Korazy Times in Seoul: Qingdao (Tsingtao) Days 1 and 2

Before reading this, there are a couple links I put into this post. They go to short video clips I took, so please click on them and check them out!

After a few hours riding Seoul's subway, waiting at Incheon airport, and flying on a plane, we were finally in China! We went through a quick quarantine check (based entirely on honesty) then were quickly out of our comfort zone and feeling over our heads. Our first step was getting to our hotel, but most of the taxi drivers didn't seem to know where the hotel was. We finally got one brave soul to take us into the city after negotiating a rate that would have been good for Beijing, but not so much for Qingdao. Oh well, live and learn. We used the iPhone's GPS and were able to find our hotel with relative ease. The first hotel was adequate for a night, which luckily, was the length of our stay. We dropped off our bags and went wandering around the seafront and pier. The pier we went to is the symbol of Qindao. In fact, this pavilion is featured on Tsingtao's beer bottle. The German influences from the missionary days are obvious. There are European style buildings and churches everywhere. One of the most striking things we noticed was the size of everyone. In Korea, everyone is slender. I would say maybe 1 in 50 people may have been slightly overweight and I saw about 3 or 4 obese people in the last year living there. In China, the size of people is much bigger. Maybe it's the dollar beers helping pack on the pounds, but it seems like everyone in Qingdao has a little bit of a belly. When your mom tells you that you should finish your meal because there are starving kids in China, tell her to go to Qingdao. Savannah and I quickly discovered what makes everyone here a little bit heavier on their feet. As I mentioned earlier, you can get a bag or large bottle of Tsingtao beer for $0.50 to $1. That's cheap even by Chinese standards. The other reason for the excess weight is Qingdao's barbecue. The city is famous for its skewers and for good reason. They are cheap, filling, and delicious. A lot of their flavor comes from the fattier cuts of meat that are used as well as the copious amounts of grease used to warm up the food and add flavor. You can buy almost anything on a stick here. So far, we've tried chicken, pork, beef, chicken heads, and scorpions. The chicken heads taste like salty chicken skin because that's the only thing you can get off of the skull. Savannah got a bonus eyeball on her skewer and said it tasted salty like everything else. The big surprise was the scorpions. Scorpions honestly taste like chicken. They're not too bad at all. They have a crispy outside and taste like the oil they're fried in at first. The inside is kind of like a juicy chicken jerky. After having crickets and waterbugs in Thailand, I figured they would just taste like oil and be cruchy, but the scorpions are honestly a nice treat.

We spent the morning of our second day relaxing on one of Qindao's six beaches. We went to the biggest one as it is the closest to our hostel. Our hostel, by the way is incredible. It was once China's first observatory, but was converted into a hostel several years ago. The room is spacious and nice. We have a TV, air conditioning, our own bathroom, and hot water 24 hours a day. There is a restaurant on the roof that takes advantage of the hostel's location on top of a large hill. You can see the entire skyline on one side and the sea on the other. The name of the place is Old Observatory Hostel and the website is www.qingdaohostel.com. It's an awesome place to stay if you have the chance.

The beaches here are interesting. Like Korea, many women remain fully clothed. Unlike Korea, the men are all in speedos and all the children under 5 years old are completely naked, running around and splashing in the water. Other than that, the first beach we went to was really cool because you can walk out into the Yellow Sea for about a quarter of a mile and the water is only at about chest level. The only thing keeping you from going further is the shark netting they've placed around the entire beach.

We came back to the hostel to wash up then headed to the opposite side of Qingdao to see the International Beer Festival. It was really rainy at this point, so a lot of the tents were closed and the crowds were small. We stopped into a few tents and tried some different beers. Several of the beers were from Munich, which we decided to skip since we're going to be there in a week. We ended up a the Tsingtao tent and were entertained by Chinese acrobats, a comic routine, singing, dancing, aggressive flag waving, drinking competitions, and some lip synching by a scandalously clad trio of Chinese pop divas. It was surprising for being in such a conservative country.

We returned to the hostel after quickly burning through our day's budget at the beer festival. It was fun, but really pricey. We spent the rest of the night on the roof of our hostel, chatting with some guys teaching English in China, picking up tips, and listening to a Chinese family sing folk songs around a keg of Tsingtao. Here's a link to the end of one of their songs.