Quaffing it up at the Qingdao Beer Festival

Considering the excitement and strain of my 42 hour hardseat journey, I arrived in Qingdao in good form: eager to stretch my legs, and eager to get to the beer.

I love beer. This is a simple and salient fact. I worry about people who don't like beer. Even more I worry about people who worry about me because I loooove beer. I am not an alchey, I am a person who appreciates that the finer things in life do not need to cost an arm a leg, that all you need in a nice big pint glass and some of that golden nectar of the gods. Beer on the beach, beer with your meal, beer with a movie, or beer in a pub. Take virtually any situation in life... add a nice cold one to it, and life gets better. Friday at work? have a pint and lunch in the pub. Divine. SOme beers are bitter, some are sweet, some are white, some are stouts, some are warm cask ales, some are big, some are small, some are smooth, and others are gassy. Pour me a pint or hand me a bottle please! Sit back and relax, wax that half-baked philosophy that we all love, and enjoy life; one beautiful sip at a time.

So welcome to Qingdao!

My week in Qingdao went by in a blur. Every day and night we drank. When not at the festival, you are still in the birthplace of Tsingtao so you are either quaffing it from the bag with your seafood or you are touring the original brewery built by the germans over a hundred years ago. We made no pretense at this trip being about anything else. The main, primary, overridingly dominating theme of the trip was BEER

The first thing I am not going to do is I am not going to negatively compare the Qingdao beer fest to Oktoberfest in Munich. They don't compare, and qingdao simply cannot compete.

International Beer City is the place where is all goes down. The 20RMB entry tickets are purchased for 5RMB by the guy waiting by the taxi drop off. You enter. In front of you there is this big golden goblet with suds flowing down the sides. You look twice and you realise that the suds cleverly forms the familiar shapes of the continents of the world. To your left is a long row of german beer tents that are selling beer that "comes from German" of in the distant you hear the rawdy thumping bass of the Uighur Kebab guys seling their meat on a stick why enthusiaticly bouncing to their eclectic tunes (their an attraction in their own right) to the right in the distance you see the sillohuetes of the carnival rides forming above the horizon, and finally to you direct right, you see the Qingdao building.

Sure we sampled some of the hofbrau in the hofbrau tent, it is after all one of my favourite beers, but why pay 160 for a picther when you can pay 45? Thus Qingdao building was our spot. The menu is simple. Normal qingdao or qingdao black. Both beers are served in 1.5L pitchers poured from the tap nice a chilled, without a doubt the best qingdao I have ever tasted. The QIngdao Dark is more expensive at 60 kuai a keg, and as long as you don't think of it as a stout... its quite tasty and more strong. Inside its humid and stuffy with cloud of ciggarette moke wafting over the hordes of chinese happily sipping away while they much on snakcs from the traditional peanuts to doufu (tofu) and weird jellylike stuff yet to be identified. Centre stage there is in fact a stage, with loud, sometimes painful, KTV amateurs singing out their favourite karaoke songs with all their inebriated hearts. Outside its cooler and less crowded but you need to answer to the touts selling roses or music.

Get their early and slowly sip your way through the day and you are still doomed to be plastered before you leave. when things shut up at 10pm they are really only just getting started. Tables full of drunken friendly chinese call you over as you head for the loo, eager to talk and "Ganbei" with the lawai (foreigner) They've lined up 6 pitchers to ensure that they would not run dry after closing. YOu sit with them and have drunken conversations in broken english and chinese, and next thing you know they are drunkenly slapping you on the back as the stagger up and out to head home... The leave behind them another 5 pitchers lined up and the table and only you and your friend to take care of them. Oh dear. Waste not want not! Or if thats not the case, every night they empty out what is left of the kegs into pitchers and the 45kuai pitchers can be bargained down to 10 kaui, or maybe even FREE!, the snacks also are desperately "given" away. So, when you finally stumble out you are left two main things: A full 1.5L pitcher of beer in your right hand and the most ridiculous Cheshire cat grin across your blissfully glazed face. The cat, my friends, got the cream.

Replay this 5 times, and that was my five days at the qingdao beer festival. We ourselves had a good group going. Me, Frank, Julian, Angela, an adorably sweet chinese girl I had accosted for the week, and then in addition about 7 Belgians. Mornings were dejavu, get up, wander around the beachand town of old Qingdao, eat CHEAP seafood (20kuai crabs anyone?). "Quaff qingdao beer by the bag" as stated in the old Lonely Planet (basically instead of buying bottles from the shop they all have kegs and they fill up a bag, hand you a straw and ask for 5 kaui for 1.5L), head back to the hostel for warm clothes, and then get a taxi to "pijiu chang" and you are whisked off to the beer festival to start al over again.

Indeed, indeed it was a fantastic week, in a fantastic town, drinking fantastic beverages. The memory visibly suffered as compounded drunkenness from previous nights began to mesh together leaving you always patching together the previous eveing despite being sure that you weren't THAT drunk at THAT point... But one memory will always remain clear: THe Qingdao International Beer Festival was a very very good time.

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