Let me sum up Qingdao in a brief few sentences. Normally I have been averaging between 120 to 270 pictures a day while I am in each port. My whole time in Qingdao I took 10 pictures! So Yeah! I think that explains a lot.
I woke up that morning, and it was raining barrels of water, not even joking. We got off the boat really early and decided to just go walk around. There were three people in my group that day (Kristen, Jeff and me) and only one had an umbrella, so Jeff and I ended up getting really wet. We began to walk towards where we thought downtown would be and we all had one of those wizard of oz moments where we said “were not in Japan anymore guys.” The streets were not very clean at all and it felt as if we were in a pretty bad part of a third world country. The people we passed were not very friendly and you could tell that they wanted to have nothing to do with us. The buildings were pretty shady looking and did not look as though they were very well built. After a long and confusing walk we made it to downtown where the streets were full of cars, big mud and who knows what else puddles that kept splashing up on to us….. then we found a mall-ish looking building so we decided to go in and get out of the rain for awhile. It was in fact a big local mall and we were definitely the only non-Chinese people there. They had a supermarket up on one of the floors and in there I saw live Turtles that you could buy for cooking and lots of other crazy stuff. After a quick lunch we decided to go back to the ship while stopping in a few local outdoor markets on the way and we were back on the ship by 1:30.
So I think out of 10 I would give Qingdao a 6. Many people on SAS hated Qingdao and say pretty mean things about it which makes it sound pretty horrible. I did not really like it there that much, mostly because I did not feel welcome at all and the buckets of rain made the whole place not very appealing. However, I would like to go back someday when it is not raining and give it another chance because I don’t think that it would be like that all the time.
I woke up that morning, and it was raining barrels of water, not even joking. We got off the boat really early and decided to just go walk around. There were three people in my group that day (Kristen, Jeff and me) and only one had an umbrella, so Jeff and I ended up getting really wet. We began to walk towards where we thought downtown would be and we all had one of those wizard of oz moments where we said “were not in Japan anymore guys.” The streets were not very clean at all and it felt as if we were in a pretty bad part of a third world country. The people we passed were not very friendly and you could tell that they wanted to have nothing to do with us. The buildings were pretty shady looking and did not look as though they were very well built. After a long and confusing walk we made it to downtown where the streets were full of cars, big mud and who knows what else puddles that kept splashing up on to us….. then we found a mall-ish looking building so we decided to go in and get out of the rain for awhile. It was in fact a big local mall and we were definitely the only non-Chinese people there. They had a supermarket up on one of the floors and in there I saw live Turtles that you could buy for cooking and lots of other crazy stuff. After a quick lunch we decided to go back to the ship while stopping in a few local outdoor markets on the way and we were back on the ship by 1:30.
So I think out of 10 I would give Qingdao a 6. Many people on SAS hated Qingdao and say pretty mean things about it which makes it sound pretty horrible. I did not really like it there that much, mostly because I did not feel welcome at all and the buckets of rain made the whole place not very appealing. However, I would like to go back someday when it is not raining and give it another chance because I don’t think that it would be like that all the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment