Qingdao and Seattle have a lot in common. One of my favorite things at home is turning a corner and getting a perfectly framed view of the mountains, Puget Sound, or Lake Union. Qingdao gets that, too.
ByGD
View From the Top
When I was in Qingdao, China with my daughter, we got lost a lot. Maybe because we navigated by the strange Ghibli-faced monsters that rose above us on a hill. Eventually, we made our way to that hillside, and discovered that they were towers you could enter, like the Space Needle except shorter, to get a view of the city. Except the glass was dirty and there was no air conditioning. Anyway, here is the view from the top.
(By the way, I keep referring to these as Ghibli towers, but there is no actual connection between the Japanese animation studio and these buildings in Qingdao. They just look to my eye like something Hayao Miyazake would design.)
ByGD
Urban Skyline
China has a well-earned reputation for ugly, industrial cities blanketed in choking smog. But that’s not the whole story. The haze you see here is only partly smog; most of it is mist above the ocean water, and that burns off by midmorning. Qingdao is a city of hills and trees. It has its ugly industrial suburbs and it’s sterile districts sprouting glass towers. But the old part of town is red roofs and green trees, with fresh air blown in off the sea.