We are here

Arrived at Haikou on time. But the taxi driver at the airport tried to rip us off. I was ready to jump back out but Audrey used a very "strong" Mandarin tone. This guy tried not to use the meter than he was going to charge us a "return to airport empty car" fee. Since we were here just over 4 weeks ago, there was no such thing. I was too tired; otherwise, I would have taken down the licence plate and complain.

Sheraton is where we are staying. Even though in the grand scheme of things this hotel is of International standard; I preferred the Gloria Hotel we stayed about 4 weeks ago. The Sheraton looks nice and all; staff is exceptional friendly; but the room was a bit disappointing for the $ we are paying. Per night, it is about 5 times as much as the Gloria. We have an ocean view here and the CNN, the Bloomberg and various foreign TV channels. Some room details are not of the value. They are: the telephone receiver stints of bad breath from long uses; yuck. The air condition fan never works; we had it on all night and set to 18C, not even cooling down; good thing we have this ocean breeze. The floor, there are stints from previous visits, never cleaned up; the sink drain has a yellow stint ring around it; that just seemed ridiculous. The shower stall, as the Chinese goes, has yellow stinting toward the drain. Other than that, it's ok. Gloria Hotel, even though was a bit smaller, everything looks clean and in perfect functioning order. One night at Sheraton is about 3 nights at Gloria's. Well, the race begins and ends in Sheraton; so we pretty much have no choice but to stay here.

The restaurant for b'fast at the Sheraton seemed chaotic; no people were greeting us; we just walked in, found a table, ate and left; when we checked in, when we checked in, we were told we need to pay for b'fast; well, we couldn't even find someone to pay for that if there was no one doing the hostess thingy.