Yantai

Jamie left China on a Thursday morning, and Rory and I found out Thursday evening that we didn't have to teach on Friday cause the kids were taking tests. Our weeklong vacation started on Monday, too, so we were basically being handed 10 days off, right after I'd already been off most of the week hanging out with Jamie. I'll take it!

We decided to head to Yantai. It's only an hour away from Weihai--when we flew to China, we flew into Yantai, but that's the only time we'd ever been there. I don't know what I was expecting when we went--perhaps something about as big as Weihai? I don't know. Our school is located by the Yanwei Expressway, so we headed down the street a little ways, and the first minibus we saw was going to Yantai. Okay, easy enough. For less than it costs to get downtown in a taxi, we were headed to a different city an hour away. I think we waited around for maybe 10 minutes before we left. So far so good.

As we pulled into town, we drove past a Super 8 motel that seemed to be right in the middle of everything that we wanted to do. I was struck by how much bigger this place was than Weihai. I guess, technically, it's about three times as big. Our city suddenly seemed really small, especially because such a big city is only an hour away. We checked into the hotel and then went to Pizza Hut. It was awesome, and it wasn't difficult to communicate at all. I don't even think we bought a map the whole time we were there, and that's usually the first thing we do when traveling to any city.

The best way to describe the trip to Yantai is to say that we went on a tour de different foods we can't get in Weihai. We didn't see any historic sites (don't know if there are any), but we ate at a French restaurant, a place called Jackie's that actually had cheese, some pretty subpar hotpot place and Pizza Hut. We also went to a few bars and saw more Westerners in one bar(than we care to) than there are in all of Weihai. And then we came back to Daguanghua as easily as we went.