On the 29th I flew into Qingdao and we (Timber and I) made our way from the Qingdao airport on a slightly rickety but relatively normal public bus. Stopping off at the hostel to drop our few things, we made our way down to the beach where I saw more thongs, g strings and naked children than I probably, hopefully, will ever see again. I guess Chinese men aren't as shy about their skin showing as Koreans are. While it seemed like everyone was pretty into being at the beach, swimming and making sand sculptures, many many extraordinary precautions were made to not get sun tanned.
The next day we took a train to Tai Shan, one of the most famous mountains in China. The train ride wasn't too bad--lots of rice fields and countryside, 5 hours of chatting and music.The hike up Tai Shan was longer than it could have been, and shorter than it should have been. Once in Tai'an, the city at the base of the mountain, we evaded hundreds of taxi drivers who wanted to give us a "special rate" to get to the top of the mountain. We found the bus instead, and made our way to the stairs that would torture my legs for the next 2-3 hours. Halfway up the mountain, we found the oasis known as the cable car and took that the rest of the way up.
Once nearly to the top, there were more stairs but also a more relaxed pace since we knew we'd make it in time for our hotel reservation, having caught the very last cable car. There are lots of pretty temples and views from the top.
After staying the night in a schmancy hotel, we woke up at 4am for the sunrise and cheered along with hundreds of Chinese (we didn't see a single foreigner the whole time we were there) when the sun poked its head out from under the clouds. This sunrise is supposed to signify the beginning of the world, and it may have been.
After going down the other side of the mountain, we found a bus to get us back to town. While waiting for the mountain to town shuttle bus thingy to leave the mountain, we made friends with a super helpful mountain man who liked to scare me with cicadas. Once we were already inside the bus, he thought it was really funny to catch one and thrust it through the window at me, scaring me out of my seat. I think he wanted to crush it between some paper and gift it to me, but I insisted he let it go instead.
Now onto the absolute highlight of the trip. While waiting in line to buy a train ticket back to Qingdao, we met a guy who wanted to sell us two extra tickets he had for the next train out of town. In a snap decision, not knowing the train schedule, we bought them from him and boarded in the half hour, only to discover what should have been a 3-5 hour train ride was a 7-8 hour train ride. We'd had no lunch, breakfast several hours ago and only a bit of water, which turned out to be a good thing since the train bathrooms were squatter holes that emptied onto the tracks--and forbidden to be used while the train was stopped. After about two hours sitting separately, Timber came to tell me how long, exactly, our ride would be. She came to stay and hang out a while, and we ended up making friends with about 50 other passengers in the car.
We taught them to play a Korean game--3.6.9--with Chinese numbers and soon had even the train conductor wondering what was going on. It was the perfect opportunity to use our Lonely Planet phrasebook, since we had oodles of time to trains-late.
It turned out that most of the people in our car were on their way to an Amway convention, and couldn't understand why we didn't personally know the guys in their 80s brochure about the company. There was nothing about pyramid schemes in the phrasebook.
After getting back to Qingdao, we went to our next hostel where we stayed right on the beach. We had some amazing Schezuan noodles, saw some pretty temples, parks and music, and some good times at the beach before heading back to Daegu, and back to work.
Kimchi and Quietze/Eggplant out China! Hope to see you again real soon.
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