Qingdao, Warm Beer and Other Weird Asian Quirks

If you've ever wondered whether there is a place in China where there were no bikes, the answer is yes. Although the new sections of the Qingdao is flat, most of the older (and more charming) parts of the city are on the hilly parts of town, making biking impossible. Thus, bikes are not a mode of transportation here and traffic flows a lot more smoothly. Surprisingly, given the ubiquity of mopeds and motorbikes in Vietnam and Taiwan, there are very few in Beijing and Qingdao (the only 2 places in China I've been to so far). If I had a license, I would totally get a Vespa to get around. Traffic is horrendous in Beijing.

We visited Laoshan, a mountain range about an hour's drive outside Qingdao, where the mineral water (supposedly the purest water in China) for Qingdao beer is sourced. Some local guy convinced us that he could help us bypass the ticket booth and led us through a really sketchy trail up part of the mountain that got us on the main path. We had to crawl through a section of cut-open barb-wired fence. Yes, it did occur to me several times that it was a very dumb idea. Once we got on the main path, we climbed up hundreds of steps to get us up to the top of the mountain where we crawled through the dark Mitian cave (we didn't believe the vendors that were trying to sell us flashlights). It was a hot and sweaty endeavour, but the views from the top of the mountain are incredible, making it worthwhile. There were other things on the mountain but we skipped it since we were starving. We took a chair lift down the mountain.

Post-lunch, we visited the Tsingdao brewery and museum, where we had the opportunity to try several kinds of freshly brewed Tsingdao beers. There was this little house you could go into (called the "Beer House") that was so slanted that even though I was not drunk, I felt drunk and disoriented. It was a really bizarre feeling. And I met a guy, who asked me where I was from. He was surprised that I spoke perfect English. When I told him I was from New York, his response was, "but you look Asian." I could not believe it. He was from South Carolina. I'll leave it at that.

The first time I was served warm beer in Qingdao, I just figured maybe they ran out of cold beer. But after I was repeated served warm beer, I asked someone about it. Apparently the Chinese believe that drinking things that are too cold is bad for the body. They drink warm beer, warm milk, etc. Not a huge fan of beer to begin with and warm beer does not help. It tastes terrible. Oh, and the term "white wine" refers to hard liquor such as vodka. Someone asked me if I liked Qingdao's red wine, which I had tried earlier, and I told him it tasted great but I liked white wine better. He almost fell out of his chair. Apparently you have to specify white "grape" wine if you mean white wine.

On the subject of weird alcohol drinking habits, in Taiwan, people drink red wine with ice cubes. They think it tastes too thick without ice and they prefer to drink it cold. One of my cousins, who is living in Paris, had brought back wine from France... the French would have flipped out if they saw what the Taiwanese were doing to their red wine. In China, they drink red wine without ice, but they literally only pour a taste each time. The tradition is to "ganbei" when you toast someone, which means "dry glass," so they just pour very little each time since you are supposed to finish drinking until your glass is empty when they say "ganbei" and they say "ganbei" a lot.

Tap water is not safe to drink in Beijing (although the water people claim that water that comes out of the plant is drinkable, it's the old pipes that the water pass through that makes it unsafe to drink straight from the tap), making it necessary to buy bottled water. I know that people say that they make fake everything in China, but it shocked me to find out that there's fake water. I got a bottle that tasted funny, and the friend I was with told me to stop drinking it since he thought there was something wrong with it too. Makes me rather paranoid.