We were at sea on February 6 and continue to be amazed at the number of small fishing boats that are well over one hundred miles from land.  One of our recent tour guides mentioned the fact that many fishermen have had to give up fishing because of depleted fish counts, this is certainly not surprising given the huge number of boats we have seen, many dragging huge nets between two boats.
We arrived at Xiamen, China at 8 am and had to endure the usual bureaucratic mess entering China.  We had to have both our passports and a "certified copy" of our passport, then we had to stand in a huge line to have the "police" compare our copy to our original and put a bar code and stamp on our copy that we have to use to check on and off the ship the entire time we will be in China. Since we docked overnight in Xiamen we have had at least 6 or 8 Chinese officials on the ship the whole time.  They certainly take advantage of the   situation, they are constantly in the coffee area and the restaurants and it is obvious that the crew does not like to wait on them.  Last night we were having dinner in the small Italian restaurant on the top deck.  During the day this is the buffet for breakfast and lunch but at night it is sit down Italian.  Just after we were seated, 7 Chinese officials came in, the staff was not quite sure what to do with them as this restaurant gets full very quickly as it is only half the size it is during the day.  They did seat them at two tables and then tried to explain that it was not buffet and they would have to order off the menu and it appeared that they did not really understand and probably could not read Italian or English! (the menu has both).  As the restaurant started to get busy the staff started to panic and eventually called for a management person who made an excellent decision and moved the Chinese over to the closed side of the restaurant and just brought them a variety of food, problem solved!
Our tour during the day was a "Day at Quanzhou", which is a historic seaport.  It was a two hour drive on fairly good highway but the local drivers do not seem to understand the concept of driving in your own lane.  Our bus driver appeared to drive with one hand on the horn constantly honking at other vehicles to warn them that we were coming!  Motor bikes were not allowed in Xiamen but there were thousands of them in Quanzhou and traffic was intense for a Saturday morning.  We toured a Buddhist temple and a ship museum where they had a relic of a 700 year old ship on display.  Of course the signage touted the superiority of the Chinese even centuries ago.  We had lunch at a hotel and luckily had a couple at our table who lived in Arizona but were originally from Taiwan and spoke Chinese so they were able to find out what we were eating!  After lunch there was another walking visit to a mosque and a temple.  Noel did the visit and Tom stayed on the bus. This area is not visited much by foreign tourists and we were a bit uncomfortable as people really stared at us and were saying things in Chinese that sounded unfriendly.  We will probably cancel our tour for tomorrow as several people told us they did not think much of the tour we are scheduled for that they had taken today.

Decoration on the Buddhist Temple wall

Pagoda at the same temple

Relic in the ship museum

Hotel where we had lunch

Lunch with friends Mickey and Richard who had been on the South America cruise with us in 2012.

Elaborate decorations on second Buddhist temple

Thousands of motor bikes were everywhere

Going back to the ship through very fancy cruise terminal