Lost Horizons

"If you see abeautiful building, its a hotel!"

We had a quick guided tour of Qingdao this morning, and we didn't even visit the brewery! Setting off in our coach, our guide, Nancy, armed with a microphone shouted the itinerary to us. First stop was Little Fish Hill Park in the old part of the town. Set on a hill is a lighthouse. It is said that if you climb to the top of the lighthouse you will find eternal life, and we were made to climb the bloody thing. The views from the top were nice, you could see a lot of the old gothic style buildings. Around this area were a lot of people selling cheap, tacky souvenirs, which had a negative impact on the serenity of the park.
From there we got back into our charabang and drove along the coast, past various points of interest. We drove past several new-looking and several scruffy, dilapidated buildings, and, Nancy advised us that if we saw a beautiful building it was probably a hotel. Eventually we ended up at May 4th park.
Its hard to describe what this is all about, but after Hong Kong was taken over by the British, the Germans invaded and took control of Qingdao. During World War 1, Qingdao was taken over by the Japanese. During the talks at the Treaty of Versailles, the plan was to hand back Qingdao to the Germans; but there was an outcry of intellectual opinion against this that lead to strikes, demonstrations and so on. The outcome of this is that China refused to sign a peace treaty with Germany. It means a lot to the people here, so they named a square after it. In the middle of the square is a huge red steel sculpture thatr weighs about 500 tons (nice bit of scrap value there).
There is a lot of building work going on for the Olympics, and a lot of it is already finished, in good time.
I suppose I may have to come back up here for the beer feswtival in August, to get a better feel for this place.

posted by Luke @ 12:04 PM