The Merry Troubadour: Qingdao Midterm Break

***Written during my trip to China in Fall 2010***

Right now I am in the lounge of Kaiyue International Youth Hostel in Qingdao, China. Qingdao is a coastal city in between Tianjin and Shanghai known for its beaches and its beer. In fact, they sell Tsingtao (old spelling of Qingdao) beer in the States. Everywhere you go, you see tons of kegs of beer sitting on the streets outside of restaurants and little convenience shops. Our most recent discovery is beer in a bag. A little old Chinese woman who calls herself “Mama” (we have now dubbed her 'Mama Pijiu') has this tiny little store the size of a small walk-in closet from which she sells drinks, shampoo, ice cream, and cigarettes. She has a couple of kegs of beer outside and pours it into plastic bags, which she then weighs on a tiny scale to determine how much the beer costs. She then pokes a hole in the bags with a straw so you can sip as you walk. The real problem arrives if your bag breaks while you are walking.

The group with Mama Pijiu

The beaches here vary from dirty sand and cloudy water crowded with tons of people to beautiful light-sandy beaches with relatively clear water and fewer people. The latter is readily available to us a couple of blocks down from our hostel. Beach #6 is right next to the train station and a bus stop, and the boardwalk above it is crowded with vendors selling a sort of stale pita bread and fried squid on a stick. Lots of vendors have loud speakers and shout at you, trying to sell English-speaking tourists boat rides. There are also people dressed up as characters (i.e. sheep) from a Chinese animated children’s show called Xi-Yang-Yang. It’s funny because even though locals say “hello” whenever they see foreigners like us walk by, they really don’t know if we speak English, or where we are from in general, which is kind of comforting. I heard someone ask one of their friends if they thought I was French. My friend was asked if he was Australian. I’m glad that people don’t look at me and immediately know I’m form the States, though I don’t think being from the U.S. leaves the same negative impression here that it does in other countries, since people here seem to generally look up to the U.S.

Xi-Yang-Yang characters, Beach #6 in the background

On one of the first few days here, a couple of the guys in our group met this Chinese woman named Ping Ping who runs a business that helps Chinese students get into and study in universities in the States. She lives in Beijing but is currently in Qingdao on holiday, plus she grew up in Qingdao. She speaks English very fluently because her husband is American. She sort of took us under her wing since her nephew is trying to learn English and she wanted him to practice speaking with us. So on Monday we all met at the bus stop close to our hostel and hopped on the 2-hour-long #304 bus (standing the whole way!) to Laoshan, a beautiful mountain on the coast of Qingdao known for its fresh spring water and beautiful scenery. We all sort of wandered along part of the road until we came to a little pathway that took us down onto some cliffs above the water. We climbed the cliffs down to the water and sat there for a bit, which was very nice, and the views were spectacular. We then got lunch, which Ping Ping ordered for us since we have no idea what any of the characters for shellfish are, and sat on the beautiful sandy beach for a while. I collected some shells and the boys went swimming and then we caught the 2-hour bus back. The bus was so crowded on the way back that even though I was standing up I didn’t need to hold onto anything because there was no space for me to fall into. For dinner we went to a place run by a Chinese woman with HUGE hair, sort of like Marge from the Simpsons, but not blue. Our final dish was a whole fish cooked in some sort of sweet sauce. Two guys from a group of three other Americans that we have been hanging out with ate the eyes, which are supposed to be a delicacy here!

Cliffs we hung out on at Laoshan

Fish DEVOURED, no eyes left

Yesterday we got up even earlier (my alarm was set for 6:47!) and went to the same mountain again with Ping Ping and her nephew, but this time to a different side. We ended up at someone’s vacation home on a cliff on the mountain. It’s still unclear to me whose home it was, but it was one of Ping Ping’s friends. One of the men staying in it took us all fishing off the coast of the mountain in a little wooden boat. We didn’t catch very much, but the views were spectacular and it was a beautiful day to spend on the water. We came back to the house in the late afternoon and the family cooked us a feast of shellfish (I tried some very interesting looking creatures including some sort of very large sea snail in a beautiful shell the size of my fist! It was pretty gross.). We were then driven back to the hostel in a van (an eventful ride trying to sit on a stool in the the back of a car speeding down windy, rocky mountainsides), and I immediately crashed when we arrived home because I was so exhausted.