Settling In
After a six hour bus ride from Qufu to Qingdao, I was dropped off next to the highway. I had to walk about half-an-hour to grab a taxi, which took another half-hour. Needless to say, when I finally arrived at the hostel - despite the road sandwich - I was famished. So I was completely blindsided by what awaited me as I stepped through the door:
You might not know what you are looking at here, but be sure that it is heaven to all senses (except maybe touch, the claws were pointy). This is crab with Chengdu spices on it. For those who don't know, Chengdu is in the Sichuan (often spelled Szechuan for who knows what reason), which is the spicy capitol of China. The head of the
Big Brother Guest House on 6 Baoding Lu is originally from the province and regularly goes back or gets visits from her son to replenish her stock of special ingredients. This was complemented by four or five regular Chinese dishes, noodles, rices, veggies, since crab still requires the same amount of immense effort for minimal sustenance in China as it does in America.
Admission
While I went to school in Maryland - home of crabs and football - for four years, I can probably count the number of times I've eaten crab on one hand. This is probably an egregious crime in the eyes of some, but I'm a Boston boy, therefore lobster is my game. If it helps, I probably ate fries with Old Bay a hundred times my freshman year alone.
After eating my fill, I went about meeting the other hostel dwellers. In the house at the time were a Brit, a Denverian, two San Franciscans (they are everywhere, and I've yet to meet a bad one), a Korean (Southern variety), a petit Beijing girl, as well as a girl from Shandong and a set of twins who helped run the hostel (we'll get to them later). Later on two (of three total, they lost one for a night) American English teachers practicing in Beijing also came on by.
While some crap went down that I'm not going to recap, most of the guests were very hospitable. One of the San Franciscans was Anton Petrenko, who wrote a very entertaining blog about his trip in China, which I have added to the links on the right. He just went on an amazing trip and hit a bunch of places I hope to go to soon. As drinking and games carried on through the night, I asked the little Beijinger how much she weighed. This turns out to be one of a few things you can ask pretty much out in the open in China, with the other things being: age and, of all things, blood type - I don't make the rules, just take advantage of them. While she wasn't super short, she said she was 40 kilos (88 pounds, I swear they have hollow bones here).
First Full Day
I made sure to make my first full day completely packed, as I intended to move on to Xi'An quickly afterwards (I couldn't, details later). So I started at the most famous landmark, Zhan Qiao, which is best known for being on the Tsing Tao beer bottles (blame the spelling on the Germans):
After this photo, I took a bus over to Baihua Park, which had a sculpture garden. On my map, it said sculpture garden with a picture of a giant evil birdlike rock structure. There was no such thing, just ones of scholars, teachers, and writers. Yeah, they commemorate teachers with statues instead of cutting their benefits and breaking their unions. Sometimes I just don't understand China.
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| I assume this is the Chinese Red Auerbach |
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| Zombie Emerging From Tomb, the closest I got to what I expected |
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| These photos would've been better with another person :( |
Enough of that! New bus to beer street! Literally the name of the street is 啤酒街(pi jiu jie, beer street). This isn't to be confused with the beer festival 啤酒节(pi jiu jie, beer festival, jie has a different tone). The theme of the street is beer. I can't emphasize this enough.
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| Dancing beer bottles, looking mildly phallic |
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| Beer bottle benches, gotta love em |
This last one might not look impressive, but people can sit outside and drink. Something sorely lacking both in America and Shanghai (Europe, Vegas, and Key West know how to do this well). And beer street wouldn't be without the immortal Tsing Tao brewery and beer museum!
What a strange and wonderful place... oh wait I forgot the BEST PART:
Huge beer on the roof! Have I mentioned yet that I love this town? There are definitely worse things to theme your town after than beer - I'm going to have to make the trek to Milwaukee one of these days. The museum takes you down the sad story of Tsing Tao beer. How it was opened by a bunch of Germans who abided by the
German Beer Purity Law, and won best beer of 1906 for their efforts. Then they were taken over by the Japanese in 1918, who prefer Kirin and wanted to make Tsing Tao of similar quality (it actually said this), for shame. Finally in 1945, the Chinese took back the town and factory and said "hey I wonder how much water we can sell in these beer bottles!" Crap. Which led to extremely low alcohol tolerances across the country (this is an assumption). Worst of all, they celebrate this transition, which is as confusing as this photo (which was actually in their photo gallery):
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| Red Sox hat, Yankee shirt, tortured soul |
It just so happens that I ran into the other American English teachers from my hostel in this museum (not much of a surprise in the grand scheme of things) and we enjoyed some free beers from the museum while watching small children do the same. (I didn't take any photos of this phenomenon, but I believe one of the others snapped one)
From there we hailed a cab and took off for the beer festival. From this point on, things get a little fuzzy, as do my photos. So I'll let them take over. What I do remember is having a smile a mile wide and feeling like a little kid again, while being envious that the little kids there got the best of both worlds.
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| Beer Mermaid |
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| New friend with hat/beer bong Herbert |
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| Did I mention beer themes are fun |
This last photo is of me and my good friend 灰太狼(Hui Tai Lang, Big Grey Wolf) from the children's show Happy Sheep Sheep. I'm going to do an advanced analysis on this in the future. It's more like the old WB shows with guns and traps and piranas than any kid's show today.
Anywho, a great time in a great city. More to come.
Next Time
Stuck in Qingdao, but making the most of it with the locals.
Stephen "Scuba" Lauer
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