The Quingdao International Beer Festival!

What a hangover. The only cure was a trip to McDonalds for a greasy Big Mac and a walk along the waterfront.

We finally decided to head to the Qingdao International Beer Festival. The site is evidently only used for the festival once a year, but is a huge area with pavilions and an amusement park. It was a complete throwback to the 50’s with huge plaster statues of cartoon characters and lots of photo-taking Chinese.

We were starting to seriously question the “international” part of the festival. We appeared to be the only Caucasians in the entire park- and then, we ran into Gordon and Jean, the British couple we met at the Holiday Inn, having a beer in the Budweiser section.

We sat down with them and shared more stories and drank more beer. Meanwhile, we had to contend with the worst karaoke singers in the world. The Chinese male has no sense of rhythm and absolutely cannot sing. But it doesn’t stop them from belting out songs at full volume. After the karaoke, we got the Carlsberg go-go girls. What an afternoon!
At the Budweiser “tent”, they required a down payment on the beer glasses. When John said to the waitress, “That’s so we don’t steal the glasses”, she smiled and said, “Yes”. Gordon and Jean had us howling with more Chinese stories.
According to Gordon:
* The 40+ Chinese have been told what to think for their entire life- and as a result, don’t know how to think on their own.
* HIV is not a problem in China. If you’re diagnosed with HIV, you simply “disappear”.
* The older people all have bad teeth- from eating grass to survive during the Mao years.
* The Chinese turn on the heat in their apartment buildings on 11/15 and don’t turn it off until 3/15. The apartments blast out heat- so that they have to open their windows to cool down. There are no thermostats.
* If we think the hawkering is bad now, just stay through a Chinese winter.

We came up with our list of Chinese “memories”:
* Spitting
* Belching
* Peeing anywhere
* M&M’s
* Kenny G music everywhere
* Staring
* No newspapers
* Disinformation and missing information
* “Rail think”
* Cell phones and the 40 year old male
* Noise pollution
We finished off our evening with another dinner of lasagna at the Holiday Inn.