Dalian and Qingdao

More travelling to the travel blog, I just got back from my beach holiday to Dalian and Qingdao. I started off by taking the train to Dalian, it's about 1000 km or 10 hours from Beijing but should be more eco-friendly than flying. A lovely city by the seaside, Dalian happened to host the Summer Davos 2007 at the time, which was very much visible on the streets and one famed beach resort was closed due to the conference. The other beaches were open though so on to the water! The beaches weren't overly clean but up to the Chinese standard, and the many Russian tourists in Dalian made it sure I was generally taken as a Russian as well. I should learn more Russian so I could play with that a bit more...

Some say the blog is all about food, so here we come to the topic. Dalian seems to have two vegetarian restaurants -- the list provided by IVCB only carries one, the other was found randomly on the street. Tian Yuan (天缘素食店) was a tiny little place but relatively central, and the food quality wasn't remotely comparable to the fine vegetarian restaurants of Beijing or Shanghai, but it was edible and vegan. So edible, I guess, that my belt broke down while I was eating there! Perhaps that's only for the better, it was the last animal product I had in daily usage, given to me over 15 years ago when I wasn't vegan yet. Unfortunately there are no pictures in this blog entry because I only took pictures with my phone and lost it when leaving Qingdao.

The second vegetarian restaurant is one of three parts of a restaurant by a central hotel in Dalian, I don't have the address here but will update this entry with that later. The other parts are a regular Chinese restaurant and an Indian restaurant... actually it turned out the vegan food in the Indian restaurant was nicer than the one in the Chinese vegetarian, not to mention the nicer atmosphere and lower price. This place is considerably fancier than the street diner Tian Yuan, but the food wasn't much better and the vegetarian part was quite small. As people go to Dalian for seafood, they did provide a lot of mock alternatives.

From Dalian I took a boat to Yantai, a port city in Shandong province. This was a fast catamaran, the trip took a bit over 3 hours but I would suggest taking the slower boat instead: people weren't allowed on the deck during the ride, there was nothing onboard but seats, the windows were mostly too dirty to see through, and the seasick lady in front of me and the TV screaming dubbed Deep Blue Sea in far too high volume didn't make the ride any more comfortable. Yantai seemed to be a relatively dull industrial city, I had a small dinner there and jumped in a bus to Qingdao.

Qingdao, formerly romanized as Tsingtao, is the beer capital of China, but also famous for beaches. They did have a nice seaside walk, 40 km long, which I went through and of course made a stop at all the beaches passed for a swim. Beside the staring and comments (positive ones, but still) of the locals, all this shirtless walking also got me a mild sunburn, silly me I thought I wouldn't burn in the sun of northern China in September. The beaches were a bit nicer than those of Dalian, fine sand and the less central ones seemed quite clean, beaches 1 and 6 (they're numbered) were slightly dirtier and more crowded. With the lack of Russian tourists the beaches were filled with Chinese men; it seems very few Chinese women go to beaches. One odd thing to see at the seaside were newlyweds having their wedding photos taken by the sea. There were dozens of them, going knee-deep in the water in their wedding dresses! Unfortunately, again, the pictures were lost.

Qingdao seems to have only one vegetarian restaurant, at least in the list and I didn't see any others either. This one is quite far from the city centre or the seaside, and while the atmosphere and service were friendly and nice, I'm afraid the food quality wasn't any better than in Dalian. Overall these two cities do provide nice places to swim and veg*an people can certainly survive there, but don't expect culinary delights from such a trip. In that sense it was a happy return to Beijing, although the blue skies now seem a distant dream again. Oh, and I did get a replacement SIM card already with the same number, and the phone was provided by the company anyway so the only real loss were the pictures. The phone must have fallen out of my pocket as I was running for the bus back to Beijing. A bus with beds, never seen one of those before, but it was a reasonable ride, although the beds were a bit short and narrow for me, made for the slightly smaller Chinese people I assume. Ah, and note that Qingdao is confusing with railway stations right now, perhaps the proper one will be repaired by the Olympics but right now the one in use is Sifang station quite far from the centre and not knowing this had me going to the wrong place and almost late from the bus back (which would be why I was running). Next off to Zhangjiajie in a couple of hours, about that later...