We got up at 5 am, which is ungodly for us. We dressed and raced down to breakfast in the hotel only to find that it starts at 7 not as we thought 6. Oh well. We fueled up on the odds and ends we had in the frig and got into a cab and off we went to the airport.
We were, as told, at the airport at 7:30 for a 9:50 flight. We found a little cafe and had breakfast. They used teddy bears as identification of what orders went to what table. Bill had a mozzarella toast and I had plain waffles.
The flight was uneventful and we landed without incident. No story there! The ride to the hotel, well that was another story.
Driving in China is a test of nerves, hell, being a passenger is a test of nerves. There are unwritten traffic rules, we'll sort of, in that stop lights exist, they change colors, but this is really only a signal to traffic not turning, if you are crossing traffic and making a left turn, these lights are meaningless. If you are making a right turn onto a road, likewise, these lights are just colors in the sky. Crossing the street takes balls! It appeared to me that size was the determining factor in right of way. Motorbike trumped pedestrian, car trumped motorbike, truck won over car, and bus over truck. This all seemed second nature to all drivers. Then there is like on like....car on car meant a game of chicken, with unpredictable results. Bill and my code for a crazy ride is Mr. Toad. We had many of these in Vietnam, where we coined the term, but China, from an outsiders perspective, has many levels of magnitude possible in every car ride. Yet, there are very few fender benders. Aggressive drives will invariably win and non-aggressive drivers are ok with that. Bill's method to deal with the potential nausea is to close his eyes and tilt his head back. I have chosen to view the scenery to my direct right or left depending on which direction we are traveling. Turn signals are virtually a useless piece of equipment on the steering column. However, the horn is the most used item in every drivers arsenal.
There are a number of things that a horn toot can mean: I am coming to the intersection and a signal to others that traffic approaches; Hey, wake up you moron, I'm in this lane; Hello, my friend; Goodbye my friend; Get out of my way, I'm in a terrible hurry and I am more important than you, I have children.
Each driver has his or her style. Our best cab driver was a woman in Beijing. She used turn signals to change lanes and did not tail gate. It was a wonderful stress-free ride. Now back to Qingsao.
It was a hoot trying to find the cab stand...once we understood it was downstairs, we then had to find an elevator which was all the way at the other end of the corridor, you'd never find it quickly. Out cab driver was a woman, who wasn't really sure where we were going. She was brusque and all business. Don't mess with her lunch that is in the trunk either. We then went off careening around the highways; speeding up, slowing down, honking, talking angrily on the phone, and finally announcing, with a thumb toss, here you are, not get out.
So we are now at a long boardwalk between 2 ponds and we walk up to the door of the hotel and are outraged that we have to actually push the door ourselves which we haven't had to do as our former hotel had an automatic door!
The room is quite funky. It has a platform on which the bed sits, and the shower with a glass wall facing the bed. Luckily, there is a curtain on the bed side that can be pulled for "privacy". Next to that is the toilet. The doors to both little rooms is a slider with rice paper which has been stiffened with a coating of some kind. The sink is a delft bowl on a counter across from the toilet. To the right of the toilet is a small couch and coffee table. We did have a choice of a water bed or a regular bed. We picked regular as with my tossing and turning Bill would end up sea sick!
We wandered the area and looked for a China Unicom to get more data for my phone. There was no one there that spoke English, and it looked like a long wait. So we continued down the avenue to find the waterfront. Eventually, we went into a mall to find something to eat and were surprised that the pickings were slim.
We wandered to the waterfront to see what was going on. There was the Olympic Sailing Venue from 2008 and lots of booths being set up, a lighthouse, a "beer street" and a fancy yacht club to which you could not enter onto the property at all, not even into a parking lot!
It was getting close to dusk and we were searching for some spots that were on the map. But, we could not find them. Bill was going crazy as he was sure that we were in Old Town. Well, we figured out that we were not in old town, but the equivalent of Brooklyn, using NYC standards. Bill felt really bad about that, since all this time he thought he had booked a hotel in Old Town and now we were in the burbs. More on this later. It is not a bad location, there are tons of restaurants and other diversions so it's not bad.
We went to the restaurant connected with the hotel for dinner that night and got some really weird stuff unintentionally. The had a picture menu without English translation, and we choose and made decisions according to what we "thought" the dish looked like. We got lots of surprises! Bill ordered this thing that looked to me like abalone, baked oysters, crystal dumplings, and I ordered what looked like Kung pao chicken.
What a surprise. The abalone was actually a scotch egg kind of thing. With a hard boiled egg inside a meat enclosure that had been fried and in a brown sauce. The oysters were identifiable but they had a slice of what looked and tasted like velvetta cheese on top. They were still attached to the lower shell so that made things a little difficult to remove from the shell into the mouth. Kind of laughable! My dish arrived first, and it was a peanut, sliced dried hot peppers and fried clams or mussels, I couldn't tell. But it was really tasty. How could it not be...fried salty crispy things.
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