Last words from Qingdao

Hi everybody!

Well, we are coming to the end of our stay in Qingdao. After almost two months in this city, we are about to head out next Wednesday! We had a good time here, learning chinese, enjoying the beaches, cheap beer and great seafood, not to forget that we enjoyed all this with a bunch of very nice people.

The last few weeks were pretty much a routine (haven't had that for a while) of studying and hanging out. It was also very nice to have our own 4 apartment to stay in, which was actually the biggest apartment Wiebke and I have ever rented! Not that we really need 93m, but is was good to have the second bedroom when my dad came over. He stayed with us for 3 weeks, two of them in Qingdao. He also took a chinese class and it seems that he did remember a few words from his cantonese speaking parents.

After two weeks in Qingdao we took off Tai An and its holy mountain Tai Shan (shan=mountain) where we spent two nights. VB and I climbed probably a few thousand stairs to get up to top, but iwas definetely worth it. Really good to be out in the nature again, after so much city life. Tai An was also a very nice city to enjoy the chinese night life, which consists of walking down a night market, buying all kinds of stuff you don't need, having a few incredible cheap kebabs of a street vendor with a pitcher of beer and then head for a game off pool. Everything outside!

After Tai An we were off to Ji 'Nan, Shandong provinces capital. Not reallt a city you have to visit, sinceit is just another huge and partly modern megalopolis with a few million inhabitants. Interestingly they have a quite a big muslim community there (maybe thats where the kebabs come from?), so strolling through crammed little side streets, packed with butchers selling Lamb, makes you almost feel like being in Kairo, except that everybody looks chinese! Also interesting to see, how Mosques look in China, where arab and chinese writing mix. The rest looks just like any other old chinese temple, maybe except the big prayer hall.

Also interesting was our hotel, which we booked through the internet. It was announced as a youth hostel, but when we finally got to a redidencial area we were invited to an apartment and were given a key to our own little apartment. It took a while to get everything sorted out, but nevertheless this was a lot better than a hotel! This is what you get when you book online in China!

Leaving Ji'Nan proved to be a bit difficult, for one since the ticket offices were so crammed and people always cutting in line in front of you, and second because trains to Beijing seemed in high demand. So instead of leaving Wednesday morning for Beijing, we left at 6pm. This left us with a day to pass in sticky and hot Ji'Nan, which was especially no fun since I some how happended to get diarrhea...

When we finally got to Beijing (expresstrain, really nice and comfortable, something the Deutsche Bahn should consider...), we were confronted with how to get a cab, since nobody seemed to want to take us to our hotel with putting the meter down...

When we finally did get there, our reservation was cancelled and we had to take a room without a bathroom (bathroom was a floor higher...) which looked more like a cell. Windows didn't open so it got quite hot, once the eletricity in the whole building went out. The next day VB got us a new room, and while I enjoyd the bathroom and the view from our new room and cured my diarrhea, VB dragged my dad through Beijing to get us tickets for chinese opera and for our return bus to Qingdao. Next day was off to the great wall and the ming tombs, which realy was a great expreience, despite all the tourists and the heat. As Chairman Mao: "He is not a real man, who has not climbed the great wall".

Really interesting also to see a silk factory (I always thought those are the pains of organized tours, but this time I was mistaken) and the new olympic park with the main stadium (resembles a swallows nest) and the aquatics park.

Saturday we spent the greater part of the day on Tiananmen Sqaure and the forbidden city, unluckily not able to see Mao's grave, because its (probaly) being restored for the Olympics.

The evening provided us with the "interesting" performance of a chinese opera, where we met a tourgroup of fellow germans in their fifties and sixties. Unfortunately, only one was able to read the english opera text, so we had to sit and listen to his (false) simultaneous translation during the performance.

Mentioning this, it was really weird for us to see somany tourists in Beijing, something we are not really used to in Qingdao. Sometimes days pass and you don't see any other westerners in the street, so I recognized me staring a tourists, almost like the chinese are doing, because it is such a rare sight!

Sunday was our last day in Beijing with my dad so we had to get him some presents to bring back to Germany. After we got that done, VB and I left my dad in the safe hands of the hotel, still being a little bit worried, if he would get to the airport safely. Our overnight bus to Qingdao was very nice, and I can only say that until now I can't support all the negative comments about the chines public transportation, either train or bus! Our nightbus had little berths to stretch out, so we got back to Qingdao with a few hours of sleep.

Being back in QD I realized how nice the climate is, with its coolnes from the sea. Especially after Beijing with all the traffic, pollution and heat.

So, now we are back in QD, enjoying the rest of our language class and doing the last of our shopping for various friends. Tomorrow some Miri and Falko from Shanghai are coming to visit us, which will be the first persons besides Markus and Jule in NZ and my dad from Germany, we'll see from Germany!

Our next stops are Hongkong again (we have to get out of China because of our Visa), then to the beautiful city of Guilin (again with Falko and Miri) and then we hope to get a glimpse of the Himalaya from Sichuan, if that province hasn't drowned by then. I also contacted a distant chinese relative of mine in Guandong province (Canton), so we hope to meet up with, before we leave China from Hong Kong for good on the 18th of July.

Take care everybody, looking forward to your comments (We changed the settings, everybody can post comments now without registration),

Tim and Wiebke