Qingdao- Day 3 (Thursday)

We slept through breakfast, well, actually we could have thrown clothes on and made it, but the coffee was so bad the previous day, we said, screw it, we will find a cafe somewhere.

We needed coffee, well, Bill in particular

After our coffees Bill perked up quite a bit.  We wandered down to the waterfront by a different path and found a restaurant alley featuring seafood.  As a port town it makes total sense that seafood would be featured in virtually every restaurant we have entered. 

Bill is tiring of "Chinese" food, but recognizes that he has been surprised at things that he thought would not be exciting for him to eat, but then has been pleasantly happy!

As we can see, he is much "Perkier" than before!

Today's wander was on the other side of the bay than Tuesday's.  Instead of looking west, we now are looking east into the harbor.

In previous days, I have taken a photo of this from across the harbor.

Dinner tonight was at 96 Barbecue, which is a local bar/rests on the main drag from which our alley cuts off.  There were full tables all over the place, with lots of different combinations of people.  There were 2 guys playing drinking games, a version of rock, paper, scissors where loser has to drink and eat something on the table.  While I watched, one guy kept losing and when he got up to use the bathroom, the other guy was quickly gobbling up all sorts of stuff form the table to soak up the alcohol.

We ordered streaky pork, eggplant, Australian beef, dumplings and 2 beers.  Bill had order potatoes, but they never made it on to the tab.

This is the pork

This is the "dumplings"

Sadly,I don't have a shot of the beef which was over enoki mushrooms

Qingdao - Day 2 (Wednesday)

We woke up relatively early and decided to get breakfast at the hotel's buffet.  It was a real Chinese brekkies, nothing western in plain sight, turns out there were some items tucked away, mostly for a reason!  There were fried eggs tucked into a corner and some cereals as well, other than that, only Chinese food.

I got some fried veggies, congee, some interesting steamed buns, wanton soup and coffee.  Well, it had a sign over it stating it was coffee, but it poured out of the urn looking like tea.  I added some milk, and took it to our table.  Neither of us could drink it....absolutely disgusting, not in a lose your cookies way, but in the way that it tasted nothing like coffee, nor did the tea fare any better!

There is a lot to learn about Chinese breakfast.  You can order some stuff, other stuff is out on the table for buffet taking, and other things you are allowed to doctor to flavor soups.  There is an array of spicy things that you can add to your soup or congee and usually I do, but I couldn't find the "spice" bar right away and I was hungry.  So I ate plain congee without any fixings...not nearly as tasty as with the fixings!

We decided to explore Old Town.  This was after logging many miles in looking for a laundry.  We went up this alley, down that alley, across the street, asked locals, and all we could find were dry cleaners that would dry clean my shorts for 16 yuan.  We had to take the laundry home, and were told that there was a machine for guests on the 3rd floor.  We checked it out but decided not to spend the day doing laundry, we would do it at night.  

I'm glad we went to Old Town because there was not much there there.  Restaurants were either fast food, or stalls near the water front, and further away, no English at all.  We ended up in a strange place that had tables and service.  There were 2 menus, one for food on sticks, and the other for classic offerings.  Bill went with the stick food, some of which was organs, and some more identifiable as other cuts.  I ordered hot and sour soup and dry fried green beans.  The soup came out in an ENORMOUS bowl, enough for an army.  The cost:  14 yuan, which is about 2 dollars.  The string beans were about 22 yuan, or 3 dollars.  The string beans were fabulous, spicy, salty, a little outside taste of sweet.  Perfection!

After lunch we wandered around Old Town, and really saw that there was no there there.  Bill felt much better about where we were staying and all of the options that are available to us in our current location.  There were some interesting street and sights, but it was not the quaint old German town that Bill was expecting.  

This explains much of how China works:  We were looking for the historic Govenor's Mansion.  We followed Google Maps, and ended up making the left turn into a hospital's parking lot and between the orderlies, people running around in scrubs, local Chinese rushing to loved ones, local Chinese escorting loved ones home, the historic Mansion was undergoing some kind of construction.  We could not figure out if it was demolision or if it was renovation.  But it is in a parking lot!  China has a habit of tearing down historic buildings only to rebuild them to look like historic blogs. When your biggest resource is man or woman power, this does make sense.  Especially, if you don't have to worry too much about the bottom line.

We cabbed home and Bill did laundry at a machine upstairs. I slept for a bit and blogged for a bit.

Perhaps our epic fail at finding one colored our entire day, but I did need a snooze before dinner.  Eventually, we went out to get dinner and ended up at a Szechwan place.  We got a cold beef dish, ma po tofu, and an eggplant dish.  For me, the eggplant was the winner.    It was spicy, sweet, sour, and salty all at the same time.  Silky smooth and piping hot when it arrived, I burned my mouth on the first bite.  The eggplant was a great foil to the spiciest of the tofu.

Tuesday - Qingdao Day 1

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 picked Pizza Hut over KFC.  What a serendipitous choice for people watching.  At the table across from us were 2 older women, probably about my age.  They were dressed quite fanciful with tiaras and kitten mules.  They were, however, quite large women in stylish muu-muus.  They looked strangely out of place in a Pizza Hut.  When one went to the ladies room, I started to wonder if they were madams and there was a convention in the nearby hotel.  Then I thought they may be drag queens...  These two women had healthy appetites.  They ordered dish after dish and were still packing it in when Bill and I left.

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.

 Velvetta Oysters

 Hidden Scotch Eggs

 Peanuts and Clams

Monday--Blood Pressure arising in the Morning.

We were up early for the debate.  We were frothing at the mouth and slack jawed at much of the nonsense that dribbled out of his mouth.  It took us until noon to be able to go about our business without shaking our head, just remembering now is giving me the willys.

It was our last day, for now in Beijing, and we had to pack and get up early the next day to head to Qingdao.  We wandered over to the Foreign Language Bookstore on Wangfujing and Bill purchased 2 new books to read.  I haven't been reading much as I have been frustrated at getting this blog up to date.

After the book store we ended up at the Chang'an Beer Garden... Well it is sort of a beer garden, in that 1, it sells beer, and 2, it is outdoors in a garden-ish area.  The downside was that it was next to (on the other side of the hedge) Chang'an Avenue, which is a busy thotoughfare in Beijing.  It travels east and west and passes between Tian'anmen and the entrance to the Forbidden Palace.  We are talking 4 or 5 lanes in each direction

 I 

This is Bill's thinking face.  He thinks so much he gives himself chapped lips, as he has now.  The small hut in the left background is where you buy beer, the tables are in the "garden area" and the tall buildings in the right background are the stores and mall of Wangfujing Street.

We ended up eating at one of our favorite "local" places where the host is nice and the waitress is super. We ordered some old favorites and a new thing call "horsetail with pancakes".  It was a huge surprise as it was a fish dish.  A dried fish dish.  I'm not a big fishy person, and this was definitely fishy.  It was disguised by a dark brown sauce which had us thinking it may be some kind of meat.

After dinner we packed up things and set alarms as we were told we needed to be at the airport 2 hours early in order to save our cheap fares....

Sunday: Hutongs, Drum and Bell Towers, and Sanlitun fiasco

We took our 82 bus up to the northern entrance of the Forbidden City.  This left us a short walk from the popular alleys, or hutongs as they are know here.

We had a walking tour thru the hutongs and quickly abandoned it as the interesting part was the Main Street, not the smaller hutongs.  These hutongs are where many Beijingers live.  It is a rabbit warren of narrow alleys with blind ends and a myriad of clothes lines all strewn with drying things. The hutong dumped us out at the Drum Tower.  The most daunting thing about it was the straight to the top staircase without landings and very large rise between each step.  Wasn't sure I was going to make it to the top!

If that is not a sight stretching before you.... This is straight up, that white patch is the only landing... One false move, and hello broken neck!

We were fortunate enough to arrive a short time before the drum performance.  

The views out over Beijing were really wonderful.  All those gray slate roofs are part of the hutongs.

This is in the courtyard between the Drum and Bell towers.  You are looking at the Bell Tower, but it would be hard pressed to tell them apart.

This bell was HUGE and the striker was as well.

We took a cab from here to Sanlitun to try to find a sports bar for Bill to watch at least one of the CAFL games that were being played on Sunday.  We ended up with 2 different cab drivers and neither could find the location that bill had given them.  We wandered a mall for a bit looking for an alternative but to no avail.  We ended up in a Mexican restaurant, which was not half bad.  Not great, but a reasonable facsimile of Mexican cuisine.  We decided to try to find a bar again, but it just got really frustrating.  So I took a cab back to our hotel and Bill found "Hooters" and a screen for his beloved game.  So It Was A Happy Ending, after all!

Saturday: Temple of Heaven

As is our usual want, we woke up and got breakfast at the hotel.  We then grabbed a cab and went to the Panjiayuan Market.  This is an enormous flea market set up on a vacant courtyard in a residential neighborhood.  We systematically wandered up and down the aisles.  What we noticed was that virtually everyone in a section of about 5 rows sold the same things.  I am assuming the prices were all about the same, although you are encouraged to bargain.  There were rows and rows of Buddhist prayer beads made of various real and man made products.  There were rows of beads for DIY necklace making, along with various things that could be a pendant on said necklaces.  There was an area of metal artifacts, Buddha heads, mythological creatures, dragons, dogs, cats, pandas, etc.  There were rows of pottery, rows of wooden or marble slabs to be turned into chops of your design.  

After we wandered all through this area, we were going to leave when we noticed another entire section of books and paper and that connected to another section of more of what we had wandered through already.  At this point, we were flea marketed out, I did bargain for a small trinket.  

After this, we ended up looking for lunch and found the pickings quite slim.  We went into a place not really knowing what it was and rejected hotpot and opted for McDonald's......now I know, you are thinking have we lost our minds, but Mickey D's in other countries is different and in many ways better.  Bill ended up with a chicken sandwich and I had a fish fillet.  Both equally evocative of an earlier time and place.  Our madelaines?  The main purpose for the luncheon break was for a bath room.   The restroom in the McDonald's was absolutely disgusting....if I didn't need one, I would have passed by entirely!  The market had public restrooms, which are everywhere in Beijing.  The issue is that they are squat toilets.  Now I had a question about which way to face when using that type of toilet and an experience at the market gave me the answer.  I did go into one public restroom and looked for a stall that had a green light, meaning vacant, except it wasn't.  There was a women in there and she was facing forward, rear end pointing to the back wall.  This answered my question and also embarrassed me sufficiently that I just left.  This is why I needed a bathroom and we chose McDonald's.  

We headed to the Temple of Heaven which was a short cab ride away.  It is in a beautiful park area south by southeast from the center of Beijing.  We entered via the East Gate and proceeded to walk to  the various pavilions.  Many of these were in the same style as was seen in the Forbidden City.  There was one spectacular pavilion, the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests.  It is raised on a circular plinth on which the circular temple sits. It is a three-tiered pagoda type building.  According to the plaques outside, it is where the Emperor would pray for a bountiful harvest.

 These temples were ceremonial in nature and were used only at certain times of the year.

At this point, my feet were screaming at me.  There is not enough support in the shoes that I brought. I will have to get new kicks.  Leaving the park proved more difficult that we thought.  You are dumped out the southern exit which faces a busy off and on ramp of one of the ring roads.  To flag a cab, we needed to cross the street and stick our hand out pointing to the ground.  It seems I have been hailing cabs all wrong....!

We had dinner at a Singaporese restaurant in the APM mall called City Garden.  We ordered prickly ash pork dish, garlic bread, durian puffs, something called "volumes" on the menu, oysters and eggs

 These are the volumes (above) and below is the prickly ash pork

Above are the durian puffs

 The dish above was an absolutely delicious stringbean dish.

Google photos has been a real nightmare.  It takes forever to back up photos and then it doesn't back them all up.  Soon only some of the meal photos are available right now.

I am updating this on Tuesday night, and a faster wifi may be a huge help.  If only there was hot water!

Friday, Forbidden City

Golden Week ends today, it is also is still rainy and we got virtually a private viewing of the Forbidden City.  There were very few people there considering that this is a country of billions of people.  The complex is HUGE and has tons of temples and various other sites.  It took several hours to transverse the entire central axis.  I'll let the pictures do the talking.