Avoid Qingdao at any cost...

Hello Readers,

We are moving north, and yesterday we started our day in Qingdao. This sounded like it had a lot of promise - beaches, German colonial architecture and the origin of TsingTao Beer! In other words a real pearl. But we saw more hookers than nice buildings. We were shocked by the state of the city, considering the Sailing part of Beijing 2008 will be hosted here.

Our experience was not enriched by the fact that we stayed in a room that can safely get the "Grottiest Hotel we've stayed in China" award! The first room got flooded by a faulty AC unit... We thought that was as bad as it was going to get, when in fact the next day the whole city got flooded, after a heavy rain storm.

From Qingdao we took a bus up to Yantai (also should be avoided!) Then a seven hour boat trip up to Dalian. We could only get "cattle class" tickets which meant that we shared an internal/windowless cabin with 20 other Chinese who liked to smoke a lot. This resulted in us camping outside our "cabin", armed with books, travel scrabble and instant noodles/coffee. Looking back, we make ourselves believe that it was in fact a pleasant trip...