Check in went very quickly in their humid, open lobby, and the ice tea they served helped keep us cooler. Our room was on a high floor (6) of building 6 facing the ocean and looking out over the Hilton’s playground and the back of the Marriott’s beautiful pool and grounds. (IMHO the Marriott grounds are much prettier at night than the Hilton. Very cool pool!) We loved our room. It was obviously brand new, had ample room, was well decorated, had comfy chairs on the balcony, a comfy bed, pillow menu… thumbs up! Huge massage menu too. We then went downstairs to explore when it began pouring rain – I mean a torrential downpour! Unfortunately their floors don’t have the proper angle to shed water away from the building so they hurriedly blocked some doors off with sandbags as well as parts of their front entrance porch. Some poor people stood out there sweeping water away from the building. The rain went away quickly and soon dried up.

I’ll summarize the next 36 hours as sleep, eat, rest, eat, sleep, etc. There are not too many places to eat in the area outside of hotels. Hilton has a broad breakfast buffet offering American, Continental and Asian options. Our first night we ate at the Marriott’s Indochine which was very good Vietnamese food. The second night we took a risk to eat at Fuguan Seafood, which is toward the bottom of Marriott’s exit driveway. DO NOT EAT AT FUGUAN SEAFOOD! As can be expected they tried to up-sell everything and push us to order expensive food. (“People say the Durian is good. You should try!” Uh, no, we happen to know what durian smells like!) The bad parts were: 1) Live ant in one of the food bowls which the waitress helpfully shooed away when I mentioned it. 2) Charging us for things we didn’t order. We counted the items so we knew it was wrong so we asked for a menu and matched prices to determine the extra charges. 3) Food poisoning. It was probably lighter for us because we’re pretty strong from living in Shanghai. 4) Most embarrassingly, we were taken by a typical scam: the fresh fish. After passing on the lobster and blowfish we chose some random fish from the tank. They put it in a plastic basket which they say had a tare weight of 0.3 later subtracted from the 1.9 total. 1.9 what you ask? Who knows! Anyway the charge ended up being 368rmb just for the fish (yup, $50) which we argued about and eventually threw a lower amount on the table and left.