It's just five minutes up the road.

Peter will remember Twilight’s, five minutes up the road. Well it’s the same here.  To go anywhere here is a bus ride, although this is a town of its own, but well out of the city centre.

Yesterday I went with Alex into Xiamen. I visited Jenny, who Peter and I worked with in Xiamen and we were good friends with her and her husband. To get to Xiamen we took a train. But first we took a bus.

We got off the bus. It’s just 15 minutes by walk up here, says Alex. Well, it was more like a 25 minute gallop. Alex went off to do some business thing, and I met Jenny at Mcdonalds, next to the train station. We had a lovely time together, and she has since handed my book over to a friend to see if she will translate it into Chinese for me. (Xiamen University Press think it should be bi-lingual, English and Chinese).

After I left Jenny I went down to Walmart. This is a weird set up, the main supermarket is on an underground level, you go down to this massive supermarket that sells everything imaginable. I’d just got started, when I got a phone call from Alex. He had finished and was at the supermarket entrance, but he wanted to go over the road to some special restaurant that sold lovely deserts.

We had only a little time, so instead of getting all the things I needed, we ran round that supermarket and found bacon and a frying pan etc. We dashed through the checkout, to find that there wasn’t enough time to go to this restaurant anyway.

Today, was just the same. We got the bus into town and he wanted to show me his new apartment. I will do a separate post on that. He was going to take the car, but the car wasn’t back in time, so it was a bus again. The bus stop is by my apartment he says….haha, not quite. It was 15 minutes fast hike up and around, up a hill, then up 18 floors on a lift.

At 5.30 we picked up Alex’s wife and went to a restaurant. A walk was in order after eating, so we started to walk. The trouble is, I have brought the wrong sneakers with me. I brought the small ones instead of my normal ones. And these ones are too small and squish my toes up like you wouldn’t believe. I said that my feet were too sore to walk far and explained why. No problem, there is a shoe shop just up here, they say. We will take you to buy some new ones.

We’ll, about a hundred miles further up we turn right and another few miles up is the shoe shop. I found something suitable and bought them so that should make the rest of my time here better. The problem is that there is quite a bit of walking involved round here and they were the only walking shoes I brought with me.

From now on I am asking more questions about ‘how far’. We learned to do this with Twilight, and found that usually it was a bus trip etc plus………….