Qingdao... contiued

Qingdao - pronounced Chin dao - is not as plastic as I first thought. Had the wrong impression as we are staying in the business district. Which is brand new with nice wide streets and plenty of tower blocks, not very interesting.

A couple of days ago we went 'downtowm' and found the old heart of the city. Lots of German archeticture as it was occupied up until 1949. The govenors house, a church, a cathedral and the prison still stand although they are now used by the communist party.

Many of the sights that were shown on a little map were either well hidden or in different locations as we could not find them. Gave up looking after a few hours and went to Old Jack's Cafe a great little bar near the hotel.

What we did find was the following.

A cathedral, who's I don't know as the dedication was in chineese, but think St Mary as there was a statue to her in the garden.

A pagoda at the end of the pier with a lighthouse on the distant island.

A German hunting and fishing lodge overlooking No 2 beach, yes another beach with that name., although this one is officially called Taiping bay.

No 2 beach Qingdao, not to be confused with....

No 2 beach Sierra Leone.

Down on the beach and all over the rocks there were what seemed like hundreds of wedding couples with photographers posing for the pictures of their happy day. Not sure if it was a special day for weddings or it was a daily occurance but there were an awful lot of them for a daily occurance, unless every couple the weds in Qingdao has to get their photo taken on the beach under an old bylaw or ancient charter or somesuch!

Away from the beach area, which was right downtown as Qingdao sits on a promontory that juts out into Jiaozhou bay, a natural deep water harbour on the Yellow sea, we found a mixture of old and new buildings. Like most cities some were nice and some ugly, others just plain bizzare.

Mixture of old and new.

The culture market, newish in an old style. In here were many stalls selling pearls and watches at dirt cheap prices.


Bizzarely there was a family of three bridges going nowhere, and indeed coming from nowhere. Maybe a job training exercise for apprentice concrete pourers. The apprentice demolition team will be by later to take them down, maybe?

Chineese fortune tellers on the steps by the bridges to nowhere. Maybe they know what it is all about, although they won't tell unless palms are crossed with silver Yuans and a translator is employed.

All in all a pretty interesting place, but full of little chineese people and some of the worst driving I have seen outside Italy and Cairo.