Saturday March 14th…
The morning started with an alarm at 5:30AM. It was so early! We had arranged for the van from the hostel to take us to the airport at 6AM. We had an early flight to Qingdao. Qingdao is on East coast, North of Shanghai. It was once a Germany area and last summer it was the host to the Sailing in the Beijing Summer Olympics. The city is absolutely gorgeous!!!! It is a mixture of San Francisco, CA with the hills and the water and Florence, Italy with the European feel. The streets are narrow and the rooftops are exactly like Florence!! It was a great cit that you could just wander in for days and get lost.
Our hostel was an old observatory, the rooms were nice, Caitlin and I had a room to ourselves. The view was gorgeous! Looked right over the city straight to the water! They converted the actual observatory part of the building into a lounge/café. The showers were scalding hot one minute and freezing cold the next, which made showering a less than enjoyable experience. The woman at the front desk was no help at all but the man that was there at night was a lot of help.
After getting settled and showered we walked around Qingdao. We weaved in and out of the tiny streets packed with markets and vendors of all sorts. Eventually we made our way over to the Tsingtao brewery. We have enjoyed many Tsingtao beers so we thought we should have a brewery tour. This brewery tour, which the tour books write about, is more of a museum with a quick glimpse at the bottling of some beer. It was still interesting and I am glad we went…after all we did get two free beers and some peanuts out of the ticket purchase. One of the coolest things they showed us was the old brewery and all of the old equipment. It was cool to see how different machines have evolved.
After the tour we wandered around for a while and eventually found a hole in the wall restaurant, which of course was delicious. After dinner a few of us headed back to the hostel to see the sunset from the decks of the observatory…absolutely beautiful! I felt like we were some place tropical, along with everyone from Purdue that is on spring break right now.
The remainder of the night we stayed in the hostel. We made plans for the next day and then just hung out. Eventually Caitlin and I went upstairs to the café and ordered some cappuccino. Some of the guys were up there talking with a girl from England. Her name was Elly and she was super nice. She had just finished teaching English in South Korea and now she is traveling China for a while before returning home to England.
Eventually I went out on the observatory deck and I was able to see stars, and they were gorgeous!!!! It was a beautiful clear night! Qingdao is a big city but all the city lights shut off early so it was perfect...I guess that is why the observatory is there.
It was a very relaxing/early night, which was needed after our late night with an early morning wake up call.
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