Qingdao Beer Festival

[note that there is a post for the first days days of the silk road that shows up BEFORE this one, even though it was posted after]

I just got back from the Qingdao (also written Tsingdao) beer festival. Qingdao was really interesting because it was a German city until after WWII, so most of the architecture was German. It was also the Germans who introduced beer to China in the first place (big surprise right?). So this is an annual 3 week festival where international and local breweries get together to throw a massive party with live performances, concerts, drinking games, etc.

We got it at around 8 on Friday night, to find that our hotel had given away one of our rooms. We had the confirmation including a guarantee that the rooms would be available until 10PM, but they gave it away anyway. So we had 15 people between to hotel rooms. We took the two rooms, for which we were explicitly told that no more than 4 people could sleep in each. We agreed, then got into the elevator with 15 of us anyway. I guess the shady parts of China do pay off sometimes for foreigners. We ended up saving about a thousand kuai by only getting two rooms, which went into a communal beer fund for the weekend.

We didn't go to the festival because it was 800 kuai (roughly $115USD) to get in. What they were doing at the opening ceremony that was worth that much money I'll never know. Anyway, we just went to a local place near the hotel. They were charging 25 kuai for a Tsingdao beer (the same beer as the city), which is outrageous because its usually 5-7 kuai, 10 max. They told us that its special because its in Qingdao, which was obviously bs because the bottles were exactly the same. Its really common for people to make up blatant lies in an effort to extort foreigners out of large sums of money here in China. No matter where you are, as a foreigner you have to bargain for a better price. So we did some work on them and instead were able to get one bottle of Jack Daniels and one bottle of this Russian vodka for 500 kuai including all the mixers and everything. Both bottles were sealed, which is also a big deal in China because they water down everything. Most shots and mixed drinks are more water than anything.

Anyway, that was just to give you an idea of what it's like any time you go anywhere in China. Always ridiculous prices followed by some hard haggling and finally a decent deal. Luckily, my Chinese is getting better pretty fast because I have to be able to speak enough to haggle on anything, even just a water bottle on the street.

Now to the actual purpose of this entry: the beer festival!
We got there around 12:30. It was essentially a fair crossed with a beer garden. There were prominent German beers as well as Tsingdao and other Chinese beers. Each brand had its own area, some with concerts and some with other attractions. After a few beers we thought we should bring some American drinking games to China. So we got some cups and setup flip cup. There are two teams, one on each side of the table. Each person has a cup with beer in it. The first person starts by drinking their beer then sets it on the edge of the table and tries to flip it so that it lands top down, then the next person on their team does the same thing. The first team to finish flip all their cups wins. This, unsurprisingly, got a lot of attention. We had a crowd of Chinese people around us taking pictures and posing with us.

On a side note, this festival had AWESOME kabobs: shark, crab, deer, etc. All of it was phenomenal, thus its all we ate all day.

After that we wondered around and settled at another to play some beer pong. We didn't have ping pong balls, but being the innovative college students we are, we used bottle caps instead. This ended up being considerably more difficult than anticipated, but it was great because we drew even more attention. The local newspaper showed up and took pictures for a while, including a big group picture with a bunch of Chinese people that joined in on the games. Its amazing how in China westerners are almost like celebrities. Everywhere we go people take pictures and stare at us in disbelief.. as if they've never seen a non-chinese person before. We have one Nigerian guy on our trip. He was recently on the subway and a chinese guy came up to him, rubbed his finger on his skin, and was shocked that no black residue came off. What can you do but laugh in those situations?

After the beer pong we walked to the beach that was about 3 blocks away. The sand was redish and the water was warm, so we had a good time.

Later that night we went to a seafood restaurant that ended up being a Tsingdao pitchers of beer restaurant. They were so busy that the only thing we got for an hour was beer. Then we ended up getting some more interesting food: whole shrimp kabobs, snails, chicken feet, etc. It was awesome. After about 2 hours there we went to a club and finally got back around 3. We caught an 8AM train back to Beijing and arrived safely at around 2:30.

That's it for now. I didn't bring my camera (for obvious reasons) but the newspaper is supposed to email us some pictures, and a couple other people took pics as well. So i'll add those in as I get them. I'm also slowly but surely working my way through the silk road trip, so stay tuned for those posts as well!