National Day Holiday - Part 2 - Qingdao

I flew to Qingdao (a city in Shandong Province on the east coast of China; home of Tsingtao Beer) on Monday morning, October 1, 2004. Melanie flew in the night before with another friend from Shanghai (she was in Shanghai for a week to attend the F1 race). I took the airport shuttle into the city. On the way from the airport, I noticed a few things: * Qingdao has a fairly large Korean population. About 1-2 Km of road just outside of the airport (on the way to the city) are lined with Korean shops and restaurants. Not surprising, I suppose, as Qingdao is just a ferry ride away. * Qingdao people are worse drivers than Beijing. Maybe because the roads don’t have the divider fences like Beijing has; Qingdao drivers use the opposite lane to pass liberally, regardless of the double line markers. My favorite is when the on-coming car passes another car into our lane neglecting the fact that we are a big bus and only a few hundred meters away. Once we arrived in the city (as with many cities, the airport is quite a bit a ways out of the city, ~18Km), Qingdao immediately struck me as a well-planned and well-managed city. Even though the city isn’t grid-like like Beijing, it was easy to find your way to places and the public transportation was excellent. We spent the first (half) day of being in Qingdao walking around – checking out the old Granite Castle build by a Russian in the 1930’s which is now (sadly) a popular wedding photo backdrop for the local newly-weds. Most of the “visitors” to this site were newly weds and their entourage of photographers and family members wishing they were someplace else. Seeing all these people getting similar photos taken makes me think that you could see virtually any wedding album in Qingdao, all photos would be the same between each album except the bride and groom would be different. Not too exciting - people should think *originality*. New concept, I know… We also checked out the city lighthouse, got ripped off at the Naval Museum by our petty cab driver giving us wrong information, and saw the *must-see* Qingdao pagoda (not sure of the name, but it is the pagoda off the shore that is on all the Tsingtao beer bottles. I have read some places that it is considered the “image” of the city.. That night we had a good seafood meal that consisted of mussels, clams, crab, etc.. Very good and cheap. The second day (October 2), we did even more walking in the downtown area. We ended up having lunch at this “grill”-type restaurant at the city Parkson’s department store. Not very good. They had a “western”-style food section of the menu, but everything was cooked with heavy Chinese influence and presented on a sizzling iron plate. At the table next to us, 3 people sat down - a mother, a teenager, and a young child. The young child seemed to be fine for the first few minutes of the meal, but then she left the table (to go to the restroom I assume) and came back crying! You kept crying. The mother didn’t see to do much about it. I **hate** crying babies. She eventually calmed down, but proceeded to have quite an interest in the only (noticeable) foreigner in the restaurant: me. Never seen one of us, I guess. Following lunch, we hopped on a bus, 20-30 minutes and 1 RMB later, we ended up on the other side of town at a very wide and decent beach. We spent 1-2 hours at the beach, enjoying waiting in the water and relaxing on the sand. We even attempted to have a rest at one of the beach tables, but we were asked to pay 15 RMB. No thank you. That night we had dinner at an outdoor night market - meat and veggie skewers, noodles, jian bing, etc.. Very good stuff and cheap. Even looked at some of the stuff in the night market; I bought a small 5 RMB souvenir then arrived in Beijing broken. Go figure. Day 3 (October 3) we got an early start to the long distance bus station to set out for Weihai, on the northern coast of Shandong Province. Unfortunately, the earliest we could go was 10AM. There was a KFC sign in front of the bus station, so we decided to have a second breakfast (our first breakfast was at the hotel). Of course, there was no direction markers on the KFC sign, so we weren’t exactly sure where to go as KFC wasn’t visible. By asking around, we eventually found it - about a half a kilometer down the road… Nice marketing tool, I must say - don’t say how far you are otherwise people may not decide to go! Stay tuned for Part 3: Weihai