Hello All,
Hope all is well in the states.
Last Sunday morning was the sports meet at school. Each grade of students preformed a dance or show. It was very interesting to see all of them perform. As soon as the performance was over, Ryan and I headed out for our May Day vacation. Since May Day was on a Wednesday, we worked Saturday and Sunday and had Monday - Wednesday off of work.
We had a driver take us to the train station and then we took a high speed train to QingDao. It took us over 4 hours by high speed train to get there. Once we got off the train, we found our hotel with little trouble. It was across the street. We walked through a tunnel underground to find out it doesn't come out across the street. The street was a round about so we had to cross the street multiple times to actually get across the street.
Highlights from the trip:
There is a beer, wine and liquor street. We went to the wine street and beer street.
At the wine street, we found a wine museum, which was very nice and had most things translated into English. We did found NC wineries on one map but the USA is mostly known for the wineries in CA. In the middle of the tour, we had a wine tasting. The most interesting part were the "crackers." The crackers came in a little bag with a hamburger on it. I think they were supposed to taste like hamburgers. The did not taste like hamburgers but they were pretty tasty.
After the wine museum, we needed to eat lunch. We walked toward beer street. We found many restaurants but no picture menus. They all had seafood (still alive) in glass containers and you just would point at what you wanted. This made me pretty nervous about orders/eating. I have standards about eating. We found a place with nice looking table clothes (one of my standards) and a guy who spoke pretty good English. Ryan order clams and "squid." Ryan says it was "squid." I say it was octopus. There were octopi heads on the plate! Ryan would say they were squid heads... If anyone is an underwater food expert, please help Ryan and I settle our dispute.
Next we were off to the beer museum. I'm pretty sure this is the reason we decided to go to QingDao. They are famous for their beer making. The beer has been around since 1903. The beer they served there was actually cold! This was a nice since we often drink room temperature beer because refrigerators aren't very common around here.
Ryan found map of QingDao that shows the bus routes. We took the buses several times. They are building a subway system in the city and are expected the finish it in 2014. We think it will be easier to get around once the subway opens.
To get a view of the city, we took a ride on chair lifts.
My favorite part of the the trip was taking a ride on the traveling beer bar. There was a bar set up on the back of the truck and we sat on bicycle seats and could pedal. I don't think the bicycle pedals actually helped the truck move any faster. It was nice to have a seat and a drink in my hand as we got a tour of the shopping street. Much better than shopping.
If a teacher goes on a trip, it is common for her to bring back a treat or little gift for the other teachers. Ryan and I had much discussion about what should buy them. Sometimes they bring me things like a little mirror for my purse or a bracelet. But more often they bring us food. Things like vacuumed sealed meat packages or candy made with donkey hide. One idea was to find the thing we thought was a grossest and buy them that because they would probably love it. We just couldn't bring ourselves to do that. At the beer tasting they gave us peanuts and we thought they were good so we decided to buy them peanuts. They teachers liked them so much, they ordered themselves more on the internet. And we got to use a coupon. When I was sitting at the table waiting for Ryan, an old man came and sat in his seat. He kept talking to me in Chinese as if I understood. He had a tour guide that helped translate a little. I believe he was from outside the city and had not seen many foreigners before so he was excited to see me. He forced me to eat some of his peanuts and gave me a coupon.
When it was time to leave, we took 3 buses, a train, 2 subway lines, 3 more buses (it was 2 bus lines but we stopped to eat dinner) and a walk back to the school. Nothing like traveling in China.
Well, that's all for now. Better get back to lesson planning or job hunting.
Julie
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