As I wrote in my previous post, my winter vacation started with a flight to Qingdao. My first impression of the city was small surprise, I got surprised how much there were construction sites all over the city. And they weren’t building few small houses, but lots and lots of tall skyscrapers. Clearly this is fast growing city.

As previously mentioned reasons, I was tired when I checked in to the hostel and after getting into my room, despite it was cold, I just relaxed on my bed and got a good long nap. After waking up, I took my camera and walked around neighborhood a little bit, but only to discover soon that weather in Qingdao was really cold at this time, specially the wind was really strong and made weather even colder than it actually was. So I was quickly back to my hostel where the New Year party had started already, so I stayed in hostel, enjoyed free food, good Tsingtao beer and nice company. I met many nice people who stayed also in the same hostel all over the world - though amazing amount of guests were from Korea, in the party at least half of the people were coming from Korea and mostly they were English teachers there. Well, it was nice to share some experiences…

Next day wasn’t any better for sightseeing as my New Year celebration got little bit longer and I was sleeping long on the next day. It wasn’t until in the evening when I got out with my friend to find nice restaurant to have a dinner. Our choice was a neighborhood that was recommended by hostel reception, and we took nice looking restaurant and had hotpot.

Hotpot was Beijing style, looked nice and had traditional coals to make stuff hot, but the part where the food was were shallow and deep, making it quite difficult to find food with chopsticks. In the end I managed to find though all mutton pieces and clams. And have to admit, that was good dinner. Chinese hotpot is just great, specially when it is cold outside.

After dinner we walked a little bit in the neighborhood but as it was getting late and weather was still cold, we headed back to hostel. There was second day of new year celebration, but I skipped this day as I felt tired and was just relaxing in my room. At this point I started to really realize that hostel dorm rooms were not so good as although AC has been on in my room all the time, it was still freezing near the floor. In my bed, which was directly opposite of AC, it was somewhat warm, but bed felt still cold. Partially. But also while in bed, it was sometimes little bit too warm as AC was blowing directly into my bed (as I set it to do so though).