Tsingtao Beer Festival

Every year for two weeks in September Tsingdao holds a beer festival in the costal city of Qingdao to comemerate there 150 years of tradition. In honor of their achievements we rounded up 11 of our friends and decided to travel over 500 miles by train and cab to see this festival. Devin, Regis and I left thursday night (10:45pm) out of Beijing Central train station with a one way ticket to Qingdao (In China you can only buy a return train ticket from the place you are returning from, weird... I know). You also might be asking yourself...hey Jim, why are you spelling the beer and the place similarly Tsingtao and Qingdao. Well reader glad you asked. Thats because Tsingtao beer was founded by Germans and they couldnt say words like Qingdao, so they improvised. Anyway we left thursday on what seemed like the train from hell. Our seats were in a car that was over sold by about 50 tickets so people where standing, sitting, squating, and laying just about everywhere. Smoking was allowed and I've come to the realization that the Chinese only have one volume: loud. I sat in a six seater with 5 other chinese in a seat that didnt recline, luckly enough I had the window and did'nt get stuck in the middle seat. This was by far the worst part of the trip. Everything from here on out was clear sailing. (This is actually a whitty pun because Qingdao was where the sailing venue was for Olympics). Serina, a Chinese friend of our was meeting us and other friedns for the festival, bought our return ticket for us on a much nicer speed train that was only 5 hours to beijing.
Once we got there (6am)we checked in the hotel and slept until around noon. After that we just walked around and got to see a part of China that was unique and refreshing from the big cities. Qingdao is a nautical city with a specialty in seafood and their surf. We got a feel for the city and walked along the beach until we met up with Serina and her friends. They took us to this really small but delicious Chinese Seafood resturaunt. This was one of the highlights of the trip because none of them could speak english and they were big on chinese tradition. They taught us the proper way to give your friends a toast and that you should "根北" (pronounced "Gen Bei", literally meaning bottoms up) two glasses instead of one because odd numbers are bad luck. The chinese guys taught me the proper way to march in the Chinese army because some of them are in the chinese version of R.O.T.C.. After we went to meet our American friends who took a later train not to miss their classes of friday. Together we went out to a bar and saw a bar tender light bottles on fire and flare with them, and caught up with everybody else.
"Its a marathon, not a race" was the theme for the Saterday. We woke up had a hearty breakfast of potatos, meat, and rice and headed to the festival. The festival was a huge venue of almost any type of European and Chinese bear you could think of. We started the day at the hofbrauhaus and ended up at the Tsingtao stand. Along the way I had the privledge of eating Shark on a stick for about 10 kuai. We ended up leaving the festival early because our 朋友 (chinese friends) wanted to take us to the beach. So we walked a few blocks and got to the beach and hopped into the Yellow sea for about 30mins. We dried off by playing soccer with a couple of chinese guys and left the beach for dinner a little while later. Again we decided to have seafood because it was so good the night before. We went to this bar street and had dinner outside on a patio with both sets of friends. At the resturaunt we met so Shanghainese men who I decided to toast to with the toast that I learned the night before. They went nuts because I knew this toast that they kept on toasting us back and one guy even gave me his hat and phone number in case I ever go to Shanghai. We ate and drank with them and celebrated Jeff's 21st birthday which was on this past monday. We had a great dinner and night went back to get some sleep beacuse our train early the next morning. The train I took back to Beijing was the same type of train that I took to Tianjin to see the olympic football game. I had so much space and was so comfortable that I got in a solid nap and studied some chinese.
The amazing thing about this weeked besides the seafood, drinking, 7hr train rides, chinese friends, and festivals was that it cost less than $150 American. We traveled a distance further than New York to D.C with hotel, food, drink and entertainment for next to nothing. The conclusion drawn from this weekend is that I am amazed in the amount of people that actually live in China. You hear about 1.3B people and you read about it in books but it takes a while to actually understand what that means. Qingdao is a city thats barely on the map in China and yet it has a population of 7M, only 1M less than NYC. This weekend I got an appreciation for what 1.3B people acually looks like and means in terms of country and infrastructure. I think I learned a lot more than I anticipated this weekend. http://picasaweb.google.com/Jim.Lechleitner/TsingtaoBeerFestival?authkey=Ig9xQYC1LyU#