Results tagged “qingdao”

                                                        

Photos by Jeremy Breningstall.

• Learning to drink like a local in Qingdao, China [CNN] "Another round of toasts and exclamations of "hajiu" sounded out around me. I took a sip and set down my small glass of Tsingtao beer as my new friends downed theirs and refilled. Our seafood dinner, perched on the single cluttered table of a tiny antique shop, was punctuated regularly by such moments. I joined in happily, although somewhat bemused, at each increasingly beery celebration of our host, the worldly Captain Jau. My company, a gathering from four regions of China, was engaging me in Chinese drinking etiquette, in the city of Qingdao."
• At Frankfurt book fair, only official China can show its face [NRC Handelsblad] "Censorship in China is the theme Dai Qing chose for her lecture in the margin of the Frankfurter Buchmesse, which opens on Wednesday. She was supposed to have been an official guest of the book fair, which this year has chosen literary China as its main theme. But Dai Qing, who is well-known outside China for her campaigns against political repression and costly projects like the Three Gorges Dam, is not welcome at the official event."
• Xinhua vs Financial Times [Danwei] "Two headlines from the home pages of The Financial Times and Xinhua, two ways of looking at the world. The Financial Times: US hardens stance on renminbi rigidity; Xinhua: China not currency manipulator: U.S. government"

This weekend, Shanghaiist Editor Elaine Chow went off to Qingdao for the world famous Qingdao International Beer Festival. This is her story. Sponsored by the lovely folks over at Ctrip, the easiest way to find the best fares in China.

                     

As part of our foray into exploring Qingdao, we decided to check out the Tsingtao Brewery Museum. On a cold, rainy day, we figured the best thing to do would be to explore something indoors and we were a little curious as to how this would compare to other brewery tours we'd taken.

Oh boy. Yesterday I got completely soaked, lost my phone, and was inappropriately goosed by a really drunk Chinese guy, but it was still one of the best days I've had recently. I'm thoroughly impressed by how nice people are in this city - coming from Shanghai to here is like heading from New York City to Cleveland. But with beaches.

This weekend, Shanghaiist Editor Elaine Chow is off in Qingdao for the world famous Qingdao International Beer Festival. She plans on drowning herself in fish and beef and beer and find some way to still manage to remember enough of what's going on to blog about it. Sponsored by the lovely folks over at Ctrip, the easiest way to find the best fares in China.

• After Jiaozhou Bay was ceded to the Germans in May 1897, the small fishing village of Qingdao turned into the military hub of the German Navy. The city became the naval nerve center of all German operations in the Pacific ocean. It was the Germans, homesick and in great need of beer, who constructed and opened the hallmark Tsingtao Brewery in 1903.
• In the antebellum period of World War I, the Germans were forced to Flee after the British and Japanese combined forces and laid siege to the outpost. The Japanese maintained control over the city (and the brewery) until 1922, when it was returned to China. But in 1937, the Japanese reoccupied the city as part of their expansion into mainland China.
• After World War II, the city served as a U.S. naval port for a brief period before the founding of the PRC.

Remember how we told you we were going to become Qingdaoist for this weekend? Well, we're flying out there today... in fact, we're probably in the air right now! We've got a tentative schedule lined up of seafood, beer and blogging, and not much to guide us by except for these websites: myredstar (which seems to think Qingdao has nothing going on on a Friday night) and That's Qingdao (relation to That's Shanghai unconfirmed as of yet). This will be the first time in a while we've not known where to go in a Chinese city... and we'll most likely be drunk on top of that, so forgive us if old Qingdao hands end up finding what we do supremely touristy! But hey, if you have any recommendations of places to go, we'd love to hear it. Send 'em to tips (at) shanghaiist.com. And as always, thanks to our sponsors: the great people over at Ctrip.

Looking for an excuse to travel out of Shanghai this August? Maybe you ought to try for the infamous Qingdao International Beer Festival starting next week. From August 15-30, the city of Qingdao will host China's biggest and baddest annual beerfest. The event draws people, brews, and munchies from all over China and the world.

The 55-year-old from Nanzhuang village, near Qingdao, took three months to build the two-wheeler. It has no metal parts whatsoever - the joints were fixed with small wooden bungs and the chain mechanism was replaced by a rod-crank system that rotates the wheel.

Remember that incredibly entertaining (if somewhat morbid) story about a woman who lost a best mistress contest and then drove her lover and his four other mistresses off a cliff? Well, apparently it might have been complete fiction! Damn it!

UPDATE: Sadly, the person who first reported this story made it all up. It's fake.

Zach Mexico and Li Du of Current TV head off to the Tsingtao Beer factory and Beer Town in Qingdao to get sloshed with locals and to investigate Qingdao's long beer history. We love those plastic bags of beer everyone's carrying about in Beer Town!

     

A thick layer of mutant seaweed has bloomed over vast stretches of the 500-mile coastline of the Qingdao Bao, an Olympic sailing venue. As the algae can only be removed manually, the city has already mobilised 1,000 fishing boats and 3,000 people to haul in algae by the boatloads. Qingdao (青岛) which literally means "green island" is prone to summer algae infestations this time of the year, but apparently this is the worst the city has ever seen, and scientists at the Qingdao Weather Bureau believe this to be due to "warmer waters, increased rainfall and high levels of nutrients in the ocean". Last year, algae outbreaks occurred simultaneously in freshwater lakes all across China. When the Olympics comes, officials in the city will be praying for wind. Last August, a regatta at the 430-million-dollar marina "saw contestants drift in a windless Yellow Sea".

                        

We're somewhat late bringing this to you, but yes, over the weekend, anti-French protests took place over the weekend all over China outside Carrefour stores in Hefei, Qingdao, Wuhan, Shenzhen, Xuzhou, Zhengzhou, Luoyang, Jinan and Kunming. Although these were mainly anti-French anti-Carrefour protests, they were described by People's Daily as "protests against Tibetan independence".