Week 4 Second Part

This week I took a vacation to go to the coastal city of Qingdao. I was lucky that my graduate student understands that I want to do research, but I also want to explore China. He gave me an extra day off, so that I could spend more time in Qingdao. He is amazing and I am glad that he is so understanding.

We decided to take the train to Qingdao. The trip was about six hours. We had soft seats, so the trip was not too bad. When we got to Qingdao, we had to find our hostel. We asked around until we were able to locate our hostel. Some of our group arrived earlier in the week, so we spent most of the night trying to find them. We eventually found them and we talked to them about the plans for the next day. After we made our plans, we all went to bed. I had a little trouble sleeping but eventually I fell asleep.

The next day we went to the beach. There are multiple beaches in Qingdao, so we started at the furthest one and walked all the way down to the first beach. We climbed a lot of rocky islands on our trip to the first beach. Climbing the islands was a lot of fun. The scenes were also very pretty. We saw a lot of couples taking wedding pictures by the sea. It was pretty funny because apparently they were carting around all of these people that were getting married in a bus and then dropping them off on the beach to take pictures for their wedding.

We stopped at one of the beaches. We went swimming for a while. I thought the water was going to be really cold, but once we got into the water, it was not too bad. After we were done swimming, we hung out at the beach for a while and then we continued to walk towards beach one. We thought we were taking the correct path to get to beach one, but we accidentally kept taking paths that led us into peninsulas. So we would have to back track to the original path. It was really fun because we did it more than once, and we never realized it until we would get to a point where we could not go any further. We saw some of our friends at another beach and we stayed and talked to them for a while. I did not seem them initially, and I thought that the person who saw them was mistaken, but then I looked and in the middle of the beach was another group that had come to Qingdao separately. After we talked to them, it was getting late so we went to dinner. We went to a very good seafood place that was located on beer street. It is called beer street because it is located on the same street as the brewery. After dinner, we were pretty tired from spending the day at the beach, so we went home and slept.

The next day we went to the Qingdao beer factory. It was fun but I thought maybe at the end we would get to try all of the different types of beer, but that did not happen. We did get to see the old brewery and the brewery that they currently use to make beer. After we saw the brewery, we went to the beach and some of the group went on boats that had bikes in the middle that paddled the boat through the water. We hung out at the beach for a while and then we went to an open market where some of the group bought kites. We spent the rest of the afternoon trying to fly the kites. We got all of the kites to fly except one, but that one required some skill because it had two strings instead of one that controlled the steering.

Eventually we went back to the hostel and got our stuff. We went to the train station and headed back home. We had hard seats on the way back home. We knew this may be uncomfortable, but it was fairly cheap so we got them. Unfortunately they were really uncomfortable and my entire body was sore after riding on the train for nine hours because we decided to take a slower train. I probably will not do that again. It was a fun experience and I had fun in Qingdao. That pretty much wraps up my vacation in Qingdao.