Qingdao, China, the birthplace of Tsingtao beer!

Another long weekend away in China.  Our destination this time was Qingdao, a port on the East China Sea, northwest of Shanghai.  No one we know had ever been there!  Cathay Pacific has terrific package deals all over China - nonstop flights and five-star hotels.
Qingdao's history as a German colony was the main reason for our visit.  We were looking forward to seeing a well-preserved colonial city that is also famous for its beaches and waterfront (wrong season!).  In fact, Qingdao was the venue for the sailing races during the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.
In a nutshell, the history of Qingdao goes like this: In 1897, after the Boxer Rebellion, Qingdao was ceded to Germany.  The Germans turned the city into a strategically important port.  They built roads as well as mansions and government buildings in the Bavarian colonial style.  But their lasting contribution is the famous Tsingtao Brewery (China's second largest), which has been in continuous operation since 1903.  When WWI began, the Japanese occupied the city and continued to run the brewery.  After that war, Qingdao became part of the Republic of China, but the Japanese continued to manage the brewery until the end of WWII.

We expected to arrive in a city that has the historical potential to be included in the UNESCO World Heritage list.  Imagine our surprise, when,  driving in from the airport on a blustery Friday afternoon, there was nothing "charming", just another enormous, growing metropolis.  Right before we reached the city limits, some of the traffic fanned onto the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge, the world's longest (42.5 km) bridge over (troubled?) water.  There were actually very few cars on the bridge, but China's motto seems to be "if we build it, they will come".

The same applies to the modern city of Qingdao (view from our hotel room), where there are hundreds of new skyscrapers.  I am sceptical enough at this point to wonder if they are indeed fully, or even partially, occupied.  Most were completed in time for the big show of the 2008 Olympics, but many are still under construction.  The city will have a new Metro next year, too.
We settled into our comfortable room at the Shangri-La (yes, we're finally learning to pamper ourselves), and then donned all of our layers, since the temperature was a brisk 3 degrees!

Our first destination was Qingdao's famous landmark, the Zhan Qiao pier.  The pavilion at the end of the pier is depicted on Tsingtao beer bottles.  The pier and its crowds reminded me of the famous Charles Bridge in Prague as it is lined with hawkers selling souvenirs, beggars, and small-time gamblers.  The cold weather made us hungry - we didn't really need an excuse to be hungry in dumpling-land!  As we crossed the subway passage under the main road, we noticed stalls steaming with fresh dumplings.  20 dumplings cost about $2CDN!  We ate them so quickly, that I completely forgot to take a photo of them.  Worth the trip to Qingdao!!

Fortified by our snack, we wandered through the old German Concession, which has been quite well tended, although some of the buildings appear to need some work.  St. Michael's Catholic Church was under repair (we have never been to a city yet where all of the landmarks are open!), so we could not go in.  It was built by German missionaries in 1934, 20 years after the German governors had departed.  I think I'm standing next to Confucius in the park, but since I still can't read Chinese, I'm not 100% sure.  Speaking of language, we can now hear the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin (and can speak neither), but we noticed that Qingdaoans speak their own dialect.  The words end in "th" rather than "sh" like Mandarin (thank you Wikipedia).

Despite the cold, we were having a grand time, and even the stares of locals could not keep us from enjoying our walk.  Throughout the weekend, we noticed only a handful of Western visitors.  Most of the tourists in Qingdao are mainland Chinese from other parts of the country.

Did you catch the foreshadowing in the paragraph about dumplings?  FOOD was the best part of our trip!!  On our first night in Qingdao, we ate at  the Heavenly Palace Old Mama Restaurant, a modern Sichuan restaurant.  Menus with pictures!  Because we weren't sure what we would be getting, we ordered a lot of food.  Waiters in Asia are too polite to tell you that you've ordered too much or too little, so we just kept adding more dishes to our list.  One of the perks of visiting a place that doesn't cater to Western tourists, is that the food is spiced to the local palate.  Everything was yummy - too bad we couldn't take the leftovers home.

The next morning, Saturday, we bundled up again and visited the remaining colonial landmarks, beginning with the Protestant church.  Despite the cold temperatures, local couples were having their wedding photos taken in front of the church.  (In China and HK, couples have their pictures taken months before the actual wedding at the famous landmarks in their home city.  On the wedding day,  their photos are prominently displayed around the reception hall.)  Jeff and I have seen plain, austere churches before (notably stripped-down cathedrals in Switzerland), but the Qingdao Lutheran church was as bare as it possibly could be.  The exterior was beautiful: mustard yellow with stone trim, and a clock tower with a four-sided clock.  Inside, the church felt as if it hadn't been used in decades.

From the church, we walked up the cobbled streets to the former Governor's Residence.  This elegant mansion is now a museum, complete with period furnishings.  In its day, it had an unobstructed view of the water, but now there are too many buildings and trees blocking the sea.  The joke in many historic places in the U.S. is that "Washington slept here" - in Qingdao, there's a bedroom with a plaque that reads "Bedroom of Chairman Mao Zedong"!

I was surprised to find a beautiful, old Tin Hau (goddess of the sea) temple on the waterfront.  There aren't too many left in China since the "cultural" revolution.  Although all Chinese temples are architecturally very similar,  their decorations usually differ.  Dragons are a popular motif, especially in this "year of the dragon".  The draped pig was something we've never seen before!

Following our sometimes trusty map, Jeff led us to the Naval Museum.  My father would love the vintage aircraft displayed on the shore.  There are also two destroyers that visitors are allowed to explore.  My favourite airplane (Russian) is in the photo.  I'm not quite sure how it ever got off the ground.  It resembled a very fat whale.

By the time we left the Museum, I was getting very cranky.  It had been a long morning of touring, and lunch was way past due.  Luckily, we spotted a tiny shop across the road with steaming baskets of perfect dumplings!  These were even better than the street dumplings we had eaten the day before.  While we ate, we watched the owner masterfully rolling the dumplings - it looked easier than making hamantaschen!

We had set aside that afternoon to visit Qingdao's main attraction - the Tsingtao Brewery.  The guidebooks informed us that for the entry price of $10CDN, we would learn the history of the Brewery, see it in operation, receive a complementary mug, and have unlimited glasses of beer.  Good advertising, but all lies!  The Brewery looks like a Disney set.  Across the road are overpriced tacky restaurants with kegs of beer on the sidewalk.  Speaking of the sidewalk, there are cartoon characters inset along the way, and the garbage cans are shaped liked beer kegs.  We should have turned around at that point and gone back to our lovely hotel, but we are the kind of travellers who have to cover every inch, so into the fortress we went.

Tacky tacky.  History of the brewery, some old equipment, and rooms of non-operating equipment.  Posters of NBA players (Scotty Pippen!) with Chinese cheerleaders.  Walls of beer cans and bottles from all over the world.  And the smallest free glass of beer that they could spare!  Not recommended for future visitors.

Another memorable dinner experience.  We chose a popular Shandong restaurant located in a quiet courtyard off the main restaurant street.  Zijing Shandong Restaurant was billed as a splurge.  Oddly enough it was cheaper than the previous night's meal, and we ordered twice as much (easily enough for six).  When we walked into the cavernous restaurant, the staff looked at us like we were from Mars - most Chinese go out to eat in large groups.  Two little Western tourists were an anomaly.  They didn't quite know what to do with us!  We were seated at a large round table, and the staff hovered nearby to take our order.  When I mimed that we needed a menu, they led us to an adjacent room where all of the raw dishes were wrapped and nicely displayed on tables (photo on the left).  We pointed to five or six different items, returned to our chairs, and waited for the incredible food to arrive.  I felt like a restaurant critic who samples many dishes in order to write a comprehensive review.  What an amazing feast!  My favourite dish was  "fried potatoes sandwich with salad" (photo on the right) - thinly sliced potatoes, deep fried into nests, sandwiching tasty veggies in the middle.  The dumplings were also excellent.

As we were finishing our meal, people began arriving (10 p.m.) to decorate the room for the next day's wedding.  Lots of purple chiffon and purple flower standards.

When we returned to the hotel, we relaxed in the lobby, sipped our wine (me) and tea (Jeff), and listened to the pianist and singer.  After they played my requested song, we retired for the night.  Perfect day!

The next morning, we awoke to a snowy day.  Poor Jeff - he didn't "sign up for winter" when he accepted his expat assignment to HK!  The weather didn't stop us from visiting our last landmark before flying back to HK - the German Prison Museum.  The building originally housed German prisoners, but was later used to incarcerate Chinese prisoners under Japanese rule, and then communist party members under the Kuomintang.  Lots of gruesome photos, torture cells, and propaganda.

As usual, we certainly covered a lot of ground on our quick getaway to Qingdao.