National Day Holiday - Part 3 - Weihai

The 4 hour bus ride from Qingdao to Weihai was not bad at all. It was a clean bus, had an attendant that provided hot water / tea and a bag of snacks. I am pretty impressed, actually. When we arrived at the long distance bus station in Weihai, I thought this city is going to be boring. First of all, it is supposed to be a coastal city. I didn’t see any water. Not many buildings at all, for that matter. Moments after getting off the bus we were approached by a man holding pamphlets for area hotels. As a rule of thumb, I always ignore them and say no thanks. Melanie doesn’t share the same policy - which in this case, was good. The man had a car, decided to take us to a hotel near the beach that was in our budget, and took us to the ferry terminal where we bought our Weihai -> Dalian ticket (more on this in a bit). Turns out this guy is a want-to-be tour guide / travel agent, but has failed the exams 2 or 3 times, so he does this work to save up money so he can attempt the exam again. (It is a common business for people to act as agents for anything from hotels to bus companies to tour agencies - they quote you a price that is a bit higher than the (e.g. hotel) would charge). Of course, as a visitor to a place you have no experience with, paying the little extra money for the convenience is generally worth it. The hotel he took us to was O.K. - for a 180 RMB / night, you really can’t complain! The “hotel” was actually a “teachers hostel”. Not sure what that was, but it was pretty empty - had a decent view of the water though. Buying the ferry ticket was pretty straight forward and we proceeded to go to another ferry terminal to go to one of Weihai’s main attractions: Liugongdao Island - the former Navy HQ from the Qing Dynasty (1800’s). It was O.K. Got there around 3:00pm, walked around, saw some of the sites (you have to pay 70RMB - 40 for the ferry ticket, 30 for the “catch-all” entrance ticket, so might as well try to see as much as possible). We got tired, wasn’t too exciting, plus we had to catch a return ferry to the mainland - last boat: 5:30PM - which seemed strange because there were several outdoor seafood restaurants on the island - could be a popular night time seafood getaway. Dunno.. That night, we decided to have Korean BBQ as Weihai, like many Chinese costal cities, has a pretty large Korean population. The place we found, sort of in the “Korean district” wasn’t too expensive. For the three of us (oh, Melanie and I met up with Charlie, who left Qingdao a day before us to go to Weihai) paid around 110RMB, I think… Following dinner, we decided to try to find a “family style” Karaoke place to unwind for a bit. Hard to find! “Family-style”, that is. We had a run-in with a homeless beggar as we were walking casually along the road on the sidewalk in the city. This guy immediately targeted me (as I was the only noticeable foreigner among the three of us). I started to walk quickly forward - this guy was pretty good at keeping up. Long story short - Melanie tripped on a curbed and scraped her knee. While tending to that, the beggar had enough nerve (or lack of respect) to continue to bug us for money! grrr Putting that behind us, we decided to catch a taxi and ask the driver to take us to a legit / family-style Karaoke place. He laughed a bit, called someone, and then proceeded to take us somewhere. We arrived at this place, immediately when the taxi stopped, all of the doors of the taxi were opened by guys who were quite cheerful - employees of the nightclub-sort-of place that we had arrived at. The three of us walked in and Charlie and Melanie started to talk with one of the guys at the front desk; a few minutes later, we saw about 10 young women in rather fleshy outfits walking down the stairs to the lobby area of the Karaoke nightclub. They proceeded to walk into a room down the hall. The three of us looked at each other and decided to leave as this was “that kind” of entertainment club. Had an early night. Melanie and my ferry to Dalian was set to leave at 8:30 in the morning on Monday, October 4. We woke up early because we wanted to have a short walk along the beach but decided to scrap that idea due to laziness. We wanted to get some food before the trip, decided to get a small snack called “jianbing”, which is a pancake/egg/crunchy/spicy thing with some meat and veggies, ~2 RMB. I will try to get some pictures of it to post.. Good stuff. Any way, according to some people on the street, “Weihai” people don’t eat that stuff. So, crap. I guess Weihai people are more sophisticated than Beijing people.. We ended up just getting some pastries. The boat trip was uneventful. ~7 hours long, kind of boring - excellent weather though. That’s about it for Weihai. Stay tuned for Part 4: Dalian