Christmas trip and pics

27 december 2006

Hi!

Just a quick post-Christmas update with some pics.

Tomas and I spent this Christmas, together with our friends and Amity colleagues, Gunnel and Per-Martin Hjort, on Hainan Island, in southern China. Despite the very long journey in a relatively short time, it was definitely worth the trip. The weather was mostly nice. We spent most of our time relaxing, talking, lounging on the nice sandy beach (it was about 22 degrees C), swimming in the ocean, and eating great food. On Christmas Eve we relaxed and then met Gunnel and Per-Martin in our hotel room for a nice talk together, and then we ate Christmas Eve dinner at a Japanese restaurant right on the beach. It was fun and delicious!

The trip home was very long; due to a weather problem in Xi'an we left Hainan at 11 AM (3-hour delay), and then we landed in Xi'an, where we missed our train, but we still managed to make it back (after catching the last train of the day) to Tianshui, and then we found a taxi so we arrived home at 1:30 AM. We are tired today but we are very happy we went. This was our first Christmas to be away from both of our families, and since Amity arranged for us to have two days off (the other foreign teachers and the Chinese teachers did not have any time off at all, since they do not have Christmas here) we were very happy to leave, even for just a long weekend. Instead of being at all sad to be so far from our families we had a wonderfully relaxing time in a nice environment, together with Gunnel and Per-Martin, whom we are getting to know better and with whom we had a great time!

We thought you would like to see some pictures also.

Soon we will finish updating our web page to include more Hainan pictures, and a short video from the beach.

Take care!
Rachel & Tomas

Ray with milkshake

Gunnel and Rachel with presents

Gunnel, P-M and us in front of tree

Ray and Tomas palms close-up

Sanya beach

View from hotel window