Qingdao beer festival

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First apologies for the recent silence. I’ve been mostly wrestling with website building. My labours have paid off though and I’ve successfully completed Module 1, just 5 more to go… My work with Shanghai Sunrise (the charity I volunteer with) has stepped up a gear too, now that everyone’s back from summer holidays. I can’t believe it’s September already, I’ve been in Shanghai for 6 months!

So, enough of the excuses. I have managed to get out and about the last few weeks. A few weekends back a merry gang of us went to the Qingdao Beer Festival. Qingdao is 1.5 hours flight north of Shanghai, on the coast and home of China’s most famous beer brand - Tsingtao.

Before beer mayhem ensued we did our tourist duty and went for a walk up ‘the famous Laoshan mountain’. Taxis were no longer allowed up to the mountain and had to drop us at a car park halfway there. From there we had to pay 100 quai each for the tourist bus and entry. After enjoying some squid on sticks for lunch, we set off up the mountain… and the torrential rain started. When our bottom halves were sodden and our cheap and cheerful brollies started to leak we headed back to the halfway car park/mud-bath. But there was no sign of taxis or public transport to get us back down to town. After a while someone persuaded an official to call some taxis, saving us a long, soggy walk. The mountain was very nice, I’m sure it’s best enjoyed with sunshine though.

So, my experience of beer festivals has been small-scale, sampling ales from independent breweries, CAMRA-like. Looking back, my expectations of a Chinese beer festival were way off. I thought maybe we’d be sampling independent Chinese brews in an intimate homely setting of a small Chinese town. The beer festival site was huge, with a fairground, music, magic and ‘fashion shows’ on numerous stages, parades, karaoke, huge branded venues, loads of food stalls. So we pub-crawled our way around the site drinking mostly Australian and German beer and had a jolly good time! My most memorable moments were posing with Chinese people for their photos - I was the only Western female in our group; and having my first public pee - quite normal in China, all squatter loos mostly without doors, yikes, but when you’ve gotta go…

Sunday started with the inevitable hangover. We dipped our toes in the sea and then went into the city centre for a look around. Qingdao is a really lovely place, a very relaxed, chilled out, seaside vibe. Very different from Shanghai! As we didn’t have much time, we did our sightseeing from the back of a taxi. The driver thought we were a bit weird and kept trying to get a destination out of us to drop us off! We’d like to go back and spend a weekend there to see the place properly. And to take some photos as my camera ran out of battery, so no photos of Qingdao, sorry!

As with the way there, our 11pm return flight was delayed for a few hours. The last thing you need arriving back at 3am on a Monday morning is to haggle with taxi drivers about the taxi fare home. They wanted 250 quai. In the end we were offered a ride by a Chinese guy and his wife for 160 quai. 4am - bed. 9am - Chinese lesson.

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Photos

Laoshan mountain
sign: treasuring life and no climbing - very sensible advice

windmill toilets
site of the public pee