Qingdao, China on my 21st Birthday

This is the first part of the next group of blog posts about my travels at the end of my year abroad. The first place I went was to Qingdao in Shandong province. I also happened to be there on my 21st birthday!

We arrived at about 2am, because we got a cheap, late-night flight. So we had a bit of a lie in the next morning, then headed out to explore the city.

Almost immediately, we liked Qingdao for its unusual feel. There is a lot of German-style architecture 

We decided to walk through town and explore on our way to the beach. The first interesting thing we found was a food market, selling all the most incredible seafood and bugs. Some of the stuff they were selling I had never seen before!

The thing I thought looked the funniest were the sea urchins with plastic spoons in them ready to be eaten. I ended up trying some fried maggots, which a guy let us try for free. They kind of tasted like potato chips, but they were far too salty for my taste. 

We walked more towards the center and the streets were full of people and there were lots of cool shops to peep into. 

When we got to the cathedral, there were no fewer than 11 wedding photo shoots going on outside. It was hilarious. 

We started to look for a cafe to sit and relax for the afternoon. The one above was one option, but we kept looking and stumbled across a cafe/art gallery/book store. It was perfect and beautiful. It was called Liangyou 良友.

We sat there for several hours drawing, reading, listening to music, and people watching. 

I ended up finding a book there which I mentioned in my June recap. It's an illustrated travel journal in Chinese about the author's trip to Nepal. That was a lovely discovery!

We walked back through town at sunset and made it back to our hostel. 

We ate dinner and then a little while later we went on a run and explored the outskirts of town, where we were staying. We found this huge park with hundreds of people dancing in the park (like most parks in China). It was really nice to explore.

After that, we came back and got some mixed drinks at the hostel. 

The next morning we headed for Zhongshan Park (Sun Yat-sen Park). We found this cute little pagoda in the middle of a pond filled with lily pads. We sat there and ate our picnic of kimbap and chips. 

There wasn't much to do there, so we headed to Lu Xun Park, which was by the sea. We walked past the beach, which actually looked pretty nice. 

By the path, there were some pretty stunning flowers blooming. 

Most of the park was shaded with evergreens of some kind and it was really peaceful there (as long as you ignored the occasional stare or being pointed at). 

This day happened to be my 21st birthday, so we decided to find a nice-ish restaurant to go to dinner. On the way, we found this pile of Qingdao boxes, which seemed appropriate for my 21st.

This was definitely not a traditional Japanese restaurant, but it was really cute and surprisingly cheap.

Naturally I had a drink in the spirit of my first legal drink and we put candles in my katsu curry for lack of a cake. We thought it was pretty funny. 

After dinner, we found an indoor food market and outdoor food stalls and walked around there before heading back to the hostel. 

Oh and we got a bubble tea after dinner. 

We actually found some Uyghurs selling 馕 (naan). I chatted to them a bit about where they were from in Xinjiang. We went back to the hostel and made a (more) real birthday cake. This one turned out pretty great. 

The next morning we packed up to get the train.

When we got to the train station, first of all I noticed the woman working there had an abacus at her desk. That was odd. But the second thing was that our train tickets never got reserved. I paid for them, but there was some kind of glitch and we didn't have train tickets. The next available train (with seats anyway) was the next day, so we booked those and headed back to the hostel to check in again. We had to cancel the hostel in Luoyang and rearranged. 

When we got back to the hostel, we were in pretty bad moods. We took naps and woke up kind of like it was a new day, which was probably the best thing we could have done. 

We walked around our neighborhood and found a quick bite to eat. 

When we came back to the room, the golden light lit up our whole room. It was beautiful!

We didn't do much that night. We went to bed early so we could wake up early and go to the beach. We didn't stay long. It turns out there were about 5 other women at the beach (but hundreds of men in speedos). We were the only people there under the age of 40. We had worn bikinis, which is normal in most countries. When we got there, we realized the way women dress for the beach in Qingdao is to wear a conservative swimsuit (or full-body wetsuit) and a mask, which looks to be the material of a swimcap and the shape of a ski mask. This is to make sure women's faces don't tan at all and stay white. It's also terrifying and hilarious. 

After the beach, we tried to get our nails painted. We ended up having an embarrassing exchange in a shop that sold salon-grade nail polish but didn't actually paint nails. 

On the way to find some lunch, we found this cute blow-up Baymax (who is called 大白 or 'big white').  

We eventually did make it to our train and were on our way to Luoyang. 

The train ride was really pretty, but it was about 6 hours on the bullet train. By the end of it, we were ready to be there. 

This was only the first of many long train rides, but in the end we made it and met up with our friend James there.