Chinese Wonder-Bliss

I have spent three cold, windy, rainy days in China that have been absolutely awesome and I’m incredibly excited for the one more that I have left. My first two days in China were spent in Qingdao, an industrial city that is really only known for its shipping and its beer. It was definitely not a city that was designed for tourists. When we climbed down the stairway from the ship, the port that awaited us was grey and wet and dirty. We walked between a line of trucks being unloaded from a huge ship and train tracks, getting honked at by Chinese men driving construction equipment. When we got out to the street we found ourselves on the corner of a busy intersection where the cars drive fast and ignore traffic signals. They honk to warn you that they’re coming, which is lucky, because they’re not planning on stopping. Walking around the city was quite an adventure, as we were also lacking a readable map and basic Chinese language skills, but we eventually figured things out. We wandered through lots of sketchy marketplaces and commercial districts where people chose to either point at us or pointedly ignore us and eventually found ourselves in a huge market district where we found a 3-story Wal-Mart and a fabulous lunch. Lunch was slightly scary because the night before the ship’s doctor had warned us all (at length) about the horrors of nausea and diarrhea that could come from eating the wrong food in China, but we stuck to the fried and otherwise thoroughly cooked meats and we figured we were pretty well off. After lunch, we spent more time wandering around the city; we found the art district, the brewery district, and the office supplies district (Stationary Street). We walked through a food marketplace where the seafood was so fresh it was still spitting at us and then climbed our way up Qingdao “mountain” to see the little pagoda on top and were exhausted and drenched before we were even halfway up. By the time we were climbing back down it was starting to get dark so we decided it was a good time to head back to the ship. We started heading back in the completely wrong direction, so by the time we got ourselves turned around it was totally wet and dark and we were lucky to find cabs to hop into the understood enough of our crappy Chinese to get us back to the port. The cab ride was terrifying (poor driving and the fear of being completely lost) but he took us exactly where we needed to go, and we were all very happy to get back to our ship, with its boring but safe food and its hot showers.

The next day lots of my friends were leaving on trips to Beijing and The Great Wall (which ended up being waaaaay more than I could afford) but myself and three other girls had another day to spend in Qingdao. This time we did a little more research and started off with a little bit of a plan and a map. The weather was worse the second day, instead of just rain and wind, it was rain and wind-so-strong-it-turned-our-umbrellas-inside-out, so we started out by just taking a cab to the artsy/bank area that was our planned first stop. We managed to exchange money but had a hard time getting another cab to take us to the marketplace that was our next stop. We decided to escape the rain by heading to the Global International Seafood Restaurant for lunch. The second day’s lunch was even better than the first, super-fancy food that was served to us in our own private dining room. They don’t really have menus in Qingdao, but instead just have a display of mock-ups of all the dishes and you order by pointing to whatever looks good. It was actually a really good way for us to actually know what we were eating. After lunch we immediately managed to catch a taxi to the beach, where we found a temple and a jewelry market. We spent the afternoon buying incredibly cheap pearls and making ourselves the much beloved American customers of the merchants. We haggled over prices and everybody ended up quite satisfied. We discovered the German-influenced part of the city and were entertained to find a Germanic cathedral in the middle of a Chinese city. In the cab ride back to the ship at the end of the day, we coined the phrase “wonder-bliss” to describe how happy we were with the day.

I spent the next two days on the ship sailing around China, form Qingdao to Hong Kong. There weren’t many people onboard so it was a good opportunity to relax and get some schoolwork done. I probably ended up doing a little more relaxing and a little less schoolwork, but oh well, sometimes that’s just the way things go.

I woke up early our first day in Hong Kong to watch the incredible view as we sailed into port. Hong Kong is a huge and absolutely beautiful city. The high rise buildings seem to grow right at the edge of the water and then they back up against the mountains. Once the ship was cleared, I headed off with a group of friends to a couple traditional marketplaces and we spent most of the day doing the whole tourist thing, buying souvenirs, eating good food (eel fried rice!!), smelling weird smells, and taking pictures. That evening we watched a laser light show on the buildings, which was incredibly cool. Hong Kong was weird in that until it got dark and the beautiful colorful lights came on, the city felt pretty much exactly like NYC, except with more Chinese. Since Hong Kong used to be a British colony, English is one of the official languages, so it was wonderfully easy to get around and to communicate with people. It was a wonderful change after the two days of confusion that was Qingdao.

…. Another day goes by….

My second (and sadly last) day in Hong Kong I spent at the Chinese Cuisine Training Institute learning about, well, chinese cuisine. We started the day by touring a local marketplace, where EVERYTHING was basically as fresh as it could possibly be. Our tour guide jokingly told us that the Chinese will eat anything with four legs (except the table and the chairs) and this market definitely proved that. We saw cages of frogs, turtles, little mammals, and chickens that were all getting ready to be supper tonight. They didn’t bring in the cows and pigs alive, but there were fresh carcasses that you could point to and have your hunk of choice cut out of. It was a really cool place to walk through. We then headed to CCTI for our class. We took a tour of the institute, watched a master chef do his master-chef thing, learned how to make two dishes ourselves (spicy beef and sweet and sour pork), and then sat down to a six course meal that included absolutely crazy things (like sea cucumber!!) and was weirdly delicious. It was so sad to leave, my friend Nicole and I decided it would have been a much better trip if we could have stayed for dinner too. We all got certificates that officially recognize us as “culinary ambassadors” – which is what I think I’m going to call myself from now on. “Culinary Ambassador Prengaman” has such a nice ring to it.

After today, its two more days of sailing (and classes) until we get to Vietnam. And then its Thailand…. And then its Egypt… and then its everywhere else!!!! AHhhhhhh!!!! Sometimes it still feels unreal that I’m traveling around the world on a giant ship.