ByGD
I love the street art I find wherever I travel in the world. But these Qingdao apartment buildings completely covered in cute artwork are some of my favorites. Partly it’s because they’re so cute, and it’s fun to imagine coming home to such cheery pictures every day. But these Qingdao apartments are also such a contrast with the housing developments of identical faceless high rise apartment towers that stretch for literally miles on the outskirts of Chinese cities.
ByGD
I almost called this post “Flames of Freedom.” But then I found that was also a first-person shooter video game and a “school” in the Ozarks and decided to stick with the proper name of the sculpture.
May Wind 五月的风 is located in May Fourth Square on the waterfront in Qingdao. The park and its sculpture are dedicated to the The May 4th Movement which protested the Treaty of Versailles’ transferring the German concessions in Shandong (including Qingdao) to Japan rather than returning sovereign authority to China.
Today, as Wikipedia states
On pleasant days May Fourth Square fills with young couples on the ground and kites in the air.
Wikipedia
My daughter and I spent a pleasant day in May Fourth Square flying a kite. The wind in Seattle is usually to gusty to fly kites, but I still have the giant butterfly kite we bought on the waterfront that day.
ByGD
One of my family’s favorite manga/anime properties is Princess Jellyfish by
Akiko Higashimura. It’s about a girl who, instead of growing up to be a princess as she had hoped, grew up to be a jellyfish otaku. When she meets a real life princess, they turn out to be a beautiful cross-dressing boy. The two of them pair up to design jellyfish-inspired dresses to help nerdy girls feel like princesses. I love this story.
Before I read it, I did not know that in Asia jellyfish otaku are no more strange than model train collectors or any other nerd-level hobbyist. But I wasn’t surprised by the discovery, thanks to the Fantacy (sic) Palace of Jellyfish.
Qingdao Underwater World is the oldest public aquarium in China. It’s scattered across several themed buildings near the Number 1 Bathing Beach. It doesn’t make a great first impression, since the specimen hall is the first building you pass through. It’s a seriously old school collection of dead animals. In some places the aquarium goes a bit too far in the other direction, with mermaid shows and dancing sharks.
But parts of the aquarium are high quality educational collections. A moving sidewalk carries you underneath a giant tank in a subway-sized tunnel. And there is an entire building dedicated to jellyfish. Jellyfish are amazing, and hard to keep in an aquarium. The variety of forms and colors on display in that jellyfish aquarium far exceeded anything I could have imagined. It was a small building with limited information in English, but it was enough to inspire the kind of awe in the natural world that internet-connected folk with passports rarely get to feel these days.
ByGD
China is hardly a hotbed of craft brewing. Tsingtao is possibly its only famous brand. Named for Qingdao, the German-influenced city where it is brewed (the difference in spelling is a result of changing pinyin systems in the 20th century) Tsingtao is a nice pilsner of the type favored in Asian countries.
When you visit the city of Qingdao and order a beer, it’s a given that you will be given a Tsingtao. The question they ask you is “Do you want the local one or the kind we export?”
“What’s the difference?”
“The local one is 5 yuan extra.”
“I’ll take the local.”
Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I think the home-style brew tasted a little fresher.
