It's all about the beer
Trip Start
Dec 30, 2006
1
10
15
Trip End
Feb 08, 2007
Qingdao, China
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
I could imagine Qingdao is very beautiful in Summer, with the beaches, parks and beer. But this was winter so we had to make the most of it.
Supposedly China's Switzerland, Qingdao has a German influence it was nice to see some different architecture and nice landscaping.
Our arrival to Qingdao wasn't without incident, after spending most of the day on the bus from Qufu, we arrive at a bus stop out of town in the middle of no where really. So we look at the map, most of the things were down near the train station, so we jumped on another bus and headed to it.
But when we arrived, something was a miss...this was a train station, but that meant the beach should be only a block away and there should be hotels everywhere....nothing..?!!! What is going on. We set out on foot, for I am not sure where got kinda more lost than we already were. Finally we jump in a taxi, and head to the "train station!". We arrived at a construction site and a big sign "renovations underway for the 2008 Olympics"...of course we should have known. Turns out that they are hosting the rowing/sailing events there.
We found a bargain of a hotel with one of the nicest owners, he didn't speak a word of English, but you could just tell.
We settled in and Nic took a shower....then had to swim out of the bathroom, it had to happen one of these days, but Nic had flooded the bathroom. It wasn't all her fault the shower drain was uphill???? all the laws of physics in the world would have to break for that shower to drain. We cleaned it up to the best of our ability and went to get the nice man, with smile on his face (maybe this had happened before) we changed rooms and that was that.
We took a walk on the pier and along the water. The days we were there were really hazy, so we didn't bother going up the tower for sightseeing.
Walking around the streets we stumbled into a 'tea-store', so we ask the guy if they had black tea and if we could get one. He spoke great English and proceeded to do lot's of fancy tea ceremony stuff chat to us, offer us biscuits and just be ( what we saw as) genuinely nice, so it came to paying, we expected it to be a bit (to put things in perspective our private double room was 50 yuan a night ($8) ), so when he asked for 100 yuan ($16)...we were in shock and maybe it was something in the tea, but we didn't argue got outside and felt completely RIPPED OFF ! We had worked so hard up till now to try not to get ripped off, but the second you put your guard down it happens and that is one of the most unfortunate things about China. I (Nic) take responsibility for this while it was a nice experience, it is always important to ask first what things cost, and in this case it wasn't a language barrier thing...it was just ignorance.
That was a bit of a dampener, but the rest of the day could only get better. We headed to "Beer street", near the brewery and had a great dinner and beers. Including jugs of Qingdao beer for 6 yuan ($1)...compare that to the tea, since when is beer cheaper than tea?
Being in Qingdao, a place famous for beer, one must make mention of the fact that the beer in China is great and cheap, but they mostly drink it warm which is a real bummer, but this could of had to do with it being winter. Though I guess this love of China beer stems from the fact that Korean beer taste like watered down XXXX that is, crap.
Other stops in Qingdao were a big Catholic Church, we hadn't been in one of those for a while, and we went across town to another Russian restaurant.
This is where I had to part ways with Matt and return to Korea to teach a week long winter camp while Matt had time to continue on towards Shanghai.
