A call from Andy's boss yesterday confirming a visit by customer prompted a change in today's plans because Andy needed to go to work. Because Andy had the foresight to get me a conveniently located hotel, this presented no problem except that my quick goodbye the night before would be the last time I'd get to see Andy and Carol during this trip.
Little did I know as I bounded out of the hotel and made a bee-line to my favorite noodle shop that this day would turn out so very interesting and I would be adding another friend to my life. I'll get to that story in a bit, but first -- my breakfast (posted mostly for Staci and Martin who introduced me to these amazing Uyghur Muslim noodles):
My next stop this morning was the busy train station to retrieve my ticket for my travel to Shanghai tomorrow. I've posted the following photo just because I think some of you may be interested in the unique way that the train station manages each queue so that the next customer keeps a distance.
And the following photo is of the credit-card sized ticket I purchased. Some of you may be interested that in my prior trips to China, I had to rely upon Chinese-speakers to obtain my train tickets. It can now easily be done with an app -- ctrip.com .
I then walked to the nearby beach....
...on my way to the nearby popular tourist attraction -- a pier with the symbol of Qingdao.
Looking back toward the city from the pier -- but this is just a small section of the massive and beautiful skyline of Qingdao:
I then set upon finding a taxi to take me to the Tsingtao Beer Museum (tripadvisor.com's number 2 tourist attraction of Qingdao behind a scenic area that I didn't have time to visit). I took the following photo from my iPad/Kindle Lonely Planet guide so that I would have the Chinese characters to show the cab driver. As I have mentioned before, it's still nearly impossible to move around by taxi without your destination in Chinese characters.
At the brewery museum I opted to pay extra to have an English speaking guide lead the way -- and though I quickly learned that the museum/brewery have excellent English language signage, I enjoyed the tour both because I was the only one on it -- and the guide happily took all the photos I wanted freeing me from the head-in-the-corner selfie's. I also found it fun that she spoke excellent English for all the sights of the tour -- but quickly admitted and proved that she really didn't have a very good grasp of English conversation.
My tour guide:
The tour was truly excellent -- both giving the history of Tsingtao (started by Germans in 1903, run by Japanese during occupation, taken over by the Government, and now run as an Government run corporation traded on the stock exchange). The tour also included viewing the historical process/equipment as well as current operations including canning and bottling lines -- along with a couple of tastes along the way.
See next posting (upwards since this blog is filed in reverse chronological sequence) - Flight Seatmate Becomes Friend
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