Qingdao Holiday (??) - Day 1 | Supertidy.net

Qingdao Holiday (青岛) – Day 1

Comments Published June 23rd, 2010 in Chinese Life

So, back in May holiday, myself and B headed to Qingdao (青岛) for a 5 day break. It was an awesome time, and I’ll present it to you in a day-by-day manner. Here’s the action from day one!

Here is where Qingdao is situated in China.

and this is a geographical summary of our holiday. Red is day 1. Green is day 2. Yellow is day 3. Blue is day 4. Pink is day 5.

This is day 1.

But, first things first. 6am minibus from Weinan to the airport.

Joanne and Vicky were also going on holiday, but not to Qingdao, but it meant we got to travel to the airport together.

Me and B.

The three pretty girls!

It was B’s first time on an airplane. Here she is outside our beastly Boeing 737-800!

Excited or nervous?

Studying!

En route!

China looks badass from above.

These shots all taken by B, by the way.

Arriving in Qingdao.

B in all her glory. 🙂 We were collected from the airport by a friend of a friend.

Driving into the city, saw a huge wedding. Lots of fireworks. Some things don’t change, no matter where you are in China.

On the way to our hotel, he had to drop something off at his boss’ crib. His apartment complex was BALLER. I’ve never seen anything like it. Usually exclusive, rich things are high in quality, low in quantity. But this was almost a small-city of super expensive apartments, and well-kept grounds. About 40 of these huge apartment buildings, all decked up floor to ceiling with £1000/square meter apartments. Ouch. The exclusivity and quality I’ve seen before; but never on this scale.

B posing for me.

This was the hotel we’d found on the internet, and the friend of a friend had booked for us. However, we got there, walked in… the hotel staff saw me, and their jaw hit the floor. “Foreigner.” they said. “Yes, I am.” I replied. Apparently that hotel wasn’t licensed to house foreigners. D’oh! We found another hotel with not too much trouble though, thanks to the friend of a friend. 🙂

After dropping our stuff in the hotel, we headed to the seafront. Another first for B. She’d never seen the sea before. 🙂

For the Beijing 2008 olympics, Qingdao is where they did all the sailing. This was the sailing center they built for it all.

I caught quite a good shot of this bird. 🙂

B getting close to the sea for the first time…

…A bit too close!

B became obsessed with finding shells. Hahahha. It took us a lot longer than I expected to walk down the coast line because of stopping every time the tiniest shell was spotted. Heheh. Cute! 🙂

Some of the seafront.

One thing that was HUGE was wedding photography. I saw so much being done, and occasionally “hi-jacked” some snaps; as you’ll see later.

not sure where this fella was headin.

B looking at shells. A brief story about Chinese accents and dialects. B saw the guy selling shells, asked how much. “5 shells for 4RMB.” he said (in Chinese, duh!) I also understood what he said… that made it about 40p for 5 big shells, so B spent a good chunk of time, picking the best shells, then handed the guy a 5RMB note. “Where’s my other 5RMB?” he asked. “Where’s my 1RMB change?” B asked. Well, it turns out 10 (pronounced ‘shi’ in standard Chinese) sounds a lot like 4 in Qingdao dialect (pronounced ‘suh’ in standard Chinese.) If B can’t understand people from there, what hope did I have? Haha.

We ended up not buying them. But at least I got some photos. Hehe.

More of a beachy beach.

A trend I’ve noticed, when I’m walking around with one of my big cameras, people always ask me to take their photo on their camera phone / camera. People see you have a big camera and assume you can take good photos; regardless of the fact you can’t speak their language. Haha. Anyway, we usually follow up by asking them to take our photo… they usually look scared, until we hand them B’s small compact camera. 🙂

People doing beachly things. Also; note the architecture. Very European in Qingdao. Has German history. Blah, blah, blah. If you’re interested, read Wikipedia. 🙂