Qingdao (5th Trip)

After staying 2 consecutive weeks in Yantai, we needed a new trip. It's my 5^th trip in China which was during the weekend of 30^th-31^st of July. We went to Qingdao in Shandong Provice which is 3 hours by bus from Yantai. Qingdao is Shandong’s most famous city. Qingdao was a colony of Germany and there is still a big deal of German touch to it. VolksWagen is popular there as Toyota is in UAE. Qingdao is famous for:

• Zhan Pier
• The biggest beer producer in China (Tsingtao Beer) which was built by Germans
• The widest sand beaches in China
• The 2008 Olympics Sailing Center
• The longest sea-bridge in the world
• Laohu Shan (The Cherries Mountain I went to on the 1^st trip)
• Parks, aquariums and museums

Zhan Pier

Kid fishing at Zhan Pier

Well, the good side of the trip was that it is the only trip in which all the 5 of us (foreigners) went together.Although Qingdao seems to be the busiest city in Shandong Province with flight and cruise connection to all of China, it is not a special place for real distinctive tourism. It is quite hot and things are far apart from each other with no real unique aspect. For us it was actually as we say in Arabic, “smell but don’t taste”. This phrase actually sounds weird when I try to explain it to others here! We actually knew all the locations of places to visit but being 5 people, it was hard to settle on common grounds. At some points we reached locations and just looked from outside. Time was also limited during our weekend and traffic was jammed.

On the rockside of the sea

Church in Qingdao. They were photo-shooting there

We had a main mission to accomplish in this trip; to reach and have lunch at Diner 22, a famous Western style restaurant that was a little far from the center of the city. The food there was a relief, we never had such American style food since months!

At Diner 22

The second day we went to the best beach in Qingdao. The water was cold but still deserved a refreshing swim! The beach was so long, still not as fascinating as Jumeirah’s Beach or Sour’s Beach in Lebanon.

Gymnasium at the beach!

Olympics Sailing Center

Run Run Run!! Around China there are infinite statues of anything you would think of

After getting back from Qingdao and looking at the pictures we took, I realized that what we actually really accomplished is taking pictures of a lot of food, especially all the weird kinds of seafood and scorpions and insects on sticks! 

Food Market

Since there are a lot of food pictures, some really delicious-looking and some really disgusting, there will be separate posts about them and other food related issues.