Liúgōng Island (劉公島)

So, getting to our tourist island was an adventure all by itself. We told our taxi driver that we wanted to go to Liúgōng Island and to take us to the docks. When he mentioned that he has a 'friend', a few alarm bells went off. There was a lot of being scared of his driving, and him screaming into a telephone. We got rushed out of the taxi into a ticket stand. Money was consumed and then we were escorted at a running pace across the street, into the terminal, where we promptly got our ticket and rushed into a waiting room for the next 15 minutes.
Why did we have to yell and run again?

The visibility didn't improve much from yesterday, but at least we got a nice measure today. Which was: when we were between Weihai and the island, we were able to barely make out some outlines of both the island and Weihai. Looking at my maps, the distance is about 4km in total, making about 2km visibility of where you could see something.

But the island had pandas, two of them. The way the somewhat overweight creatures walked around, the folds in the fur looked a bit like the person on duty today got a slightly too big a suit. And considering the pictures around the pen where they showed that cubs are transported and measured by people actually donning Panda suits, we started to get very sceptical.
But it was also a very sad display. You could see the Panda's trying to climb out, and react to the noisy kids. As it's not exactly tourist season weather, there was usually only one noisy kid at a time, but the Panda pens were actually enclosed in three rings of different level platforms, kind of showing just how insane some of the tourist numbers to this island can get.

The evening was spent at a restaurant where they actually cook the food in the middle of your table (students: don't forget your notebooks), and we saw Interstellar in a student cinema (with a nice big screen but unfortunately the speakers didn't quite hold up to scratch). All in all, a nice Saturday.