Ch-ch-ch- Qingdao
The title isn't clever unless you know that a q is pronounced as a ch in Chinese...
I don’t know what I’m laying down on, but it’s hard and it has springs in it. A boxspring maybe? I’m in the world’s smallest hotel room in a town called Qingdao on China’s East coast. We came into town on Saturday, the day after finishing our “last day” of work.
I put that in quotes because I’m actually working on a story right now. We had so much work to finish over our last week that I couldn’t squeeze it all in. These hamburger stories are very time consuming and all of them have at least one silly thing I screwed up that took forever to try to fix, without ever really fixing it. Story of my life...
So after work on Friday a few of us went to get some Chinese barbecue – one of my favorite things to eat here is mutton skewers – and a beer or two. Our train left early Saturday morning, so we didn’t want to get out of control. It was all going to plan until a young Chinese man who had just graduated from university approached us and asked us to join him and his friends because he had never met a foreigner. So we did, and they basically hazed me for a couple of hours while they kept telling me the one English phrase they all knew – “I like football!” Then I couldn’t respond with, “Me too,” because they didn’t understand that, so I had to say, “I like football!” right back to them. It was a pretty deep conversation. We had a couple of our colleagues there to translate all the more trivial exchanges.
We did wake up in time for the train, which was the bullet train to Qingdao. It was a five-hour ride in really comfortable seats, so we were able to catch up on some of the sleep we missed. Of course, we had to do it in five-minute spats because there was a five-year old Chinese psychopath on the train who couldn’t think of anything entertaining to do aside from just running up and down the aisle. I was getting kind of annoyed but Joh looked like she was about to eat the poor kid. If there’s one thing I’ve learned here, it’s that it is very dangerous to deprive Joh of sleep.
We arrived in Qingdao at about 2:30. This city is famous for having been a large German settlement. The German influence is apparent in a lot of the architecture, as well as the city’s most famous export – Tsingtao beer. I had images of a nice quiet city on the coast – kind of like a typical German town but with Chinese people.
No, sir.
There are six beaches in Qingdao, which might sound like a lot until you learn that each of them are about 60 yards long and so full of people they look like ocean-front anthills. The guys are walking around in Speedos, the women are wearing bathing suits and the kids aren’t wearing anything. It’s not exactly Hawaii...
I don’t know what I’m laying down on, but it’s hard and it has springs in it. A boxspring maybe? I’m in the world’s smallest hotel room in a town called Qingdao on China’s East coast. We came into town on Saturday, the day after finishing our “last day” of work.
I put that in quotes because I’m actually working on a story right now. We had so much work to finish over our last week that I couldn’t squeeze it all in. These hamburger stories are very time consuming and all of them have at least one silly thing I screwed up that took forever to try to fix, without ever really fixing it. Story of my life...
So after work on Friday a few of us went to get some Chinese barbecue – one of my favorite things to eat here is mutton skewers – and a beer or two. Our train left early Saturday morning, so we didn’t want to get out of control. It was all going to plan until a young Chinese man who had just graduated from university approached us and asked us to join him and his friends because he had never met a foreigner. So we did, and they basically hazed me for a couple of hours while they kept telling me the one English phrase they all knew – “I like football!” Then I couldn’t respond with, “Me too,” because they didn’t understand that, so I had to say, “I like football!” right back to them. It was a pretty deep conversation. We had a couple of our colleagues there to translate all the more trivial exchanges.
We did wake up in time for the train, which was the bullet train to Qingdao. It was a five-hour ride in really comfortable seats, so we were able to catch up on some of the sleep we missed. Of course, we had to do it in five-minute spats because there was a five-year old Chinese psychopath on the train who couldn’t think of anything entertaining to do aside from just running up and down the aisle. I was getting kind of annoyed but Joh looked like she was about to eat the poor kid. If there’s one thing I’ve learned here, it’s that it is very dangerous to deprive Joh of sleep.
We arrived in Qingdao at about 2:30. This city is famous for having been a large German settlement. The German influence is apparent in a lot of the architecture, as well as the city’s most famous export – Tsingtao beer. I had images of a nice quiet city on the coast – kind of like a typical German town but with Chinese people.
No, sir.
There are six beaches in Qingdao, which might sound like a lot until you learn that each of them are about 60 yards long and so full of people they look like ocean-front anthills. The guys are walking around in Speedos, the women are wearing bathing suits and the kids aren’t wearing anything. It’s not exactly Hawaii...
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