alright, 'amore' is too strong for amoy.  amoy is the peace in mind.  it represents a life with strolling amongst the silent old buildings, writing in the sand anything coming up to your mind, drinking from a fresh coconut, eating seafood on the beach, lying on the grass in the park, staring at your reflection in the lake, making a wish in front of the buddha... ah, and getting up very late.

 

yes, amoy is a place to relax. 

 

*food

of course food was one of the strongest motivations for going to amoy.  i was born in an inland city so i never had too many chances to taste sea food.  Newcastle is quite close to the sea (well the whole britain is an island isn't is), but surprisingly enough it has a sea food market that is so tiny it looks almost pathetic.  amoy is the first place for me to have unlimited access to loads of real sea food.  you can always see countless red buckets with all kinds of live creatures from the surrounding sea: big crabs with orange dots, big and fat pink shrimps (which we were told was called 'squilla' 虾蛄), scallops, clams, mussels, cockles, beautiful red trumpet shells, eels and various fish, the majority was very challenging to give names.  for the first time of my life i learnt that there are great differences between big and small oysters and that they could be so cheap!  we drowned ourselves in the overwhelming joy of sea food feasts, tasty tasty tasty, until...

erk, i feel sick talking about sea food.  i simply had too much!

 

but the italian restaurant we went to on the cafe street near Marco Polo Plaza was 'molto buono', very good, indeed!  'GEO GEO' was the name, with nice round green sheds over the windows and pretty garden with pink flowers, and a balcony looking over the sea, which was only too chilly to sit on in winter.  they put three big posters on the wall, with all possible kinds of spaghetti , pasta and bread.  truely amazing that the italians have such imagination and creativity.  last month i was making a cliche joke about marco polo 'stealing' noodles and chinese bread, brought them back to italy and made spaghetti and pizza.  Franz said, again, who knows if it was marco polo who BROUGHT spaghetti and pizza to china and then chinese people changed them to noddles and bread!  fair point!