Ni Hao

Its been about 2 weeks since I arrived here in Xiamen, China. The place is really beautiful and very clean. It’s an island in south east China (very close to Taiwan). Language seems to be my primary problem out here since not many localites speak English. So I'm trying to learn Mandarin :-) . Here nearly everthing (Billboards, business cards, magazines, sign/navigation boards... even Windows !!) is in mandarin. As Bhavin puts it -- "We work with 128 bit encrypted version of Windows !!"
We do get veg food.. and that's how i'm surviving here. I've learnt to use chop sticks pretty well now. Its good fun using chop sticks (atleast its fun until you drop something on the table :-))

Red Eared Slider

Lotsa places to visit around here. So far have only been to the Amoy botanical garden. Its really huge and beautiful. I've got a lot of snaps but I cant upload them coz the network connection is very slow here. I've taken some good snaps over here. The one above is a Tortoise (a red-eared slider as identified by Naveein from INP) which I found in our backyard. I havent had any luck trying to photograph pandas yet :-(
I was shocked to find out that China blocks all blogspot sites !! (although I can login and post something.... i cant view it, or for that matter cant view any blogspot site !) . Thats the update for now. Hopefully, I'd be posting my experiences regularly.