Actually, there isn’t anything ! about Qingdao. Wait, no, there is one thing, and here it is:

The one good thing about Qingdao: I found an ice cream place that serves ice cream on a waffle cone — three delicious scoops for only six kuai! And on our last night, I tried to get some for dessert, but the place had already closed. Devastated, I loitered around for a few moments. The really sweet guy who worked there noticed me, and perhaps even remembered me from a couple of days before, and said he can still get me some ice cream on a waffle cone if I wanted it. He was all smiley and happy to serve me, too. It was the cutest thing ever, and it made my night.

Besides that, Qingdao was full of potential greatness, but we were let down repeatedly. Perhaps it was because we had absolutely no idea where Qingdao was, what it looked like or what to do there, no plans and no time to think about any of these things. But I was still expecting something exciting.

The road to Qingdao: It started with the bullet train. After the 14-hour ride back from Dandong on a hard seat, Chris and I were looking forward to the clean, modern and sleek bullet train. And it delivered: the backs of the seats reclined a good bit and even the seats themselves could be adjusted forward. We settled down in comfort until we realized how many people kept walking back and forth, rustling in the aisle, talking loudly and generally doing annoying things. And then the kids! Some stupid little girl kept running up and down the aisle all the way to Qingdao. It was a miserable six hours. I just wanted to sleep!

The hotel search: Then, we arrived in Qingdao, ready to find us a hotel. We had no idea where in Qingdao we were, nor where a good hotel might be. The nice hotels close to the beach front were pricey ($120 or more a night). We started looking for hotels farther away from the shore; they seemed a little dicey. This guy started hassling us, trying to get us to look at hotels. We could not shake him off! It didn’t help that a lot of the more reasonably priced places wouldn’t take foreigners (not exactly because of local racism, but because a place needs to get government permission to house foreigners). A lot of times they would see Chris and say, No rooms available. After looking at four or five places, someone flagged us down on the road and told us her hotel had rooms available for 220 kuai a night. We thought it was worth a shot and went to look at the room.

The Qingdao Tian Cheng Hotel: Our room was tiny. The beds were wooden. The bathroom was the size of a large shower and doubled as one. There were no slippers. Our air condition broke our last night. The Qingdao Tian Cheng Hotel is no Crowne Plaza.

The bathing beaches of Qingdao: So we put on our bathing suits and headed down to the beach. Bathing Beach No. 1 was so crowded that crowded seems inadequate to describe it. There were no free spaces available on the sand. There was no free space in the water. The water was dirty with litter and seaweed. People didn’t lay out on towels; they just buried themselves and each other in the sand. I did not see a single bikini on a girl, but I saw men in tight shorts or Speedos and naked babies everywhere. Bathing Beach No. 2, which was a ways down the shoreline, was an exact replica.

Qingdao redeems itself: Qingdao is actually a cute little city that reminded me somewhat of San Francisco because it has a lot of one-way streets and hills. The German influence did not seem German, but the architecture was not Chinese, either. It is definitely one of the Chinese cities being revolutionized by the Chinese economic miracle. Run-down apartment buildings are being demolished so modern high rises can take their place. On the other hand, decent-looking facades line the sidewalks, but breaks in the walls reveal dismal living conditions on the other side.

Friends-turned-extortionists: Chris and I got lost wandering around the city, and just when we were about to hail a taxi back to our hotel, a guy sitting outside a small corner restaurant shouted at us: “Hello! Welcome!” He was waving us over. It was 5 in the afternoon, so Chris and I decided what the hell and joined him. He seemed to be friends with the restaurant owner, who brought us some cold bottles of Tsingtao and peanuts. This guy knew about 10 words in English and had no idea how to form English sentences, so there was a lot of pointing and gesturing. “You! Mah firrriend-a! Look-a look-a! Ship-a! Tomorrow! OK!!!!” “You! Tsingtao beer! OK!!! Me, Laoshan beer.” Somehow, I gathered from him that there was a shipyard in the direction behind the restaurant, and this guy was saying he and the restaurant owner had the pass to enter it so they could take us to go look around. A couple of beers later, the restaurant owner pulls up his SUV, and we are on our merry way to what turned out to be the Port of Qingdao. It was the coolest tour ever. There were billboards with these Communist slogans everywhere. There was a “butterfly garden,” which had statues of butterflies, giraffes and zebras. The restaurant owner drove us around the port and then back to town, straight to the heart of the tourist area. Finally, we were back at a familiar place. Chris and I say thanks and hop out of the car, but restaurant owner and mah fiiirrriend-a guy starts saying something about 200 yuan. I look at them quizzically, and it sounded like they said something about how other people would charge us 500 kuai.

“Wait, you want us to pay you 200 kuai?” I asked, not sure if I was understanding them through their Shandong dialect. And with perfectly serious faces, they were like, Yes!

I told them we had no money, and of course, they didn’t believe me. After this back-and-forth a few times, they popped the door open and told us to get back in the car because they will take us to an ATM. I was like, No, we’ve already caused you so much inconvenience, and Chris and I walked away. We watched our shadows just in case they were to hop out of their car and chase after us. I’ve never been so glad to be near a crowded Chinese tourist area.

The Americans: Chris and I walked along the tourist walks and then went to McDonald’s to recover over some fries and soft serve ice cream. On our way out, we ran into a couple of white guys, one of whom had been drinking a lot since that morning. They turned out to be part of some program at OSU and were studying at Qingdao University for the summer. We decided to get a beer, and I tried really hard to like the drunkard, but he was too pushy and borderline violent. He started an argument about Afghanistan and the Iraq War when Chris said he had been in the army. Then he kept trying to get us to go to a disco club called Feelings, which even his friend didn’t want to go to. His friend went home, and he kept saying how it would be awkward to end the night without going somewhere. Chris and I said we could have one more beer, but we didn’t want to go anywhere. He ended up wandering away randomly, and I couldn’t have been more relieved.

In a way, Chris and I have come full circle. We got into trouble the first weekend we were in China, so it figures we would get ourselves into trouble again on our last weekend together in China. Miraculously, we managed to stay out of it the whole time in between.