a little coffee

 Chris and I spent two weeks in Qingdao soaking in the beach, cafes, pizza, and English-language bookshops. We meandered through the parks, the Tsingtao Beer Brewery museum, and took a ferry to a nearby island to explore a different beach. But most of the two weeks was simply relaxing in the atmosphere of this very unDoodle-like city. By some miracle, Qingdao has preserved much of its old German-style architecture, unlike the rest of the country where historic buildings are systematically destroyed and replaced by an ugly tile monstrosity that itself will be demolished and replaced by another ugly in ten years. 

From one of the three mushroom tops at Signal Hill Park, we admired a sunset view of the city. On one side: the sea rolling onto the hot, sandy beaches of the Old Town, where most of the German architecture stands. Crisp, licorice red roofs atop vanilla buildings peaked out from swaths of trees. Viewed this way from above or from the Little Qingdao peninsula that juts into the sea away from the city, Qingdao looks like a Mediterranean town. This alone made us love the city more. 

On the other side: sprawling east of the Old City is the land of shiny high rises with tinted, reflective windows that are standard everywhere else in China. Beijing, Yantai, Dandong, even outside Anyang there are these anonymous office and condo buildings. But this less pretty new side is where the bookshops and cafes were. And where we spent much of our time, happily stretching out for a couple hours in a quiet, clean, comfortable place. This was our luxurious escape from the months in Anyang.

Like most tourists, Chris and I found sweet digs in the Old Town. We stayed at Kai Yue, a hostel built from an old church. To anyone going to Qingdao, I recommend this place. It revelled in its oldness. Creaky hardwood floors, chipped and cracking in places, decorative woodwork on the doors and moldings on the ceiling, colorful vintage furniture in two lounges. Bizarre murals on one wall, old post-its with scribbled messages in Chinese on another. In the middle of the night, the staff left only one light on on our floor at the end of the hall near the bathroom (the all the rooms on the fourth floor shared a bathroom). Walking back to my room after a bathroom trip towards the gape of darkness at the far end, I imagined ghosts emerging from the maroon carpet to tickle my legs.

The hostel’s restaurant/lounge, though, appeared recently remodeled. Framed or matted photographs hung on lilac walls, latte and turquoise colored chairs gathered around hardwood tables on which rested a lamp and/or tea lights. They had a full bar, pool table and dart board. Before or after venturing into the hot sun, we spent a lot of time in the spacious lounge, reading and relaxing while nibbling on french fries, occasionally ordering a surprisingly good margarita pizza and (me) indulging in their tasty, inexpensive coffee.

After a few days, we discovered the nearby bus 228 took as directly to the new part of town (cafe! books!) or a transfer point to hitch bus 317 to our favorite beach far on the east skirts of town, away from the crush at the beaches closest to the Old Town. We spent a couple days some blindingly hot, others cloudy and rainy, at the beaches of Shilaoren. 2.5km stretch of sand and waves. This was Chris’s favorite part of the trip, battling the waves. Qingdao experienced a stretch of cloudy, rainy weather (which coincided with the typhoon that hit China further south) which turned the lapping waves into a ferocious force. In water barely waist high, tumultuous waves would crash against you, chucking you this way or that. In Chris’s case- turning his body a reddish purple color.

“Poseidon calls me to battle!” he announced, hurling himself against the wave while gobbling lots of saltwater because his mouth hung open from the sound effects he was making during the charge, “Hoo-ah!” Glub glub glub.

Being mortal, I could only take so much on those stormy days and escaped Poseidon’s clutches without war wounds. When resting from battle, Chris let me bury him in the sand or we dug holes until the sea called us and we went charging in.

On brighter beach days, with more people about, we noticed gobs of Doodle children, ages just-started-walking up to seven, eight sans any scrap of clothes. (Also 14 year-olds squatting and peeing into the sand). Not even the pretense of clothes like the glorified bib that many Doodle babies wear. Beaches in Qingdao were more progressive than those of Yantai. Plenty of girls and ladies ran about in swimsuits. Even a few obvious foreigners wore their itty bitty bikinis. 

Several different nights Chris and I strolled down to the waterfront in the Old Town where the smallest but probably most crowded beaches are. Even at night with only the hazy orange glow from the street lights, people swam in the sea or trolled the tidal pools hidden amongst the boulder clusters on the beach, hunting for treasure. Dozens of street vendors pedalled seashell jewelry, pearls, and a yellowish fruit that looked like an obese porcupine. 

After a day of heavy walking and book buying, Chris and I ate a picnic of cheese, bread and yogurt near the Olympic sailing beach and watched as people bought paper lanterns and sent them floating into the night sky like miniature hot air balloons. After a while, a section of sky above Qingdao was dotted with pricks of light. Further away in the Old Town you could just make-out the lanterns flickering above the haze of light pollution, like lightning bugs blinking up in the trees in your neighbor’s yard.