Week 4 (Part 2) - City of Sails

What you see is what you get

Our first dinner was at some really popular restaurant. It seemed like your iconic Qingdao eatery. Many patrons, inside and outside, smoking, inside and outside, drinking beer, inside and outside, from mugs or plastic bags, as it is custom. There was also some pretty exotic food. In general, I was exposed to a lot more atypical food items in Qingdao. My list of new foods grew to include, octopus (tasty, but chewy), chicken heart (tasty, but tough – rejected), beef stomach (fine, but not great), pig ear (tasted like you would imagine cartilage might taste), pig foot (apparently prepared poorly, icy, not bad, not much too it), pork liver (not great), whelk (really good, both fileted and whole, depending on species), some crustacean I do not know the name of yet, and yellow croaker, horse mackerel and squid dumplings cooked in squid ink, giving it a black hue (delicious).

Southern Qingdao

The days in Qingdao was spent giving presentations about our work, answering questions and discussing projects with current OUC students and also watching Jie give a couple lectures. We were treated to lunches and dinners. These meals were always included way too much food and at least 1L beer/person. Needless to say, I felt like a stuffed goose my entire time in Qingdao. It should be mentioned that in visiting OUC, we were also visiting our good friend Chongliang, someone who had spent 2 years at UMaine in our lab, who was a newly minted associate professor at OUC. 

Old meets new

He was kind enough to walk us around a good portion of the city (for 4 hours) that took us through cobbled streets, wooded drives and along the coast and the beaches. Really, as you may have seen from the picture posted in the last entry, Qingdao really emits a Mediterranean feel. Adobe houses, climbing the hillsides, open air markets and the densely packed housing really gave me this sense. Maybe I’m wrong – I’ve never been, after all. There was a mix of old, traditional eastern and western architecture and the modern-style building throughout the city. 

View from top of a Laoshan peak

We visited some touristy sites, including a temple built in the middle of a bay, some beaches, fenced in to avoid sharks (I think more for the sharks’ benefit). These beaches were a familiar scene. Umbrellas, tents, volleyball (no nets), laying on the beach. Where it differed was significant. Just outside of the fenced area were piles of seagrass. Maybe a foot tall in places, with waves of green lurching onto the piles. I also noticed an incredible amount of broken glass mixed in with the sand and pebbles. Seemed less than ideal, but nobody else seemed to mind much! Jetskis and motorboats raced around just outside the swimming area. Laps, back and forth, carrying passengers (for money maybe?), it all seemed very pointless. I’ll take Maine beaches every day.

Lots of aquaculture

The last full afternoon in Qingdao saw a group of us hire a car to take us to Laoshan, an ocean city that laid at the foot of a mountain range just north of Qingdao. The drive around this peninsula was really spectacular, with grand views of the cities, terraced agriculture and buildings, the ocean and expansive aquaculture operations on the seaward side of the drive and boulderous, misty mountains to the landward side. Before we embarked, we had an enormous lunch at a famous restaurant in Qingdao, known for their soup.

What you see as you drive into the Laoshan area

Probably 120% too much food (as usual) and 2 pitchers of beer, right before hiking, was not something I would have advised. It was hot and muggy for the hike, which was a cathedral of granite steps straight to the top. The views were stunning all the way up. So were the number of vendors peddling jewelry, fruit and refreshments the entire way. The result was maybe more trash than I was comfortable with littering the trail (and especially the summit). Perhaps the only place I’d seen beyond the reach of the cleaning workers and the difference was noticeable. Luckily, if you kept your gaze above the ground, you were treated to a magnificent view of the villages and cities along the coast, the Yellow Sea and large swaths of the aforementioned seagrass, piled up within bays and along ocean currents. After a farewell dinner, it was time to rest up for the return trip.