Another day at the beach, another night at the Absinthe bar

Another semester at Xiamen University has come to an end. To celebrate the last weekend with some classmates, we went to the beach at Hai Yun Tai （海韵台） for a long afternoon of swimming and bumming around. I hung my hammock from the branches of a large pine tree at the edge of the beach, providing some shade to the hot sand. For the past several weeks temperatures have been in the thirties, so I have been swimming almost everyday to cool off a bit.
This afternoon I was joined by Paul from Germany, Hannah from the UK, Ding Ding from the US, Jack from Korea, with his girlfriend (also Korean, but not in our class) and one of the Korean mothers in our class, who also brought her ten year old son. An American acquaintance showed up later, with his Chinese girlfriend.
The sea water is now about 26 degrees, very comfortable, and the waves are relatively big at this beach, which is also the favoured spot for kite surfers, so some attention while swimming is required.
After several hours of beach fun, and going home for a quick shower, we met again in the evening in Zeng Cuo An for dinner. The party had shrunk to just four people, but not less animated, and hungry too! We sat down at one of my favourite small restaurants where the always friendly staff served us a fine selection of local seafood, including sauteed clams, steamed fish, and oyster omelette （海蛎煎 - a Xiamen specialty), delicious as always.
The night was still young, so we headed to the ever popular Absinthe bar to help digest our meal with this mysteriously green spirit, dripping through a sugarcube in icy water. The bar has some guitars and ukulele's (the latter for sale), which Paul and Ding Ding skillfully handled to bring us some sweet songs to lull away the night. In my hands, the ukulele produces nothing but some random pling-plong...