China - Day 23

Today was our first full day here in QingDao! We had a really good time here. All the stuff here sort of makes us want to stay longer. We didn't do any real touring today, and may never get to that with all of the shopping you can do, but I think we will tour around tomorrow. I don't know when we left the hotel, but it was late morning. The hotel we are staying at is a little ways outside the downtown area, about a 15 yuan taxi ride. I'm sure that means nothing to most everyone who is reading this, but that is a journey under 10 kilometers.
To give a quick summary of our day. We went to the train station to buy our tickets to get back to Beijing, we had lunch at a hotel restaurant, walked along the beach, and went to a mall market.

We are not going to stay long in QingDao. So, the first thing we had to do today was get train tickets for our journey back to Beijing. We are going to take the high speed train back. The journey will still be 6 hours I think. Nothing much exciting happened when getting the train tickets, we got them and paid without a hitch. So, the next thing to do was get some food.

Lunch, that is when a vacation day should start. Ours started pretty close to lunch time, one of the few that have. We first looked around right next to the train station for food, but could not find anywhere to eat. The first place we looked at smelled like fish, and my parents could not stand it. The second place we went smelled like smoke, and none of us liked it. So, we took a walk around, having no idea where we were going. Most of our long walks start out that way...

My dad always says that we are "exploring." That means we are walking around aimlessly, with absolutely no idea of where we are going. This walk did not last that long though, we ended up on the beachfront road. We found a nice looking hotel named, appropriately, "California Vogue." So, today we had lunch in the "California Kitchen," as the restaurant was named. Imagine that, we fly across the Pacific Ocean to eat in a California Kitchen. Tourists...

The place was very nice though, it's named after California after all. It was very clean, and we were pretty much the only people in the place. That wasn't because the food was bad though, that's how all hotel restaurants are. Anyway, we had a nice lunch there. The restaurant overlooked the ocean, and the meal cost under 13 dollars US. Where else can you get such a deal?

There was even a wedding going on upstairs. We didn't go up there, but the MC was pretty awesome. I couldn't understand a word he said, but he sounded pretty cool. So, we had a nice back beat while we had lunch. After lunch we walked across the street to the beach.

The beach is not something like Hawaii. It was really interesting. There was about 100 feet of dry sand, but the rest of the beach was all wet from the tide. About half of the beach was a rocky area. The tide comes up really far on the beach. We took some pictures there, and Danny got a little net to catch stuff in the little tide pools around the rocks. All we found were little crabs. Some crabs that people found were a few inches across, but the ones we got were around the size of a quarter.

There were lots of sellers on the beach. They would just set out a towel and put all sorts of shell, rocks, and pearls on them to sell. My mom and Katherine ended up buying a few pearl necklaces there. Since they were a little expensive, comparatively, they did not buy many. So, we walked around on the beach for a while, and then went off to the mall market place thing.

What we were really going for was the pearl market. There was one building that had, I think, four levels. Two above ground and two below. One the first floor though, there where watches, leather belts and wallets, and pearls. There were lots of pearls. The way the Chinese malls seem to work is that there are just lots of little stalls, which are operated by different people.

This is the place to get all of the knock of names brands for really cheap. I may have to pick up a Rolex or something. Anyway, my mom and Katherine were more interested in the pearls. At these markets you can get strands of imperfect pearls for pretty cheap. So, my mom spent all her time at one stand bargaining and buying. That occupied the rest of our day. We just looked around for things. We may go back tomorrow.

Tomorrow, my mom says, we are going to church, and then going to do more shopping. Well, I don't know if that is all we are going to do, but that will probably occupy a lot of our time.

I should also mention that we checked into the wrong part of our hotel last night. I guess there are two different parts to the hotel we are staying at. One is a 3 star, and the other is a 4. We were supposed to be in the 4 star part, but got put in the 3 star part due to the desk clerk not knowing what was going on. In any case, we are know staying in two great rooms that are overlooking the ocean. Well, part of a yacht club is in the view, but who cares?

Each of the rooms is a two bed room with a flat panel TV and computer. You would not believe the change from the other room. It is like night and day, or should I say sky and ground since we are in China. It is much nicer now that we got the right rooms though. Now, instead of waiting for the minutes to pass until we can go, we are wanting to stay in the rooms for half the day.
-Aaron

There are some more pictures on the album.

This is us getting train tickets. That big board is how everyone finds out what train they need to take.

From China Day 23

What? We came all the way to China to see this? I think the real one is better.

From China Day 23

I guess you don't really need the rest of it above ground...

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Part of the beach. I have a whole panorama on the album.

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Well, we wouldn't be tourists if we didn't get our picture.

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With almost all of the beach wet, there were some neat reflections.

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The rocky section of the beach.

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One of the "towel" vendors.

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One of the guys there had this cute puppy. It made me smile :)

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There were lots of vendors up on the pavement.

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This is inside the mall market. This is part of one walkway out of the 30 or so on this floor. Almost every one of these stalls was selling pearls.

From China Day 23

These are how the sellers get their pearls. They just have these huge bags of pearls. Each one of those layers is a conglomeration of 60 or so pearls strands, each having a 100 or so pearls.

From China Day 23

The sunset.

From China Day 23