Saturday, January 30, 2016

Merry Amoy Christmas and Happy Monkey Year in Xiamen

 Warm greetings from Amoy!

We had quite a Christmas in Xiamen in 2015. They get livelier every year. Some of the buildings had gigantic Christmas decorations, some of my favorites being the gigantic Santa Clauses climbing ropes up the side of department store walls--like red-suited cat burglars. We were also very surprised to see a beautiful, nearly life-sized nativity scene on our busiest downtown main street (Zhongshan Rd.) A non-stop crowd ogled it, taking photos. Who’d have thought of this in mainland China when public nativity scenes are often banned even in the U.S.?

Lots of changes in 2016. Sue will be busier than ever with her English Corner, ladies’ studies, and teaching  And I’m not going to do TV work in 2016. I filmed 329 episodes in 2015, which on top of teaching, writing and everything else, was a bit much. This year, I hope to spend more time on  teaching, writing two books, one being “Off the Wall" (about our 27 years here, and published in Beijing), and one about the Hakka city of Longyan in West Fujian), and working more with XMU's part of the OneMBA program. I add a photo of our granddaughter, Kate, who just celebrated her first Christmas. Hard to believe she’ll be a year old in two months. We hope we can see her before she goes off to college! She’s becoming quite the little lady. Matt's already teaching her to play ukulele. He sent a video. What a grin when she strums it (Matt holding it for her, of course).

Enjoy Amoy!

Bill and Sue Brown
Dr. Bill's Amazon eBooks
"Discover Xiamen"
"Fujian Adventure"

Cartoon from my nightly TV program on Fujian's HXTV




Bill Brown Xiamen University www.amoymagic.com

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