Tianjin Is Hell

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What a living nightmare! We went to the train station in Beijing at 8 in the morning because everyone told us there were hourly trains to Tianjin, there were, all full! Chinese Labour Day week long holiday, can I? We got a ticket for the 14:15 train which only took an hour, and it gave us time to set this up, so it wasn`t too bad. The train, by the way, air-conditioned, fast, clean, lots of leg room, swivel-reclining seats, and all for 2 English Pounds. Make's you realise how much we're being ripped-off! Anyway, that was ok, but when we got to Tianjin, oh dear! Nightmare! We were swarmed by taxi touts at the train station (we`ve learned to only get cabs on the meter, there were none), and ended up paying over the odds for the taxi ride from hell. We showed her where to go on the map, but when we got near she couldn`t find it, so we showed her again and she started ranting some undecipherable shit at me. Obviously we couldn`t understand but she kept talking to me anyway. We stopped at a hotel to see if they spoke English or had rooms - neither! When we finally arrived at the University, and after walking about a mile with the packs on, they told us "no rooms, no rooms!" I phoned all the hotels in Lonely Planet and not one had a room, so we decided to skip Tianjin and go to Qingdao. We got to the west train station and it was rammed, absolutely rammed (Chinese holiday), and we had no idea how to ask for the window that sold tickets to Qingdao. We waited in a huge queue not even knowing if it was the right one, and after about an hour the staff there decided to take a 40 minute break! We were well pissed off. We left the station thinking we might have to rough it for the night in the dodgiest part of town, but I tried one more hotel, the expensive Sheraton, which had a room. After negotiating that we wanted a ride with the meter on, with about 10 touts all grabbing my map, we set off on our winding, long winded taxi journey back through Tianjin. When we got to the hotel though, the weight off was heaven..... I can't really write anymore bad stuff about Tianjin because we never really saw it well, and I think we were a bit unlucky with it being the holiday, and after all, it's our fault we can't speak Chinese, not theirs.

What a living nightmare!