Qingdao

Howzit, my China! (one for our South African readers). Bit of a long update, as we have a lot of thoughts to share 😆

We arrived in the Middle Kingdom on Sunday morning, after sailing overnight from Incheon to Qingdao on a 15hr ferry, in a private room that included a bath! Luxury for all of £70. We are a little late as we forgot that the ferry only goes on alternate days. Whoops.

Qingdao is an unusual starting point, but we have really enjoyed easing into China here. It’s the country's beer capital, boasting the Tsingtao Brewery and the Qingdao International Beer Festival (essentially a Chinese Oktoberfest). Unsurprisingly, this also means it is known as the most laidback Chinese city. A visit to the Tsingtao Brewery Museum provided historical context and two starter beers at 10am 😂 German occupation of Qingdao in the 1880s brought with it a brewery. The old bottles have a swastika on them with the words ‘Absolutely Pure’ above, which is… awks 🫠 (and predates the Nazis by 30 years, bizarrely). The Japanese conquest led to Tsingtao being refined into a Sapporo-style product. After 1949, Tsingtao was nationalised, and the brewmasters re-titled as ‘Party Secretaries.’

The quality of the beer became a matter of national importance and pride. You can feel this throughout the city: beer flows in their veins! The museum and festival are completely family-friendly (for better or worse), with wobbly-floor exhibits for kids to experience the feeling of drunkenness, and fun mascots to help promote the health benefits of beer drinking. Is anyone going to tell them?

The annual beer festival runs for a full month from mid-July, so we arrived with it in full flow. We visited the Qingxi King tent and had a ball in the Tsingtao tent, where we were adopted by a lovely family who insisted we have some of their seafood platter and several 1L beers 🍻 'Tent' is a bit of a misnomer—these are like aircraft hangars with enormous music stages and thousands of seats. Nothing is small in China.

This feels like the right time to share our beer rankings for the year so far, scored out of 10. Criteria include flavour, availability on draft, packaging, and whether it is good in the heat:
🇹🇭 Leo: 2
🇰🇭 Hanuman: 3
🇹🇭 Chang: 4
🇻🇳 Pasteur St: 4
🇰🇷 Cass: 4.5
🇰🇷 Terra: 5
🇮🇩 Bintang: 5.5
🇻🇳 Saigon: 5.5
🇸🇬 Tiger: 6
🇹🇭 Singha: 6
🇻🇳 Hanoi: 6
🇻🇳 Huda: 6.5
🇰🇭 Angkor: 7
🇨🇳 Tsingtao: 7
🇰🇭 Cambodia: 7.5
🇯🇵 Kirin Ichiban: 8
🇯🇵 Asahi: 8
🇻🇳 Bia Hoi & Vietnamese local drafts: up to 9
🇯🇵 Sapporo: 9
🇱🇦 Beerlao: 9.5

Despite having an international festival, we seemed to be the only white people in the entire place. Dan has been a hit with Chinese children who all want a photo with him (especially when he lets his curls range free). We have been subject to a fair bit of staring, but it never feels malicious. At the Huilan Pavilion, which features on the Tsingtao label, we were greeted with smiles and reciprocated many a thumbs up.

We also witnessed several cases of public urination 😂 China smells like the 90s, before smoking in public was banned, but there are clearly moves to tidy up, with many litter pickers sweeping and a ubiquitous police presence. As millions of people join the middle class from one generation to the next, there’s an inevitable adjustment period. But we have been pleasantly surprised so far by how clean and modern everything feels.

Food-wise, things are also looking up after the challenges of Korea! We’ve found that if we look for Muslim-friendly restaurants, and Buddhist temples, we can get pork-free meals. Spanish mackerel dumplings have been a fast favourite, and we’re back in egg fried rice territory. Garlic is also back on the menu 🥳 Breakfast foods are still absent and dairy a distant dream, but having been in Asia for seven months now we are habituated to soy sauce in every single meal.

It is still hot, cracking well over 35° daily, and the city seems to pick up at night, with rowdy tables appearing on pavements. We have resolved to sleep in later and shift our days to join the nightlife. The heat also means we are seeing a LOT of the 'Beijing Bikini', where chubby middle-aged men stay cool by rolling their T-shirt up under their armpits, baring their tummies to the world. We will endeavour to get Dan on this trend.

Enjoying China is about being prepared: downloading Chinese in Google Translate, setting up eSIMS, WeChat, Alipay and two VPNs. Going from our cards being rejected 70% of the time in Korea to paying through WeChat QR codes on our phones has been a revelation. It doesn’t always work and sometimes we have to re-verify with our passports mid-payment (awkward as hell), but between us we get there eventually and have not yet needed to run for cash. We can see that this would be a nightmare if you landed here without prior warning, but so far everything has gone relatively smoothly for us 🤞

Next stop, Xi'an 🚄Read more