A Grey Day At The Beach
Trip Start
Feb 04, 2007
1
28
107
Trip End
Mar 09, 2008
Qingdao,
China
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
The place is famous for being a beautiful beach town and also for being the home of the Tsingtao Brewery - opened in 1903 under German administration. In fact Germany turned the place into a huge port under its 99 year rule from what was once a sleepy fishing village (or so I've read).
After a luxurious train ride (automatic motion sensor soap dispenser and water dispensers and a WESTERN toilet on the train - not a squat. Hurray!), I began to question why my ticket said that the train was going to 'Sifang' and not Qingdao (where my accommodation was booked). [Sifang does not exist in my Lonely Planet].
I began to feel completely desperate when I found a lady conductor who spoke no English and began my act by holding up my train ticket and saying "Beijing!..... Sifang!...... Qingdao??.... Qingdao??" It didn't work. She seemed unimpressed and walked off. I looked out the window thinking - 'oh well, I hope Sifang is nice 'cause it looks like I'm going there'.
In fact, it wasn't until I got off the train and saw a giant poster at the station which read 'Qingdao: 'Home Of The Host City For The 29th Olympic Sailing Regatta in 2008' that I knew where I was. This poster illicited the type of jubilation in me that I'm sure China Tourism hopes every tourist will feel - but for entirely the wrong reasons.
[I must just add that I am writing this as the Back Street Boys plays again way too loudly in this gaming parlour... what is it about the Chinese and their obsession with this band?]
So anyway, I alight the train to below zero degree weather, a furious black sky and a ferocious storm brewing - all at 2pm. Wasn't I ecstatic that I chose to come to a beach town seemingly in the middle of their winter. Perhaps I should have given this more thought?
I was furiously poreing over my map trying to determine my whereabouts when I heard loud screams. A moment later the Lonely Planet was knocked out of my hand and my leg had been slapped. A huge gust of wind had uprooted a phone booth from the concrete and blown it over with a huge crash (all within a millimetre of where I stood). Suddenly a million people were around gasping, staring and screaming. I put my hands up and said "I'm OK, I'm OK" not too sure if they were screaming about my near-miss or the fact that now they would have to walk further to make calls. One man walked up to me and said 'so-wee' which I thought was very touching as he had nothing to do with it, but just wanted to make sure I knew that this was unintentional. [I walked to the other side of the phone booth and saw contorted steel cables and bursting concrete flooring and thought 'wow, if I'm not supposed to be here, someone please send me a sign'].
I allowed myself to be touted into a cheap hotel (because the tout helped me buy a return train ticket and also because it was a third of the price of my booked accomodation - in Golden Week!). Lets just say that I survived 24hrs in that room. My complaint that the tap was not delivering water meant that while I was out, they removed the taps, pipes and half the sink and left muddy (well I hoped it was mud), stinky puddles and a limited facility for ongoing hygiene.
We thought we would need to pre-book accomodation while China was undergoing 'Golden Week'. The Lonely Planet says avoid China at all costs during this week long holiday as everything is closed. Every single day that I have been in Qingdao a tout has approached me offering cheaper and still cheaper accomodation. I have taken a look at a few and seen large hotels with numerous empty rooms - but moreso I have gone just to observe that all the touts have the same shiny, red laminated brochure of a nice-looking hotel which is actually nothing like the hotels they lead me to. I suppose it gets the tourists in. Heck, it worked on me.
I met a guy from Shanghai on my first day who is still the only person who I have seen who has spoken any semblance of English in the 3 days I have been here. He was just finishing his holiday with his sister and seemed incredibly excited to see me. He said 'in Qingdao people don't speak any English' and 'Amazing! I can't believe it! You are Super Girl for coming alone. So amazing! I can't believe this'. I would be lying if I said it didn't make me a tad nervous.
He spoke fondly of the beaches and how this was such an amazing place, 'so special!'. I tried to ask 'in the week you have been here, have you swum at all? It is too cold, yes?' and he replied "yes, yes, but you can walk beach, dinner the seafoods" and then mimed throwing pebbles into a lake: "Very interesting!". "Great" I thought. Just how I wanted to spend my next few days.
He spoketh the truth. There is absolutely zero English here in Qingdao. Neither of my hotels have had English names (usually the business card has both names). This all meant that I have had to pay particular attention to where I live so that I can return home safely at the end of the day. Those who know me well would also know that geography and, erm, not getting lost, is not exactly my strong suit. [And this is when the street signs are in English....]
For sport I have been passing the time trying to determine what each shop front represents by peering in windows and seeing what pictures/posters present themselves. A lot of the time I leave with absolutely no idea. Its a lot harder than you'd think.
This lack of English has not stopped people talking to me nor trying to sell me things. People run up to me and call out "HELLO!!!" and I'll stop and respond (eager to be polite). But that's the extent of their English and my Mandarin is just as bad. So then they will say something to me in Mandarin and I will try sooo hard to understand what they are saying to me by looking for expressiveness in their eyes - but usually this ends in diddly. I shrug, 'wor boo ming bai' and wander off thinking 'they seemed very nice'.
In fact this total lack of English in Qingdao leads to the incredibly amusing shirts I have seen on my travels. Whilst noone seems to speak the language - it is still tres cool to wear the language and so every person between 0 and 35yrs of age wears shirts emblazoned with rampant, unintelligible English words: 'Rock in fashion: Don't be scared'. Every tenth shirt actually makes some sense so you'll see a 20something boy proudly wearing a funky looking top stating that he is "Teenie Weenie" or kids running round labelled "Lucky Wind" or even my favourite (picture huge, bold text taking up the whole front): "Trust This Brand".
The beach in China is very different to Australia. [The next few days have been scorchers..] Noone actually swims at the beach. They sit on the sand eating picnic lunches, set up stalls selling bits of shells, coral, live starfish, live sea slugs, live hermit crabs, live extremely underage baby turtles and other living things that have been pillaged from the sea only moments ago (as made clear by the stall holder's wet rolled up jeans and even wetter Nike Ayre Maxes). The family bonding activity undertaken most frequently on the sand is digging for pippis, muscles and other foodstuffs that can be pilfered for dinner. This is all happening when they are not purchasing the number one Qingdao piece of seaside tourist memorabilia: the Groucho Marx fake glasses, nose and moustache which whistles when you exhale through your nose. I kid you not. These are sold everywhere.
I'm confused.
* Few days pass *
I remember learning in school about how every culture has a different sized invisible perimeter which is the unspoken allotted personal space which moves as you do. Not in China. There is NO such thing as personal space. People constantly walk into you, bang into your shopping, step out of shops without looking and hit you with never a 'dway boo chee' or even a second glance. Perhaps this is even more exaggerated because I am in Qingdao with almost all 1 billion of China's occupants during their Golden Week holidays.
I walked the scenic 7km coastal pathway passing all 6 of Qingdao's beaches (aptly titled 'Beach 1' through to 6) and jostled with the ice-cream devouring crowds for my square inch of foot path. I passed the 78 brides and grooms getting married on Sunday (this is not an exaggeration - I stopped counting at 50) all of whom were posing for photos on the most glorious patch of coastal parkland (which happened to have other brides and grooms in the background posing for their photos too). Will be an interesting few wedding albums produced.
It really was a beautiful walk which is very well-maintained: gardens, clean winding pathways, tall trees providing shade and the zillions of colourful potted plants (which must be watered daily to stay alive). Unfortunately I have no photos...
Every second restaurant in Qingdao is, of course, a seafood restaurant. This means that there are styrofoam boxes on the floor of the footpath with little water pipes shuffling the water from one box to the next with unhappy looking sea creatures all desperate to stay alive trying to claw their way out. Then there are the higher class establishments which have a whole window-front devoted to the standard aquarium look. Tanks of tepid, greenish water house all manner of larger creature desperately gasping in the not-quite-enough water provided for them. I stood and watched the crabs getting about their business: preening, eating, scratching blissfully unaware of their fate. The large Gropers and Sting Rays in the next tank, however, all seemed to know what was coming. Every gasp for breath looked to me like a soft cry for help: 'save me....<gasp>.... save me!'.
I just can't eat seafood with all of this around me. I mean, I eat steak (but it doesn't look much like a cow); I eat drumsticks (but they don't look like chickens) and nobody is waving the soft, cuddly live animal versions of my dinner around in front of me as I eat them. Call me a hypocrite - but I find the tanks of live animals all over the place really off-putting. It makes it all much less desirable. [Of course, this excludes prawns, squid and scallops who are all way too small to have any feelings]... ;)
I've had my fair share of Tsingtaos at BBQ King on Liverpool St so I thought I would take a look at their museum. The Brewery tour was great: history of Tsingtao; history of beer; how beer is made; marketing and branding stuff. The end of the tour actually led you through their manufacturing plant so after reading all about it, we walked across an enclosed elevated walkway and could look down and watch the bottles being filled, labelled, packed and conveyored around the factory. They also plied you full of beer at the numerous beer stops throughout which perhaps favourably affected my enthusiasm for the tour. [I hadn't had any lunch, y'see].
Interestingly I learned that Tsingtao was set up by the Germans and then run by the Japanese after occupation (they also produced Asahi and Kirin from the same plant). This meant that the first 50 years of this factory's life (until1948) was a direct result of 'foreign' involvement. Now it is one of the top 10 most recognisable Chinese brands and a huge export for them but I couldn't help but think, would it really have been so successful if it was 100% Chinese from the start? Who knows?
I think the Customs official who confiscated our Lonely Planet for having Taiwan in a different colour from China needs to visit the brewery where they proudly proclaim: "Soon Tsingtao beer was being exported to international destinations as far away as Taiwan, Malaysia and Germany". I thought all violations of the One China Policy were not tolerated!? Having said that, this was in the text in the middle of the tour - they did have the 'newish looking' map at the start in the correct colours.
Today I visited QingdaoYing Binguan which is a 100yr old German Palatial structure (the ex-residence of a German Governor who was fired as soon as the bill came in for the place) which was later converted into a guest house for important dignitaries: Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Sihanook and various members of the CCP all stayed here. It was interesting to see such incredible German architecture in the centre of China. You could see by the cobbley streets and the structures surrounding the place, that 100 years ago the Germans were here to stay.
I thought I'd lash out on the $3 audio tour to make some sense of the place (as everything had an audio tour number but most things had no label). Intriguing audio tour. I learned that every piece of furniture, bed, couch, wardrobe, bookcase, desk and chair in the place was "made in a furniture factory in Stuttgart". The audio tour then continued to detail the length, width and height in cm of the said object - then it would move onto the next number. If anyone is thinking of coming, save yourself the $3. I wonder if the Chinese language audio tour was the same as the English one?
Zhongshan Park during Oriental Cherry Blossom Festival was very pretty with lots of trees beginning to blossom. But it was manicured with such extraordinary precision that I felt like it wasn't really natural nor very relaxing. That and the fact that if you took the path to the left they were selling Ferris wheel rides and if you took the path to the right they were selling tickets to climb up a viewing tower. If you chose to go straight ahead there were some tickets to a stone sculpture garden. I think I prefer my gardens a little more au naturale.
One last note is that I have been incredibly impressed with how hard these guys are working to transform the country. I live, of course, in a hotel overlooking a giant construction site which has been operational 24hrs a day, every day since I arrived. You can see that the Chinese are taking their Olympic commitments incredibly seriously. Everywhere I turn something is being upgraded. I went to the Post Office in the morning to buy some postcards and when I returned to buy stamps in the afternoon the whole front facade had been ripped off and was being replaced. [Nothing was wrong with the old one]... It is like 5yrs worth of Australian construction happening in only one year.
Overall Qingdao has been a very entertaining stop for me. And most importantly I survived! Sorry to the history lovers out there - as Iain is not here there is noone to detail the big picture of the town's history. Rather, you'll have to suffice with the little picture of the town's minutiae.
