Qingdao

So I was too lazy to rewrite our experience in Qingdao, I just copy and pasted Bruce's email. Hope you still enjoy:

This past weekend we had a couple of days off from teaching, and we decided to go to a beautiful coastal city very close to us in our province, called Qingdao (pronounced ching-dao). We left in a bus from Weihai this past Friday morning, and it went 4 hours to the south. We had fried squid and rice for lunch, and found our hostel (a cheap hotel). They did have a 2-person room, so Katie and I were able to stay in that one. Last time we traveled, we were put in a 5-person room with other people from our group. Then we walked the 2 blocks from our apartment to the beach. On the way there were a lot of street vendors. One of them was selling live baby turtles for 50 cents a piece. We begged our head teacher to let us get one, but she said no. There were a lot of people flying kites as well. We took a couple of buses, and found an Italian restaurant. Katie and I shared a bowl of gnocci. That's something I had a lot on my mission in Argentina! It was great.

Saturday we woke up, and I had a sore throat, I think from the pollution in the air. Every day I went to bed healthy and woke up with a sore throat. We got on a city bus that took us to Mount Laoshan. It's one of the tallest mountains on China's coast (it touches the ocean). It was very beautiful, and after we got off the bus we hiked on the trails for a few hours (and a little bit off the trails, too). There were a handful of attractions you could hike to on the trail, and we decided we wanted to see the "jade pool." After hiking for an hour to the crest of one of the mountains, we descended on the far side. In the valley, there were trail signs in Chinese, but none of them went to the jade pool. We were kinda lost. We kept hiking up to the crest of the second mountain. By then, our faces were red, our heartbeats were up, and we could barely walk. Luckily, we found a cable-car station on top of the second mountain, like a ski lift, that would carry us back to where we started. They let us get on for free, and we rode for a few minutes back to base. When we got off and they saw we didn't have any cable-car ticket, they charged us $5 per person. We were glad to pay. After riding the public bus back to our hotel, a few people in the group thought it would be fun to go out dancing. We stopped a cab, and had him take us to a local club. He took us to a little plaza with at least five different clubs. They were all free, unless you ordered food or drink. We went into the first one, and no one was dancing. They were all sitting down at tables, listening to a guy sing karaoke. We went to a different club, but it was the same thing there, too. By the third club, we realized that it wasn't going to be different. Also, the singers were not just doing karaoke; they were professional karaoke singers hired by the clubs, and only they were allowed to sing. So we finally decided to stay at one of the clubs. There were only about 20 people in it, and it was small. They sang us a few American songs, and then Katie got up with 2 of the girls in our group and started dancing. The club liked that the 3 girls were dancing (including Katie), so they brought our table 3 free drinks, one for each of the girls. We didn't drink them, though, because they were alcoholic. Then I got up, and then everybody in our group was dancing. I didn't get us another drink, but they did bring us free peanuts! The karaoke singer stopped, and the DJ turned up some techno dance music and turned the fog machine to "high." Everybody in the club was watching us dance, and then they started to get up and dance, too. The DJ kept sliding from one song to another so that we would all keep dancing. We felt like we had started the party we wanted! Then, the bartender in the back gets up on the bar and lights two show bottles on fire (just the tips) and starts spinning them and doing tricks with them. Then he lights a third one on fire, and juggles them! It was so cool! After that, we took a break from dancing, and after we were cooled down, we headed home for the night (it was only about midnight).

Sunday morning, we all slept in. That felt really nice. We got breakfast from a fresh bakery, and went to Qingdao Polar Ocean World (the local Sea World). It was really neat to see all of the animals, and I'm sure we took hundreds of pictures. The seals did tricks for us, and the dolphins did, too. Some fish liked to be fed from a bottle, so when I stuck my finger down by the water they would swim up and poke their heads out of the water and suck on my finger like baby goats at a petting zoo, but they were fish! Some of it was sad, because some of the animals were in too small of a cage. They had 5 arctic wolves in a display room about the size of 2 bedrooms, and 2 polar bears in an area the size of 2 living rooms. They didn't seem to like it very much. One of the girls in our group, Kilee, got to have her picture taken with a seal, and it bends over to kiss you on your head and holds its lips on you until you get a picture. That was really cute. After that we saw the beach one more time, and walked up and down it.

Monday morning, we had McDonald's breakfast. They are actually celebrating Easter in the Chinese McDonald's. They had pictures of Easter eggs, and posters in English, and even a person wearing a body suit that was a giant painted Easter egg! We walked to the bus station, and that's where our adventure home started. The bus ride was supposed to be 80 yuan (about $13 US). But a guy walking around the front of the bus station was trying to get us to go with him for cheaper. He said he would do it for 70. We decided to check it out, and followed him to his bus. There were a bunch of people on it already, most of them waiting to go to Weihai. Before I could firm up the details, half of our group had gotten on the bus, assuming it was what we were doing. Katie and I got on, and the bus pulled out. After 10 minutes, the bus pulled over in the middle of a road, and the guy walked around collecting the fees. Then he told us it would be 90 yuan. We said no thank you, and that we would get off. He said he would do it for 80, and we said OK and paid him. We also think we might have misheard him the first time he said the price, and perhaps he said 90 but we thought it was 70 (chio-shur vs. chi-shur). Soon the bus is on the freeway, and after an hour, they stop the bus on the side of the freeway and kick 2 people off. Then they keep going. 30 minutes later, they pull over and kick 2 more people off, in the middle of nowhere, on the side of the highway. Katie and I started to get scared, and thought that any time now we were going to get dropped off in the middle of nowhere. Finally, we pull into an actual bus station in Yantai (about 1 hour away from Weihai, where we want to go). Our driver/salesman gets off the bus and starts yelling at other bus drivers to take us. I think he was trying to pawn us off, and sell us under the table to the bus drivers, who would keep all of the secret profit, and not tell their bosses. None of the bus drivers would take us. He even blocked one guy's bus in with ours, and threatened him. But still, no one would take us. In the end, he paid a few taxi buses to take us all to Weihai, but he was really mad about it. I think he didn't make as much profit as he wanted to. The taxis had to split up our 8-person group into two, in separate taxi buses with 4 people each). I stayed with Katie. After another hour drive, we pulled up to the bus station in Weihai, and we were relieved to at least be in the right city (and not stranded on the side of the freeway). However, we did not have a map of Weihai, and did not know how to get home. And we don't have phones. And, the other 4 people in our group aren't showing up anywhere, and we don't know where they are. So we pulled over a cab, and showed him our school's business card with the address, which is how they always take us home. The first cabbie says no. The second one says no. They all say no. So we jumped on a cheap public bus and hoped it would take us somewhere closer, where a cab driver would actually take us. Lucky for us, the bus took us right to the central bus stop where all the buses come. We got off and waited until our local bus came that goes right in front of our school. 20 minutes later, we got off at our school, and went up to our apartments. The other 4 people in our group were already home, and had apparently gotten home 2 hours before us, and were really worried about us. We went out to eat to a really cheap Chinese restaurant, since we missed dinner. A big bowl of fried rice with egg was only 50 cents. That's Bruce's new favorite.