I had wanted to have a really nice relaxing weekend, so I had my friend Leo help me pick a modern luxurious hotel instead of something more economical. He said that the 船舶丽湾大酒店 (chuánbó lí wān dà jiǔdiàn), a four star hotel that was near the beach in the center of the city, that was recently built and had nice facilities. It cost around 500RMB a night ($63 US) for a big one bedroom suite with a large separate living room, huge bathroom, excellent view, and breakfast for two. The room was not ultra-ultra-luxurious, but definitely at the top end of the scale, and met my desires for the weekend.

I had read that Chinese hotels were a bit different from western hotels in terms of their blatant solicitation of sexual services. I figured, however, that they might have been a bit more discreet considering that I was in an upper class hotel with my girlfriend. This was not the case. The pouch with our room keys had two coupons for massage, with a picture of a girl in sexy lingerie. I wonder what kind of massage that is . Then every night at around 10pm, we would get a call from a girl with a sexy voice asking if we “needed” a sexy massage.

The breakfast at the restaurant on the top floor of the hotel was quite good, complete with western cereal which I had been craving for a while, and Jello. The hotel’s location was great, and the in-room amenities were more than acceptable. I would not hesitate in recommending the hotel to others, but would advise looking around as the room seemed a bit expensive for what we got.

One last thing that I found funny was that since China is for the most part an all cash country, instead of putting a credit card on file to cover the room, they insisted on a cash deposit of around 800RMB ($100 US) to cover the room.