The drive from Xiamen Airport to Anhai has changed since we last took it in early 2000. The pot-hole laden pseudo road has been replaced with a bona fide superhighway, complete with tollbooths along the way to help pay for it. A trip on the road from Xiamen to Fuzhou used to take 8 or 9 hours; now, we’re told, it can be accomplished in 2, thanks solely to the improved road conditions. And the generic Chinese cars and trucks have largely been replaced with imported vehicles and more modern-looking Chinese vehicles. And there are oodles more billboards along the road.

In the late 90′s and 2000, I recall, the few billboards along the road were for high-grade items like Hennesey cognac and the latest brand of washing machine. Now they seem devoted almost exclusively to the pillars of the local economy: stone and stoneworks, marble and granite suppliers, as well as some general trading sites like alibaba.com, with text in both Chinese and English.

Fujian Province has always been more outwardly focused than most other provinces, more business-minded too. In fact, the Chinese end of the so-called “Marine Silk Road” ended here in nearby Quanzhou, I believe, though things on that route kind of dried up when the local river silted shut a couple or few hundred years ago. “Let’s hope the Information Superhighway doesn’t clog to a halt,” I imagine the folks who’ve bought billboard space are thinking.

On the way into Anhai, on the outskirts of town, we passed the Anping Hotel, where we had our wedding ceremony in February 1997. It’s common here for folks to spread the legal “paperwork” marriage and the whoop-de-dooper marriage ceremony and banquet fairly far apart, though we were longer than most, over a year in between.

The only changes I noticed in town had to do with a greater number of multi-story private homes–and a couple monumental enclosed gardens that some of the extremely rich have built for themselves here. Otherwise, the streets and alleyways looked mostly the same: filthy and unattractive on the outside, grand and sometimes nearly palatial behind people’s locked gates.

China is “a vast and diverse country,” as the travel brochures tell you, and the town of Anhai certainly has its own unique flavor. But we’ll save that for another entry….

Our flight, direct, from Tokyo to Xiamen took 3 1/2 hours–after an hour delay on the ground. It’s tough to explain to a 4-year-old that no, we’re not there yet, and actually, we’re still stuck on the tarmac.

Just like my first flight into China in 1993, mine was the only non-Asian face aboard, unless you count the youngsters, but since their mother is Chinese, we’ll give them honorary full Asian status for this blog entry.

The first major sign I was back in the PRC: while we were still taxiing down the runway after touching down, a few people began unbuckling their seatbelts and opening the overhead bins. A flight attendant got back on the P.A. system to instruct people to sit back down, leave the overhead bins closed, and so on, since we weren’t anywhere near the gate yet. And for some reason, she gave this announcement only in Chinese, not also in Japanese and English, like all other announcements so far.

But her admonitions seemed to prompt a few other people to jump up and try to head for the exit up front. From my seat in the front bulkhead row in economy class, I could see her simply replace the microphone to its place on the wall and look down at the floor. Apparently she’d flown this route before.

After getting through the immigration desk, the customs desk, and the health form declaration desk (new question since my last visit: Have you visited a poultry farm in the last 7 days?), we gathered our luggage and exited into a surging throng of humanity. Fortunately, our Welcome Party spotted us right away: my Wife’s Younger Brother, Younger Sister, her Husband, and their 5-year-old Daughter; the 7-year-old Son of my Wife’s Elder Sister; and two drivers, one for a Honda mini-van and the other for a Chinese-made sedan, the brand of which I didn’t catch.

My Wife’s Brother, my 2-year-old and I loaded into the sedan; everyone else and all our luggage went into the mini-van.

In the Rush of Things, we didn’t have time or space to install the car seats for the kids, but it would have seemed socially awkward to do so anyway, since the Niece and Nephew weren’t similarly equipped. So off we went, leaving the throng of humanity for a throng of motor traffic, heading north out of Xiamen for the town of Anhai, about 50 to 60 km north. In the sometimes swerving traffic, with a toddler on my lap, more than once I clicked my heels together and muttered, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…”.

Today is our ten-year wedding anniversary.

A decade ago, during winter break from a teaching job in South Korea, I was taking some private Chinese language courses at Xiamen University–partly to take advantage of the relatively inexpensive boarding rates in Xiamen–and the future Mrs. was working in Xiamen for an international trading company.

On the morning of the 24th, we met at the Xiamen University main gate, took a taxi to the marriage bureau office (after previously completing all the bureaucratic paperwork, medical exams, background security checks and so on), waited our turn, signed the final paperwork, and there, beneath of picture of Chairman Mao, officially became husband and wife.

Fast-forward ten years to this morning.

We woke up at 4 A.M. in our hotel room at the Hotel New Otani in Tokyo after some days sightseeing, got ourselves and daughters, ages 2 and 4, ready, and caught a taxi to Narita International Airport. Unfortunately, we had to set out earlier than the airport limousine buses were in operation, and so the taxi fare was, well, astronomical.

Ten years ago today, a taxi in Xiamen to take us to get married cost us just under $2 U.S. dollars.

This morning, a taxi in Tokyo to take us to the airport to return to Xiamen to begin our extended visit back in China set me back over $200 U.S. dollars.

A decade can bring lots of changes and differences, but here’s hoping they won’t all be quite this expensive.