Day 1 of China: Qingdao

This entry is about my first day in China, which I spent in Qingdao. I wrote it on the morning of my second day before heading to Beijing, but wasn’t able to post it, so I’m going to now. I’m now in Hong Kong and I’ll write about Beijing and Hong Kong tomorrow. Beijing was awesome and today I’m going to check out HK which looks like it will be amazing as well.

Day 1: Qingdao
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So I’ve been in China for a day and this place is awesome. I had a great first day in China, and definitely saw some really interesting things, even though I’m in Qingdao which is a nothing city with only one attraction.

Yesterday, the boat was cleared much faster than in Japan. The Japanese took over 5 hours to clear the boat, the Chinese didn’t even take 2, so we were able to get off before 10. In Japan, when you get off, you have to go through a metal detector and you get searched, the same doesn’t happen in China. In China, you just get off the boat and boom, you are free to walk around.

Since Qingdao is a nothing city, it obviously doesn’t have many cruise ships coming through. Or any, for that matter, besides us. Our boat is docked right next to shipping liners, and when we got off, tons of trucks are just flying right next to where we are walking going from the ships to the city. There is no sidewalk, so we were just walking right in front of these big trucks trying to dodge them and not get hit. On top of this, it was raining. I thought this was hilarious, a great introduction to China, just trying to avoid getting run over by a tractor trailer.

The boat was docked 10 minutes away walking from any street, so after we were dodging trucks for 10 minutes, we finally found safety….a sidewalk.

Our group of 6 started the day by going to the Bank of China in the city to get money. At the bank, some guy at the bank was yelling at some bank teller for 15 minutes at the top of his lungs for god knows what reason (it was in Chinese obviously, so I have no idea what was going on.) It was….interesting, but pretty funny.

After we got money (which took a while since we were exchanging USD for Yuan instead of just taking it out of the ATM…their ATM was broken), we got food (SO CHEAP), shopped a little, then went to the one attraction in town, the Tsingtao Brewery.

The Brewery was really cool. It was 50 Yuan to get in (or 7 bucks, the most expensive thing of the day), and we got to walk around, see the Museum, and got a lot of free beer. It was really cool. Obviously, tons of SAS people went since it was a) the only attraction in town and b) they are college students and love beer.

Also, at the Brewery, the Chinese people there kept wanting to take pictures with the girls in our group. It was so funny. One of the girls even got dragged by one of the people out of no where just to take a picture with her. So great.

After that, we walked around some more, shopped some more (I didn’t really do much shopping, but some of the people in our group wanted to and there is nothing else to do in Qingdao so I was fine with it), and ate. We then just went to the boat to crash for the night (obviously, dodging trucks on the way back) because we all have trips leaving today for Beijing.

By the way, the stuff in this country is SO cheap. None of our cab rides were more than 8 Yuan. Since the exchange rate is 7.6 Yuan to the Dollar, that means our cab rides were all around 1 dollar (and this is for the whole cab, which would have 3-4 people in it.) We took 4 cab rides yesterday, so if I was riding around by myself, I would have spent a little more than 4 dollars ALL DAY on cabs. Since I wasn’t, it was like a dollar for cab rides to everywhere we needed to go. So awesome.

Also, the smog in Qingdao is terrible. Off the boat, you could taste the air, and it tasted real bad. Beijing apparently has even worse air quality, so I’m sure this trip will be great for my lungs.

Also, food is cheap. Lunch was around $3.50 USD, and dinner was $4 (that’s with desert, too, and the place looked nice and had good food.) Beer at dinner was 6 Yuan (or around 85 cents) for a 600 ml bottle of Tsingtao, which is around 20 ounces or so. I don’t think I spent more than 20 bucks all day yesterday because its so cheap here, and the awesome thing is that the countries coming up next (Vietnam, Thailand, and India) are even cheaper.

My trip to Beijing leaves in an hour and a half, and I’m so pumped. 4 days there, then a day in Hong Kong before getting on the boat (wish I had more time there)….this is so awesome. SAS definitely beats out school, even though I love U of A.