Adventure 3 - part 1

 Last December, I went to China for two weeks in the city of Quanzhou in Fujian. It's a camp sort of layout, where everyone under 23 can go to a city of their choice with all expenses paid, bar the air fees.
I've been to about three of these so far, the third being the one I went to last year.
Since its supposed to be an educational trip ("You're here to learn! Not shop and play around," said the moody camp guide), we spent a lot of it in a classroom, studying a range of subjects: learning chinese, music, calligraphy, kung fu and chinese chess. Chinese class was by far the most boring, the cafeteria food at school was always the same and the food wasn't that good to begin with.

Oh and we all had to wear yellow jackets, so that we were easily seen, just in case one of us wandered off I guess.

We had the occasional day of touring in between. We went to a temple and visited some museums and galleries. The temple was quite nice, but it was pretty boring, but I did take this photo (spot the creeper).

Afterwards, we went to a museum and a gallery. I didn't take any photos of the museum, but the gallery was quite interesting.

Super seedy Buddha (I joked to my friends that it was his 'Come to Bed' face)

More days of studying and then finally, time to tour! We went to Xiamen for a day where we had to sit through very long presentation about opportunities at Xiamen university. Then we went for a very short shopping trip - all the shopping trips were always limited to an hour or two, making it very hard to shop and we ended up catching a taxi at night to go do our own shopping. After lunch, we went to an island. I'd tell you the name, but I didn't pay attention when they were telling us. It was basically a  tourist shopping district, filled with little shops and pretty, overpriced goods.

One particularly colourful store. I couldn't get a better photo as a shop assistant told me photos weren't allowed.

The view as we drove along the river/ocean/sea - a body of water.

The next day, we visited some earth houses with are supposedly infamous and about 200 years old. They're basically their own little forts and back in the olden days, the villagers could sustain themselves purely on the things inside the fort without having to go outside, which was handy for sieges.

An 'Earth House'

Villages near the earth houses

Part 2 coming soon.