Oh we do like to be beside......

Trip Start Jul 18, 2006
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Trip End Jul 17, 2007


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Sunday, August 13, 2006

After climbing a mountain and gauranteeing our long life we decided we needed a bit of r & r as well as a scope on potential retirement locations. With this in mind we enjoyed a lovely train ride to Yantai, no air con and no seats (some did become available) made you think that the further you get away from the main cities, the more luxurious things get! After 8 hours we arrived. The hotel we wanted, ie the cheapest one in town, was fully booked, so we used our contacts to source a new place. Our contact was some Chinese student called Alexander, who is now our friend (although when he found out we were leaving on Monday and wouldn't be in a position to buy his tour he scarpered pretty sharpish, for shame, that's not what friends are for). To be honest, we kind of wish he hadn't helped us find our lovely hotel, as the shower is disgusting, the toilet doesn't work (Aaron found this out after leaving turdzilla down there) and Aaron had a poor nights' sleep after dreaming the beds had caterpillers in them. Beth is impressed witht the two tone paint effect, half green half brown thanks to mould. Anyhow, that wasn't what we came here for. The town itself is pretty poor but the seafront is lovely, it's recently been renovated and is a really nice walk. We had a totally bizarre meal on the first night in a Korean restaurant which had loads of chicken skin and cold soup, yum yum.
On the morning of our second day we were awoken by a knock on the door, "are you ready?" what the??? It was bloody Alexander trying to hawk tours first thing in the morning, curse our friends. Beth dealt with him in awesome style by just saying "bye" and closing the door leaving him waving on the other side. We went to the beach, which was pretty small and smelly, there was seaweed galore (still finding it in our bags now) and when we were having a good old splash and playing with the beach ball, as you do, the Chinese people were all watching, which was a bit offputting. In the evening we finally got some street food that wasn't awful or expensive (we love it, when a Chinese person sees a western face the little dollar signs pop up in their eyes and what would be 1yen to a Chinese person would be 50 yen to us, and that's an actual example of the markup they've tried to use on us!), meat on a stick with tasty bread to go with it. When we were walking down the seafront at night we were amazed to see that more people were using the beach at night than during the day, it was great, people had picnics and were swimming, the whole nine yards, but it was night!! Aaron also got a massage from some guy on the seafront (it didn't sound dodgy until we wrote it) and he must have been a butcher during the day as he was trying to tenderise my back. We finished the evening off by finding ways to flush the toilet in the room, how romantic.
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