Back in Beijing

I'm back in Beijing from my little excursion to Qingdao. On our last night in Qingdao we decided to go down what's called 'Little Street' (I think) and get some eats. We saw this place where you get a big fondou looking heater thing which boils up water and you cook the food yourself. It looked like great fun so we gave it a shot. We had no idea what to do so it was the classic point and hope technique that has served us so well in the past. We first chose some innocent looking vegetables and got some beef. Easy as. Then the guy pointed to these strange shellfish monsters and we got those too. That turned out to be the funniest decision made yet!! Check out the picture below. Please if you know what that is, tell me.



We got three and they were delivered to us very much alive! The main problem was that it took an age for our burner to heat up to get the water to boiling temperature. In this time those creatures did not stay still. It was a great laugh and tasted good, although disappointingly they didn't hold much meat.

The next day we went back to the train station and went to Tianjin. It is on route to Beijing and the bullet train took about 5 hours, so quite far away. When we reached Tianjin we were going to walk to the hostel. The problem was that we were heavily flooded in. It's the first rain we've had on our travels... but there was a LOT of it. In the end we had to get a taxi there because it was simply impossible. We were drenched. We were trying to lug our bags about. And it was only 10RMB (that's 1 pound) to get a taxi to the hostel. The hostel was very basic and we set out pretty much immediately to wander Tianjin. The city itself, from what we saw, was very nice and quite cheap. We met a couple of Australians and went out for a really good dinner which worked out to be 2 pounds 50 each.

Today we have come back to Beijing. It is quite nice going back somewhere you've already been since you know where you are in relation to your surroundings. There are a couple of people we've met that are in Beijing as well so we can meet up with them again this week. That's about it for now. Keep an eye on my pictures as I will try and get more up when I can.