There's nothing like going on a tour bus with Chinese university students to experience a cultural event. Namely, the event is going to Qingdao not to see the cultural event (the Dragon Boat Festival) but to go to the beach and have fun around the city, very similar, in fact, to what American university students might do to celebrate Spring Break (only with more drinking, wanton parties and forgetting it all happened the next day, of course).
Even so, it was all in all a great time, for we were able to see: a monument built in honor of the 2008 Olympic games...
Experience the awesomeness that is a relatively cheap Chinese hotel equipped with an almost see-through restroom...
Realize the view we got out of our hotel window is of a sketchy place where people make numbers for light-up signs...
Visit a small and crowded Qingdao beach...
Walk down a crowded pier to look at/pay entrance to a two-storied octagonal building filled with nothing but merchants selling wears you can buy on any street market and realizing later the reason it was so crowded was because the building is the logo for none other than:
The Tsingtao (Wade-Giles romantization of Qingdao) Beer company logo...
And going to another Chinese beach the next day before leaving that evening (Monday).
Eventful, of course, until I was the only one who later realized (with a bit of light-shedding help from my parents) that we'd been swindled into paying a considerable amount of money (￥360, currently the equivalent of $55.58) by a Soochow student who convinced us we'd be going to see the Dragon Boat Festival... Fair warning for future travels though.
No comments:
Post a Comment