Qing Dao

November 30, 2006

This is how I get around China. I show people these post-its and they take me places. It is not a foolproof. I have accepted it though as a viable means of transport. I seem to have forsaken the all-knowing guidebook and legitimate research in favor of random possibility. I land and scramble for information. Today it worked, mostly.

It all started out wrong. A friend of mine backed out on me at the last minute, no reason stated. After class I boarded a bus full of students and then had to fight my way through the young pubescent hordes yelling for the bus driver to let me out after he took an alternate route, bypassing my stop. The fascinating thing was that I was asking students all around me to tell the bus driver to stop, to help me, yet they all just stared at me quietly. There is a chance that they didn’t understand me, but surely the sight of a man flailing and shouting near the back of the bus must have resonated with someone.

At the bus station I boarded a junker, a heap for sure. Blackened on the inside from the smoke of a thousand cigarettes, I could clearly see that I was in for a long ride. I had heard that the ride would take about four hours. It took five and felt like three days. I grew fingernails and a beard. The oldest man I have seen in China rode with us. He aged as well.

People boarded at all manner of strange location, at on ramps, under overpasses, by gas stations. There seemed to be an elaborate system of phone calls and shouting out the window that allowed people to board with their various sacks. I have never seen such an assortment of paraphernalia as I have on the buses in China.

The driver drove with his window partially open the entire trip. I was cold but offered no complaint as it lessened the amount of smoke that pooled overhead. I saw some of the bleakest, greyest landscape I have ever seen in my entire life between Rong Cheng and Qing Dao. Miles and miles of tree branches and the outlines of mountains through overcast skies, harvested cornfields, piles of pasty earth, mostly colorless, except for the occasional green field of baby wheat or pink brickyard. Sporadically we came across power plants spewing clouds of smoke into the air and the early stages of cities around them. The miracle of industrialization. I saw vehicles hauling cardboard, fiberglass automobile shells, hay, pine, people, cornstalks, people lying on cornstalks, pigs.

At one point an empty bottle that had occupied a seat up until that time fell onto the floor and started rolling around. The driver told a woman to throw it out the window. I looked outside and noticed a small seating area up ahead with benches and foliage. She seemed to wait until we arrived there and threw it at the little park so that it shattered around where people would walk. The driver noted the strangeness of her shot selection as well and told her he meant for her to throw it into the bushes. She responded that she heard him, but didn’t understand him. I am not alone in this, apparently.

Upon arriving in Qing Dao I inquired what the name of the place was so that I might catch a taxi back when I return. The driver said, “Qing Dao.” I had to specify, the name of the bus station.

I caught a taxi to the hotel that Mrs. Yu had set up for me, upon my request, through old friends of hers from school. It’s still too early to say, but it seems my request contained a fatal error. I had read once in a guidebook, which I subsequently forgot to take notes from or bring, that one of the hotels near city center had rooms with balconies overlooking the sea. I thought this was great and asked Mrs. Yu if she could arrange a room like that. She unfortunately did get me a room overlooking the sea ("Perfect Life Between Sea and Mountain"), only not in city center. Qing Dao is on a peninsula. I am somewhere on the outskirts of the city, on a desolate strand of beach, from the looks of it, and it is not summertime.

There is an upside to this. While trying to coordinate the Internet in my room with the hotel staff, I befriended them and have plans for all types of unspecified fun over the next two days. Seeing the Internet not working and time slowly slipping away, I told them not to worry about it, that it was more important for me to go and eat and have fun as soon as possible, and where exactly would that be…? They told me of a place down the street (surely there must have been something lost in the translation) that was alternately beautiful, bamboo, and animals. I was drilling the boys for deeper meaning when one of them offered to take me out to at least fulfill the eating portion of my request.

We hopped in the hotel minibus and drove off into the night. I found out that my host’s name was Hu and that he had been in Qing Dao for 2 years and thought highly of the place, and though he was on the clock, it was somehow permissible for him to take his new American friend out for dinner, on me of course. I gathered that he was on sporting terms with hotel management. We drove through an upscale Qing Dao neighborhood and stopped for gas before arriving at the restaurant. In China, I find that it is quite common to pick your food out from a selection of fish tanks and plates of uncooked meat. I am always confused by this as I’m never sure what’s what. I attempted to make selections based on what Hu seemed excited about.

The food, truthfully, was excellent. We feasted on a plate of spicy fried lamb, legs of pork, some kind of fish I had seen him handle a few minutes earlier, and raw oysters dipped in wasabi and soy sauce, accompanied by a couple of Tsing Tao beers. We made suitable conversation, I think I may have a ride to the brewery tomorrow and definitely some sort of outing planned for tomorrow night, perhaps including hot pot and maybe dancing (?), and, more importantly, I felt like I had pierced the usually opaque veil separating me from China.