Qingdao Trial Run

Happy belated Canada Day! Here we are in Qingdao on the rooftop of our hostel. Hoping to travel by ourselves this summer, we decided to go to nearby Qingdao as a trial run. Since the Olympic sailing events will take place here and so they’ve been preparing for an international crowd, we thought this city would be a nice transition for the rest of China.

Getting around - We’ve rarely taken taxis by ourselves here but had to rely on it in Qingdao. We have discovered that it can be a bit of an adventure. Even when we had the address of our destination, it wasn’t straightforward. For instance, the hostel gave us a taxi card to make it easier to get back but we quickly discovered that this didn’t easily guarantee success. Some drivers found the typeface hard to read. One time we got in and though the taxi driver wasn’t sure where he was going, he started driving anyway. Luckily, I was able to copy the Chinese characters out in a larger size in the back of the moving cab.

Day 1 – We took our first cab in Jinan by ourselves and got to the train station. We pushed our way through security and found the waiting
area. So far so good. We took a super fast train that reached a top speed of 247 km and arrived in Qingdao in 2 ½ hours. It was comfortable and convenient. There was a snack cart and free hot water. Chinese people love plain hot water.

We got to the hostel by taxi and even had a “conversation” with the driver. Mainly she wondered where we were from, why we came by train and why I looked Chinese. We checked in and spent the rest of the day walking around the old city. We saw quickly that it is much cleaner than Jinan and much more tourist centered. There were souvenirs (coral, sea shells and dried shrimp) everywhere.

Day 2 – We walked along the sea on the boardwalk. The drizzly day didn’t stop us or the many Chinese tour groups with their matching hats.

Day 3 – We walked out the pier with lots of other tourists and saw the algae problem

that the city is struggling with. Touristy note: For those of you who enjoy Tsingtao beer (this is the old translation of the city name), the brewery was first established by Germans in 1903. The beer is made with mineral water from nearby Lao Shan. The pagoda at the end of the pier is on every Tsingtao beer label.

We hailed a cab to go to a temple but when we showed the driver the spot on the map, he waved his hand and told us no. Huh? Since we couldn’t figure out how to ask him why not, we agreed to his suggestion for the alternative, the tv tower. So we ended up paying more than we wanted to in order to ride up to an observation deck to check out a foggy Qingdao from a higher vantage point.

After that, we tried to go to a restaurant that is recommended in our Lonely Planet guide. Unfortunately, the taxi driver did not understand my pronunciation, I didn’t have the Chinese characters for the name and she quickly gave up trying to understand me. I was able to make myself understood when I asked to be taken to the nearest landmark, the Crowne Plaza. Funny enough, I had to use the Chinese name which is much longer than the English name and she understood that!

A word about pinyin - The Chinese were thinking of doing away with characters so they started teaching the younger generation pinyin. It’s a system that uses the Roman alphabet but is not pronounced like English. What we learned during this trial run was that if you’re older (like most of the taxi drivers we met), you may not have studied pinyin and so having the address written out in pinyin does not help one bit.

We liked Qingdao. It has an international flair and has a few western style malls with merchandize we recognize. There’s something to be said about the familiar. There are lots of western style restaurants too that we hadn’t begun to investigate. Before we left Jinan, I was excited that there were Starbucks there but in the end, I preferred to enjoy the coffee on the rooftop of our hostel. The only negative thing I have to say is that the taxi service was a bit disappointing, considering that they are gearing up for lots of foreign visitors. We will definitely be back to enjoy the clean sea air.