Tomb Sweeping Day

Not too far off the heels of Spring Festival is Tomb Sweeping Day/Clear Brightness Day (this one was actually Thursday). I ever-so-politely invited my SO and I to a Chinese friend's family home in Shi Shi, a suburb of Quanzhou, for the holiday.
Shi Shi is about an hour and a half away from Xiamen by bus and about thirty minutes outside of Quanzhou. It's apparently known for a booming clothing manufacturing industry. Coincidentally, Quanzhou is also where the school I initially signed on with when first coming to China is located.

I knew my friend's family had a lot of money because A.) she has not one but two siblings and B.) she's going to grad school in England and her father is paying for the whole shebang. When we arrived at her apartment though, I discovered that were we staying at the nicest home I have ever been to in China.

Napoleon? Of course.

I absolutely love this wall. The door to the storage room (or what in a western home would be used as the pantry) is all but hidden when it's closed!

Oh yes, that is a projector you see over the couch and central air vents over the loveseat. I've never even heard of central air here before.

I think she felt a lot of pressure to entertain us in Shi Shi. The 24ish hours we were there, we rode in three of her family's cars (three!), went to two coffee shops, three restaurants, one temple, one museum and one beach. When I asked her what she'd be doing if we weren't there, she said sleeping, ha.

The temple in Shi Shi was nothing too special. More colorful than your typical, northern China temples- much closer in style to Taiwan's temples, but I realized I hadn't been to a temple in southern China at all yet. The best part was definitely the view of the harbor.

Because Buddha like juice boxes too you know.

After the temple we went in to Quanzhou to go to the museum (and as my third Chinese museum, I have decided they're all pretty awful).

This is somehow underwear. My Chinese friend was also confused...

They are way too trusting with these tiny "No Touching" signs and no other barriers or precautions to prevent said touching.

Seriously, too trusting.

I mean come on, this guy is begging to be touched.

Does this bother anyone else? It remind me of this (second photo from the bottom).

That night we ate out with her family for her brother's birthday. Her family isn't big on drinking (which we discovered when we were the only people that ordered beers with dinner). After dinner we returned home to eat chocolate cake and watch a movie. Everyone except her brother went to bed after the cake though; it was a very chill night. Not what I was expecting at all, especially since there had been rumblings of ktv for the birthday boy.

I was also surprised to find that their entire movie collection seemed to be subtitled American action movies. Her was just apparently the only one interested enough to stay up and watch Minority Report (after he'd turned off Looper because it was too long).

Awesome projector screen movie viewing experience.

The beach the next day had a sand sculpture contest. There were a bunch of Disney sculptures and some Chinese themed designs as well that I enjoyed.

You know you love this. I certainly do.

After the beach it was time for us to catch our bus home to Xiamen and leave the family to do the actual holiday thing. Tomb Sweeping Day is about honoring ancestors by visiting their graves and burning "money" for them to use on the other side (this used to be real, but now they mostly print fake money for it). Not exactly something we needed to crash.