Visiting Qingdao's main tourist attractions

(Well, not any more. In reality I'm failing to find words for how beautiful Shanghai is at night, but here's what I wrote yesterday before my hostel's flaky wireless fell over.)

Brewery tours can be pretty boring and the city's main museum is very boring indeed. "We've been making beer since 1905.", they say, and then they tell you in excruciating detail how they did it then and how they do it now. (Spoiler: it's the same way everyone else makes beer.) There are many rooms describing the history of the Tsingtao company and its Corporate Strategies. "In nineteenmumble we moved from the Larger Then Stronger strategy to the Stronger Then Larger strategy.", they explain, clearly. "Here's a picture of the Board at that time. Later we had some Strategic Alliances with other companies. Recently we have adopted the Recycling Economy strategy because the environment is very important. Here's a diorama of a man in a hat looking thoughtfully at some barley." I barely got out alive.

No, ok, I stayed for half an hour watching the packing production line at the end with real fascination. It's _almost_ worth going to the factory to see at how cleverly they move bottles around and into boxes. Other than that the best I can say is that it's less pretentious than the Guinness Storehouse. But most things are.

In the afternoon I saw the rather nice Tianhou Temple, devoted to a Goddess of the Sea. She's got incense burning on every flat surface and she's accompanied by threatening guardians, a friendly metal dragon who was shiny from being petted and a shrine to the God of Wealth that collected a continual stream of coins. It's a clever setup: the shrine has a small hole that you can throw coins through if you have good aim, so people keep trying.

After that, I climbed up the hill to see the Christian church, built by the Germans in 1908. It had fewer fierce statues and no dragons at all, but the clock tower was lovely.

Last thing for the day was to walk down Huangdao Road, a nighttime food market warm with orange lights and filled with all sorts of aromatic, sizzling (and sometimes wriggling) things to eat. There are hens pecking around underfoot, tanks of assorted shellfish waving claws or fronds or feelers, slabs of dangerous-looking meat on hooks, and sinister quivering objects that you're not really sure what they are. I bought three types of pancakes (all excellent) and a bowl of very spicy potatoes and beans and peanuts, then brought them back to the hostel to fill my belly. A contented evening.