Qingdao, June 11-12, 2008
Trip Start
Jun 05, 2008
1
2
18
Trip End
Ongoing
Qingdao,
Shandong,
China
Monday, June 23, 2008
Our trip to Qingdao got off to a rough start--we missed our 6:25 train out of Beijing by a hair and had to wait around for four hours for the next one. As we were sitting with our huge packs in the train waiting room, we were an interesting sight for the Chinese people around us. You'd be surprised by how even in the big cities people gawk like you're a strange curiosity--even in Beijing there really aren't that many Caucasians. People here are not all that shy about staring at foreigners (we're easily identified), and we get the most double takes when traveling with our bags. But people are generally curious and friendly, and sometimes it can be an advantage in meeting people. One security guard came over and practiced his English with us for over an hour, complete with Chinese lessons for us, before we left to catch our train.
Fortunately, we were able to get onto an express train, which took six hours to get to Qingdao. That length of time is a testament to how massively far apart things are in China--a non-express train would have taken 10 hours, and Qingdao is (relatively) one of the closest cities in China to Beijing! Express trains directly from Beijing to Shanghai are twelve hours, and from Shanghai to Hong Kong it would be 27 hours, if there were no delays. So the journey was comparatively painless.
When we arrived in Qingdao (pronounced Ching-dow--the Chinese language has its own English transcription system called pinyin that uses the same letters as us, but pronounces them differently, like 'q' becomes 'ch'), we were picked up by Lee. We found Lee on Couchsurfing.com, and he invited us to stay the night in his home in Qingdao. He's an 18-year-old student studying English, and it ended up being a great match because he had a chance to practice his (already very good) English and we had the pleasure of having an interpreter while staying with a Chinese family. When we arrived at Lee's apartment, his mother welcomed us in with a huge bowl of cherries (early June is the time of Qingdao's cherry festival, which we had just missed) and limitless pots of green tea. That evening, we took a walking tour through Qingdao and returned to eat a delicious feast of Lee's mother's dumplings. Later we checked out Qingdao's night market--it's something they have pretty much everywhere in Asia from what I can gather, a big market of foods and goods that is open late. When we got home we got into our pajamas and settled onto the mat in front of the TV to watch the Euro Cup with Lee's father and few bottles of Tsingtao (aka Qingdao) beer.
The next morning started early with a big bowl of dumpling soup (no, we're not at all tired of dumplings yet). Then we set off to see Qingdao, which can be done easily in a day. Funnily enough, it's almost the same size as New York--7 million people--making it a relatively small city for China. With cities like Shanghai and Beijing numbering between 18 and 35 million people depending on who you ask, 7 million starts to look podunk, and we were not especially struck by the size of the town. Somehow, in China everything just blends so that even if you know the stats on how large the city is, it rarely feels overwhelming because it's hard to take it all in at once.
One advantage of the sheer number of people living here is the ease of domestic travel. We had originally intended to take an overnight train to Shanghai that evening, but after discussing it with Lee and his family we learned it would be the same cost to buy a plane ticket, cutting the travel time from 18 hours (due to switching trains) to one hour. So, with his interpreting help, we went to buy our tickets. It was the first time I'd bought a plane ticket the day of the flight--and for $40 to boot! But these things are common in China; in fact, they had a flight to Shanghai every half hour, so the tickets were widely available.
But before Shanghai, we had to see Qingdao. We stopped into Lee's English school, which was a very nice facility in the center of Qingdao. We chatted with his teachers and even gave one of them advice about applying to graduate school in the US. We walked along the waterfront for awhile, but it was a very gray and cloudy day so we could only barely make out the city's skyline and the water seemed murky. We continued on to Qingdao's beaches, the existence of which makes Qingdao stand out from the rest of northern Chinese cities. They were nice, but relatively small and lackluster, especially on the overcast day.
The highlight of the walk on the beach was actually the unbelievable concentration of Chinese couples taking wedding photos on practically all corners of the beachfront. It was a Thursday morning, yet there were literally about 50 couples taking wedding pictures within a quarter-mile radius--according to Lee, that's a normal amount for any random day of the week! It was a laugh for us as tourists to be bemusedly standing off to the side observing the whole procession, yet Lee was completely nonplussed and couldn't figure out why we found it so interesting. All the brides were wearing practically identical wedding gowns (rented from the number of stores in the town that specialize in such a thing) and they were posing with their husbands-to-be in what we Westerners would consider ridiculous positions. I think it reflects what we have gathered about the Chinese view toward romance: what we would find cheesy, they find sweet. In multiple cities and on multiple occasions, we have seen couples wearing matching outfits, the funniest of which are these T-shirts that seem to be everywhere--they are pink with a big black arrow and the text "Falling in love: He is my boyfriend" and "Falling in love: She is my girlfriend" on them. Yet we rarely see any Chinese people holding hands or, god forbid, kissing. That's Chinese romance for you, I guess.
One of the highlights of our time in Qingdao was the hot pot lunch that Lee took us to. Lee refused to tell us what any of the foods were that you were supposed to dip in the boiling oil until after we had eaten them--smart move, because that way he got us to try cow's veins, among other things. After lunch we popped across the street for some quintessentially Asian entertainment: karaoke, at a KTV Bar (a chain of karaoke bars that seems to be everywhere in China). The language barrier made it a little difficult, because Lee didn't know many English songs, and Dave and I (of course) couldn't read Chinese. So we struck a balance, with me and Dave dancing to "Thriller" and "Ice Ice Baby" while Lee belted out Chinese pop songs.
I should mention Chinese music because it is mentionably TERRIBLE: literally every single song every single place you go is an incredibly cheesy pop song, the kind that's so bad it would not even be played on the worst American radio station. As far as we can tell, they all deal with some sort of romance, and combine synthetic pop beats with extremely high-pitched singing. Even Lee couldn't make them sound good.
And so it was in Qingdao... off to Shanghai!
