just one of those in the Xiamen area. The rooms were a little on the small side, but built with high quality material. The closets, minibar and desks were equipped with everything I could think of. They even had umbrellas and a safe in the closet. The window was huge and offered a great view through the front of the hotel.

We didn't really use the services much here, but the front desk was very helpful. They gave us a pro-rated price on one of the rooms when we needed it for storage a few hours after their standard checkout time.

I didn't stay long enough (3 nights) to check out all of their facilities, but the business center looked very complete. There's a 2-floor restaurant taking up the 4th & 5th floors and a cafe on the first floor with breakfast buffet. Internet service in the rooms was stable, fast and most importantly... FREE!

Xiamen in 1.5 Days

We arrived at night on 11/27 with enough time to check out Zhongshan Lu. The next day was a full day which we split between Garden Show Park and Gulang Yu.



Zhongshan Lu: [Attraction] This is the main shopping street of Xiamen. It consists mostly of designer clothing stores and sporting goods. It's not like the shopping areas of Shanghai & Beijing where you can find small souvenirs and gift items. The side streets are filled with DVD shops, restaurants and food stands.

Huasheng Tang Dian: [Restaurant] Located at the end of Zhongshan, My Mother's uncles made a point to stop by here for a peanut soup (huang ze he) snack as they were our tour guides. This is a specialty of the Xiamen area. It was also served after dinner at the Peony Wanpeng Restaurant.

Garden Show Park: [Attraction] This is the home of the 2007 Garden EXPO and is made up of 98 different gardens. We spent about 2 hours here and saw 5 gardens. They were some of the most artistically arranged gardens I've seen, but I can't imagine anyone sticking around for all 98!

Gulang Yu: [Attraction] The original home island of my paternal grandmother, Gulang Yu is now a tourist attraction made up of historic buildings and shops. Tour guides can be picked up right after the ferry drop-off. They start at 40 RMB, but can be bargained down to 10 RMB. Our group of 10 took about a 4-hour tour, so we just paid her the full 40 RMB anyway. It didn't even tranlate to much in USD ($5.40), but 40 RMB can go a long way in China.

Yuan Xiang Kou: [Restaurant] Our first stop on Gulang Yu was this small restaurant that specialized in fishball soup. I was a little reluctant at first because I didn't feel it wa exotic enough to try out and none of us were really hungry, but the tour guide convinced us to try a little. I'm glad she did because it was a the best fishball soup I've ever had. It tasted like real fish meat as opposed to the processed stuff we're used to in the US.

Xiamen's Cast

Joining Me and my parents on this side trip were:

Auntie Remy: Mom's younger sister, has lived with us in NY during my childhood
Auntie Ida: Mom's oldest sister
Auntie Solidad: Mom's youngest sister
Uncle Ruben: Mom's younger brother
Granduncle Manuel: Mom's uncle
Granduncle Robert: Mom's Uncle, builder of schools, bears a striking resemblance to Thomas Haden Church (Sandman in Spiderman 3)
Auntie Day: Mom's cousin from Long Island

Later on, we met up with the following, who arrived a little later:

Uncle Ramon: Mom's younger brother, well-known architect/designer in Philippines and Asia, majority owner of Swire Élan Suites
Auntie Élan: Uncle Ramon's wife, yes... the hotel is named after her
Kim: Their daughter

Pre-Flight / Non-Thanksgiving

It feels weird to skip Thanksgiving. This is the first year that I can remember that we're not celebrating it. It's the only way to get a trip to Asia while cutting down on vacation day usage though. Right now, I'm at the airport with my parents, waiting for our flight to the Philippines on Eva Air. Most of my family is headed there for my cousin, Christine's wedding on December 1. My sister, EM is already there. She headed there a week earlier so she could include side trips to Thailand and Cambodia. I also have 2 pairs of uncles/aunts heading out from NY & Boston after Thanksgiving.

The flight is surprisingly full for Thanksgiving night. Check-in went by at a normal pace... no problems. The security checkpoint was a mess though. Laptops needed to be in a separate bin. So I ended up with 3 items... 1) backpack; 2) laptop & 3) bin with miscellaneous items. Of the 3 of us, they chose my mom to be patted down. Whenever I travel with my family, security never checks me. Usually, it's my dad they get. It's ironic because I'm by far more suspicious than my parents. I'm almost fully covered in black, including gloves, hat and hood. My backpack is filled with electronics that security guards have never seen before. Any one of those items could easily be a bomb component. Yet I never get searched. One other thing... if my laptop has to be taken out of the bag, then passed through the x-ray, then I lack confidence in the ability of the x-ray machine to protect my security.