Penglai

Wow, this is taking me a lot longer to do but I guess it's good in a way to space out my stories. So, we woke up and Gen helped us get on an early bus to Penglai. The bus was about 6 hours but not too bad of a trip because we got 3 seats together in the back so we had some room to put our stuff. Once we got to the small town we got off the bus in a daze. We waited around for someone to come up and offer us a ride like usually happens. But it wasn't happening so we walked over to a line of cabs and that started up the frenzy. The taxi drivers started showing us maps of tourist spots and saying that they would take us there. We tried to convey that we wanted to find an inexpensive place to stay. One driver seemed adamant that he could do the job so we let him take us. We passed some very nice looking hotels that appeared to have vineyards and I got the feeling that this wasn't going to be what we wanted. We turned down a side street and into a driveway. The hotel was empty, aside from the flies surround the black mold on the ceiling. We said no way to the over-priced and strange hotel. He wanted to take us somewhere else but I thought that we should just go back to the bus station to start over. So back we went and we ended up just walking towards the ocean and got ushered into a hotel by some women following us down the street. Most of the places near the ocean had a restaurant downstairs and some rooms upstairs and the one we stumbled into was run by all women. It took us a while to get the communication down and bargain for a room but we figured it out. That night we walked around down by the beach and tried to figure out what we should do for the next few days.

The next day we decided to go to the Penglai Pavilion because, well, we heard that that is what you do in Penglai. We paid more money than I thought I really wanted to to get into a complex of temples and sites up on a cliff over the ocean. It was really beautiful and kind of like a tourist amusement park of varying temples without any rides. Well there was a cable car but we walked instead. We saw a lot but didn't really know what anything was and just took a lot of pictures. Then after a while the questioning feeling kind of sunk in of whether or not this was an authentic site, or just how authentic it was. I get tired of being a tourist pretty fast so I was not exactly a patient and polite person for my poor friends to deal with but we managed. We did also get to see a Chinese music video being filmed along the walls of the cliff which was pretty hilarious. After deciding we had had enough and establishing that we were tired the mountain somehow became a maze designed to trap Americans. It was too funny to be scary so we just wandered aimlessly, finding many dead ends and pushing through shrubbery designed to keep people on the paths in order to get the hell out of there. That night we decided to brave some local seafood since we were on the ocean. We ordered the specialty which looked like huge stretched out shrimp, kind of a cross between a shrimp and a fish. That is also what they tasted like but we cut up our hands pretty good trying to peel off the prickly shells. We were excited to get to the island that we had heard of off the coast so we decided to get up early and go there the next morning. However, first we stumbled on a jewelry store specializing in pearls. So of course we all bought pearls and watched the lovely lady who gave us all a discount string our necklaces right in front of us. And then we left for Chang Dao.

(Again, sorry that this is taking me so long to post. I'm not good at journals but thought I would give the blogging a try... I'm not giving up yet though! Getting myself behind in all these posts has given me a new project to work on. Tune back in for more updates soon I promise!)