What a guy. He’s just so… rude and annoying. We don’t trust him because he lied to us (by telling us we’d be based in Yan tai city (not Nanshan) and that we’d have a full induction at the school (which definitely didn’t happen) and other things besides.)
So when we arrived Jack was there, and we asked him to take us to our hotel. We had booked it on Elong which is a trustworthy website – we’ve used it before. But he told us we needed to cancel our reservation because the hotel was in a bad location and it was too expensive (remembering that we were paying for it anyway so it made no difference to him.) It was a motel 168 which is a little more expensive than a Home Inn or Hastings, but for two people sharing a room its pretty good value. So, we pretty much told him to push off and that we’d be keeping our reservation.
We think that he was so keen to get us to stay at one of his crappy hotels because he has some deal there where he makes money out of it. So yeah, his hotels are cheaper, but they’re also disgusting and crawling with bugs and have nasty stains on the bed sheets – thanks but… no thanks! So we checked into our hotel, and Simone booked a room there too, which Jack was quietly furious about. He kept bringing it up and again and again, pointing out other hotels where the room would have been cheaper, and saying how bad the location of our hotel was (which was a total lie – the location was excellent, only a 15 minute walk from the beach, museums, bars…)
He was quite helpful with getting the train tickets we needed – we could have done it ourselves but it was nice of him to help. However, he did that thing where he didn’t ask us anything, just decided for us and treated us like children. For example, he took us to the Yantai museum and he didn’t even ask if we wanted to go there. I thought he was driving us from the train station to the hotel, that’s all we asked him to do, but on the way he made us get out at the museum. Once there, he didn’t show us around or anything, he just left us there while he read a book. Later, we had plans for dinner, but Jack insisted on driving us all the way out of town to the University where he has some deal, and bought us dinner. He made a big thing out of it but it was just like a school cafeteria, nothing special. The food was quite nice, better than the food in Nanshan by at least a hundred times, but still, it was all a bit weird. As soon as he finished eating, he ran out to wait for us in the car while we ate, then he had us pose for photos around the university.
Eventually we managed to get him to take us back to the hotel and we got rid of him. He indicated that he wanted to continue the ‘fun tour’ and also take us out the next day. We were quite blunt with him in the end and said we didn’t want to see him the next day – we were absolutely sick of the sight of him and so happy we’d never see him again!
So after Jack had finally left us we escaped to ‘bar street’ and had a few drinks. We spent quite a long time in ‘Raffels’ bar, where the landlord Eric was very pleased to see us and we played darts and foosball and chatted to two Norwegian Oil rig workers until almost midnight. After that late night we didn’t get up early the next day, but we still packed a lot in.
We walked down to the seafront with Simone, which was bustling and busy with people, it being May 1st and so lots of people had the day off work. There were people on roller skates and skateboards, kids flying kites, people fishing and families meeting up… a really nice atmosphere.
It was also boiling hot and sunny. We strolled along the seafront and met up with Lily, a Chinese friend of Simone’s who just moved to Yantai to work at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. We took a walk through some of the back streets there that were steeped in history – old colonial style buildings standing out against the modern Chinese structures.
We tried one of the snack stalls at the end of bar street – Taiwan friend yoghurt. She had little cubes of set yoghurt (which was actually more like milk with flour in to make it set) in a variety of flavours. Each stick had four or five cubes on, which were then dipped in batter and deep friend. After that she painted a layer of condensed milk on top. They were lush – the inside was all creamy and delicious, a great snack. For lunch Sasha, Simone and Lily had Mala Tang from a street-side stall and I got a few sticks of BBQ – a circle of sweetcorn bread, a large squid and some fish which were flat, chewy and sweet. Not sure what kind of fish but I always think that they taste a bit like mackerel. After that I had a stick of fresh pineapple which was very sweet and fresh.
In the afternoon we went to the Chang Yu Wine museum. 50 Yuan entry but that included a free taste of red and white wine down in the wine cellars, plus a 110 ml bottle of Chang Yu brandy.
The wine museum was quite interesting. Most of it had English captions. The wine cellar was the best – it stank of wine, a fruity, intoxicating, heavy scent of sweet red wine. There were barrels of all sizes and walls lined with dusty bottles. Most of all it was nice to escape to the cool of the cellar and get out of the midday heat.
We went back to the hotel then for a rest and then in the evening went for the long dreamed of outing to Pizza Hut. I don’t even like Pizza Hut very much, but the whole time I was in Nanshan, with the terrible food, I dreamt of Pizza Hut. We ordered entirely too much food and I felt pretty sick afterwards, and my stomach was certainly paying the price afterwards. Don’t think I’ll eat Pizza Hut again for years now – not until I’m stuck somewhere else where the food is hellish and I’m driven to it!
We took a walk along the seafront by Number 2 Beach to walk off some of the food, and then back to the hotel. So that’s Yantai in a nutshell. It seems like quite an interesting place. A lot of history there. I think it was the first port to open to the West, and at one time I had all the trade with foreign counties. But then Shanghai opened up and developed and eventually took over. The British Embassy moved from Yantai to Shanghai and the little seaside town went back to being nothing really. It has some old churches that were the first in China, and a hospital that was set up by French missionaries. It’s still in use, though I don’t think there’s much of a French influence these days.
After our short break in Yan Tai we took the train to Ji Nan, an 8 hour journey and our first major train travel experience. The tickets were great value – 80 RMB for a seat so it works out about £1 an hour for travel. The train was a K train, which is one of the old style trains so it went quite slowly and was all clunky and rattling. There were four or six seats to a table, not much leg room but the windows were nice and big. The seats were a little uncomfortable and the toilets on board were… pretty primitive! Just a squat toilet with the hole opening out onto the track.
On the journey the landscape was really interesting – it changed as we went along too. Lots of farmland – at first it was all apple orchards (Yan Tai is famous for its apples, as is Shan Dong province in general) but those soon gave way to other crops. It was a very windy day, and occasionally there would be all sorts of rubbish flying by the train windows, caught on the breeze. There was rubbish all over the place really – gathered in clumps in the streams and creeks, and piled in lumps at the edges of fields. The low, tumble down buildings gave way to small farms and built up areas, with machines at work. I saw magpies everywhere – lined up on telephone wires or groups of 8 or more sitting amongst the crops.
Some of my sketches from the journey (I'm no artist so, be warned! haha)
By the end of the journey I had a sore back and a sore arse, but even after 8 hours on the train I wasn’t bored once. I took up a lot of time writing about and sketching what I saw out the window, doing cross stitch, reading, and of course just staring out the window and watching the world go by. We spent a good while chomping our way through the prodigious amount of snacks we brought with us, and chatting to the Chinese people sitting nearby, who were all very interested in us. Pulling into the last leg of the journey, the scene out the window was dramatically altered from what it was at the beginning. Much more built up, dozens of motorways, high rise buildings and tower blocks. A few years ago, I guess that none of this was here. In another 10 years things will have changed even more, with the last of these tumble-down houses crumbled to dust, and old farmland converted into cities of skyscrapers, probably just as empty and unoccupied as those buildings are these days.
So there’s a short introduction to Yan Tai, next on the list of travel diaries to write up – our visit to Jinan. Zàijiàn xxx
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