Buying Sweet Potatoes

My next stop in China was little bit different from normal tourist path. Luckily for me I had an opportunity to visit smaller Chinese city, Jiaozuo, which was about six hours by train from Beijing.
City itself was interesting place to see as city itself didn’t had basically anything interesting to see. It was city for people to live and work. And still it ws full of interestness to experience as everything you saw was real Chinese life. There were no tourist places, no tourist traps, and definitely no traditional tourist scamming around. Just people living.

Scooters... They're Everywhere!

Then what was in the city? During the train trip I noticed that almost everything I saw was greyness, all the time when I watched out of the window I saw grey. Sometimes I just saw flames and grey smoke. And other times just grey. The same continued in the city, but I don’t know was it just weather or pollution that made it grey. There was sunshine, but still overall what I felt was just greyness.

Seller in Market

But when night felt, city changed. In nearby city square I heard loud music and people were dancing there, just enjoying their evening. Mostly it was older people, but sometimes there were also some younger people dancing as well. One charactericts of the city was that it was full of scooters. In other cities where I had been in China so far, there were always many bikes and scooters around, but Jiaozuo, seemed that most of the people were using scooters to get around.

Three-Wheeler

Guiding English Tourists

Being in the city where you expect nobody speaks English I got surprised few times. On some mornings my hotel breakfast restaurant staff greeted me in English, other days another staff member was just talking Chinese though. One of my biggest surprises was that in Jiaozuo there were few signs that pointed out in English where was place to have Chinese food or where toilets were. Just makes me wonder how many English tourist the city gets per year… But funniest moments were when I walked on the street and heard many “Hello”s behind my back. Seemed that local kids were interested of starting to talk in English with me but had only courage to greet me afterwards. Longest discussion I had was “Hello, welcome to China” and this discussion happened after person talking to me had walked about ten meters past me

Inside Chinese Train

My trip continued from Beijing to smaller city, Jiaozuo, by taking train. My train left from Beijing at 10.30 morning and arrived to Jiaozuo nine hours later, 7.30 in the evening. As it was little unclear for me how much space train offers for luggage, specially as my backpack wasn’t the smallest one, I played for sure and took hard sleeper, although my traveling was during the day so I didn’t actually needed sleeping place. But with bed, I also could be sure that I can stretch my legs enough and not need to suffer for not having enough space for my long legs

The Chinese train was again something that I had no idea what to expect. But I was positively surprised as the quality was good. It felt pretty much same as traveling in Finnish trains (although I haven’t ever took sleeping place in Finnish trains). Hard sleepers in Chinese trains means a section in train car where there’s six beds at the same space, and several bed compartments are divided by walls. Three beds are on one side, one above another and other three are on the opposite of the small compartment. And as in Finnish trains, beds are on one side of car and on another, there’s a narrow corridor. Not sure in Finnish trains, but in Chinese trains, this corridor also has few chairs and tables which offered nice place to sit and watch outside during the day.

For me this was the longest train trip I have ever taken. Before I have taken train trip that took six hours and took me to other side of Finland, but for this trip, I needed to take three different trains (well, two on the way back). This was nine hours, three hours more, in the same train, in the same car, in the same bed. And I enjoyed every moment.

Traveling is nice, and to me it is very relaxing. After all the hurry, when you finally manage to sit down, take your seat either on the bus, train or the airplane, it means that you have done your part. After that point, everything is somebody else’s problem. All you need to do is just sit back and relax and enjoy traveling. For me, nine hours on the train meant that I had lots of time to think, to watch outside, look Chinese countryside, and even read book. Chatting with my friend who was waiting for me on Jiaozuo. Basically, doing everything else expect worrying about traveling, as that was the train driver problem

And as the bonus, in Chinese trains, in sleeper cars, there’s one nice bonus. As it is expected that people sleeps on the train, you need to switch your ticket to ‘bed car’ from the conductor. You give your ticket to conductor and get a credit card sized card that has your car and bed number. And when your end station is going to be next one, conductor comes and wakes you up, so in the Chinese train, all you need to do is just relax. Even getting out of the correct station is somebody else’s problem

My next stop was Beijing. Taking morning flight meant short sleep for me, and leaving Qingdao in the early morning. Getting taxi in the morning was as easy as always in Qingdao, for some reason, specially in nearby the hostel, taxi drivers seemed to have excellent eyes to spot potential customers and headed right through the junction to where I was standing and waiting for free taxi. So I managed to get to the airport without any problems, and flight to Beijing was as usual, boring short-haul flight, but did had breakfast at least.

Beijing Subway

From Beijing Airport I was taking airport train to the city and while trying to figure out if I could find my hotel by metro, took off from the station that I should been able to transfer to another metro line. However, as my only metro map was Google Maps and for some reason it seems to be impossible for Google to update their map in China to anything newer than decade ago, I ended up having few problems figuring out where to go and decided to take taxi. At which point I started to realize that my hotel was not so easy to find as taxi driver had no idea where to go. After trying to call to hotel reception, and getting hanged up cause I was speaking English, I finally got someone on the other end who was able to speak and understand enough English and I was able to get her to explain to taxi driver where to drive. My hotel ended up to be a somehow far from tourist center but was good and nice. But as for me as I like to use metros to travel, its position to be 10~15min walk from nearest metro station was not so convenient.

Night Market

Cooking Mushroom-Bacon-Rolls

My first night to Beijing was just visiting Tiananmen square and surrounding at evening. For my surprise actually I found out that square was closed already around 5pm so all I could do was just looking the area at its night lighting. Even though, there were lots of people doing same as I, walking around and taking photos of lighted walls. I also decided to find my dinner at nearby night market that was recommended by travel guide book that is worth to visit. Which was quite a mistake as I learned soon. Place was just a big tourist place, lots of people selling small stuff that nobody needs and as its specialty, more or less weird food with heavily overpriced. I saw one seller selling dumplings which were priced 10RMB per each… For some reason I decided that I’m not interested of dumplings. But for that market its specialty was all weird food, such as grilled octopus (yeah right, like that’s something weird), or scorpions. I skipped those as well as everything looked just not so special to me and still way too overpriced. Looking that they were asking more for bbq chicken stick than I spend for my whole bbq dinner in Qingdao…

A Big Square

Few People at Palace Area

Next day I was getting back to Tiananmen square but this time while it was open. I am not sure what I was expecting but whole square and place area was just amazing. It is hard to imagine but whole area is just huge. It took long time to walk from place area from one side to another and seeing all museums there. One of the most interesting places was Clock museum which showed all old clocks that has been bought or given as a gift to the emperor. Some of the clocks were just amazing and hard to understand how they could have been made. Some clocks were just stupid, as they were huge, around 3m tall and then the actual clock was just about 1cm as its diameter. It was difficult to find the clock from all the decorations. But one amazing clock was writer, which was writing greetings in chinese on the paper with real pen. Quite amazing, too bad that it wasn’t operating so I couldn’t see working with my own eyes.

Clocks

Otherwise palace area was not so interesting in the end. Mostly I was just starting to wonder why it had to be such a large area, and for example, there was own building where emperor changed his clothes for the ceremonial events. Why to build big house for just one occasion only, what was wrong with normal bedroom… Thinking about all the resources and time and manpower that has been used to build whole palace area, just makes to think what else China could have achieved in the old times instead of building amazing, but kinda useless buildings…

Summer Garden

But then the gardens. As it was winter, they were at the same time really boring and really interesting. It was nice to walk in old gardens and feel the peace and quietness but still I was just wondering how it would look like in the spring or summer when all flowers are blooming.

View over Beijing

I was originally planning to stay in Beijing about four or five days to see city around, but quite fast I realized that first, it was too cold time to visit the city and second, it was definitely not my type of city as it was just full of tourist. Everybody were just selling stuff to tourist or trying to scam our money. It felt that it was just big city where everybody were only tourist, even Chinese. So in the end of second day I spend about two hours experiencing Chinese railway station ticket selling queues while queuing up to buy my train ticket.
And in the next morning I checked out from my hotel, took taxi to railway station and got onboard to Chinese train for my 9 hours train trip…

Instructions on Brewery Fence

After Jiaonan trip it was time to get back to Qingdao and continue my tourist life there. Which meant of course visiting Qingdao Beer Museum. Finding the place was tough little interesting as finding the area was easy, taxi driver dropped me outside of main gate, but then, following the sign “Beer Museum” was interesting as it pointed way to the right and when following the direction, after a while I saw another sign that said museum was in opposite direction. Well, after getting back to main gate and asking from the guard I found the visitor center and got my museum ticket.

Bottle Benches

Beer museum was interesting place, it was nice to see the history how beer has been made and the history of important part of Qingdao. However, as always with museums, it wasn’t nothing so special, so no too many photos in here. Definitely worth of place to visit though. One interesting detail was from the beginning of the tour, in one room there was one old fan in the ceiling. A sign was explaining that during Japanese colonization, Japanese were running the brewery and had installed the fan to the room. Clearly they though that it was too hot in the room, but I cannot understand how much on small fan in quite big room helps…

Ancient Fan

Bottle Art

Outside of the brewery is located beer street, which, in the winter time, was one of the most dead place I’ve seen in China. No shops, no people, nothing. But lots of beer inspired art in the street. My favorite was big statue made totally from Qingdao beer bottles and bottle shaped benches.

Street Art

For the next day my target was Qingdao Water world, big aquarium and ocean themed, umm, place. I liked this place also. Basically place is divided to two parts, first is ocean and water relate educational tour, and second part is big aquarium. Again, nothing too special, aquarium is aquarium with lots of fishes At one part there is though an underwater tunnel where you walk inside the ocean and seeing fishes swimming all around you. That is just amazing looking and feels little bit scary even at first when you see big fish squad coming right towards you.

Starfishes (as seen on underwater tunnel)

For the same day I also visited Qingdao Navy Museum which was located nearby. Interesting place as well specially if you are interested of old ships. The museum itself was boring. At first there was exhibition hall showing history of Chinese navy, old uniforms etc. Interesting to see, but first part was only large amount of photos and only in Chinese explanations (museum did though had some English instructions, such as No Cameras etc.).
Second part was exhibition of old ships which you were able to walk in and see. Like always in this kind of museums, it’s little bit boring, but still amazing to see how full ships can be. There really isn’t too much any extra space for, anything, like walking around. One specialty was an old submarine where was required separate ticket to be able to visit inside.

Submarine

And as it turned out, visiting navy museum in the middle of cold winter day was the best idea ever. Yes, I was freezing from the really cold ocean wind all the time, but staff was even more, which meant that nobody were walking around nor cared at all about me. For submarine viit I was suppose to leave my belongings to storage, it was forbidden to take backs, or cameras to the submarine (as it is small). But as it turned out, nobody cared of gave any instructions where to leave my belongings, so somehow I ended up getting in the submarine with my backpack – and more important with my camera.

Old House in Qingdao

Unfortunately I don’t have so many photos from inside as it was really difficult to get real impression through photos. That place was small! Going from one section to another meant walking through small hatch that really wasn’t much bigger than I. And all corridors, I started to felt like a giant in there. I really cannot imagine how it could be months inside submarine, not seeing sun at all, fresh air, nothing. Just your colleagues face right next to yours.

At Qingdao

After all I spent few days in Qingdao – and lots was left to unseen. But from what I saw, I really started to like the city. It has its own long history, and it’s own character. MAybe cause there is lots of old German style houses, it makes it so different from the feeling. But what I got, at least during the quiet winter days, it is nice and peaceful city. For me all people were friendly and helpful and I didn’t encountered any of traditional tourist scamming (as I experienced later in other cities). It was nice and fun to walk around the city. Nice city that I definitely will visit again. Maybe next time though when it’s warmer and beer street has much more happening… Well, Qingdao Beer Festival, just wait…

Hostel's Cutest Dog

Another Side of Qingdao

Pipe Painting

Market Spirit

Breakfast

My plans included that I was staying in Jiaonan two days, so naturally my second day, Monday, started with having breakfast. We had our breakfast in nearby hotel restaurant. For my luck it was all chinese style breakfast. In the buffet table there was a lot of food that I had no clue what they were, so I just picked something that looked interesting. Breakfast was mostly lots of different kind of pastries and rice porridge, of course. It was definitely different than some cereals or simple coffee & break that I’m used to nowadays… But it was good and didn’t felt hungry for a long time.

After breakfast I was helped to get Chinese mobile phone subscription so I could stay connected more easily during my stay. And more cheap. It was interesting to see how much China Mobile had English service, although of course I was helped so I didn’t need to do myself pretty much anything, but the promotion material etc. was available in English. And although China Mobile isn’t official iPhone carrier, well, they didn’t had any problems for giving me Micro-SIM or my iPhone 4.

Village Road

The rest of day then included something else. It was a trip to country-side, small and fast just a smaller village nearby but still, first visit outside of big cities. (I still consider even Jiaonan as big city ). First we we driving through small villages and trying to find one factory. The impression of Chinese country side is interesting. All roads were almost always straight lines, network of roads are just huge grid. Boring, yeah. And mostly I saw all roads were made of concrete instead of asphalt or just gravel. Don’t know then how much better it is as I haven’t driven those roads… But as villages, not so big surprises. They were still lots of buildings and houses, but all houses were smaller, clearly one family houses. And outside of houses, on the road, you could see a lot of dried and harvested plants, well, anything they grow in country-side.

Mountain View

Deers

Wild Pig

Lunch

From the factory we switched to another person’s car and drove to nearby small mountain, where he had bought a farm. So somehow I ended up to see real Chinese farm. And in there I got big surprises. First, the view from mountain was just beautiful. I couldn’t see any cities, nothing but nature. Green trees, brown fields (as it was winter), simply something so different than I have got used to after living four months in Seoul. And the farm, definitely didn’t expect anything like that. There were chickens running freely around the farm. Wild pigs as well. In the fenced area there were deers, more pigs, chickens, ducks. Interesting trip and have to admit, at least in that farm chickens looked much more happier than in Finland…

The country-side trip ended to having lunch which included again lots of food, and some delicious seafood as well. This time I saw in the table dish of silkworms and decided to taste one. Well, I have been hating the smell in Seoul, it just smells awful everywhere I go, and it smelt same. Taste was, well, nothing special. Little bit similar to generic nut taste but the worm was just too soft with hard shell. The feeling of eating it and taste, not my thing. Not bad but not good enough to try again.

After lunch it was time to return back to Jiaonan and after a while, it was already time to return back to port and catching a ferry back to Qingdao.

After experiencing new year in Qingdao, I got an opportunity to see another, smaller city in china – visiting some of my family members who lives there.

In a ferry

So my sunday, after sleeping late, started by finding my way to ferry port. That wasn’t too difficult, as I had port name in chinese and all I just needed to do was taking a taxi, but luckily for me I had a chinese friend with me who took me to the port (so I managed to skip trying to get taxi driver to understand me). Taxi left us in the small junction that was full of taxis and small mopeds, it looked at first really interesting and totally at the wrong place but quickly I spotted the road signs above that showed that we were indeed in the right port. So following signs we walked a short distance to the port, which was weird as I was already so used to that taxi drivers like drive you in front of doors almost always. Buying ticket was surprisingly easy, I had again destination name in chinese but I tried to pronounce it at the desk and for my huge surprise she understood me right away and gave me ticket (of course after I handed money).

And then we encountered first problem as it wasn’t clear at all where to go next. There was a long line in front of doors, but I had no idea when my ferry was supposed to leave and where to go. At this point my chinese friend came really handy as she was able to ask some help from other passenger and we quickly learned that I just need wait in front of one door that had my destination name written above (which I noticed at that point). Easy when you know

Ferry trip itself didn’t have any surprises, it was as you can imagine ferry to be. Although it was my first time taking one-hour ferry across the sea, it was still a ferry. And for my surprise other passengers didn’t looked me at all, at least I didn’t notice at all that, even though I was then only westerners onboard.

Park at seaside

Big ship

Sunset at the park

Forgotten Rose

After one hour trip I arrived to Jiaonan port where my family members were picking me up. First we drove from port through the city to one bigger park next to sea. During the driving I saw the first impression of smaller chinese city and that was just amazing, I couldn’t even imagine before how much they are building new apartments everywhere. Even smaller cities, lots of building sites. I saw one block where they were building ten new apartment buildings, I have no idea how many floors they were going to have.
The park was beautiful even if it was winter time and practically the whole park was dead. It was very popular place, specially during summer, for wedding couples to take their wedding photos, my brother got his wedding photos there as well, and despite winter time we saw couple couples taking their wedding photos. We were there at the right time for me as I was able to see sunset.

Seafood Market

After park we were heading to my guests home but during the driving we stopped to seafood market. Which meant a small road between some fields full of tables and people behind tables selling all kind of seafood, it was full of fishes, clams, grabs, who knows what. Nothing so special in there but it was nice to see local market. And it’s nice way also to know that at least some of the sold goods were fresh as they were still swimming in small buckets

From the market we went to my guides home which meant for me to see first time chinese home. I don’t know what I expected, nothing much actually, but the chinese home felt much like any other home I’ve seen, even in Finland. But as in good chinese way, I got offered good Chinese tea while waiting for dinner time, and as I was nice english speaking foreigner, it meant that family’s daughter had nice opportunity to practice english and chatted with me.

And then the dinner… That is most amazing dinner that I have had so far. It ended up to be good seafood hot-pot dinner in nearby hotel restaurant and including lots of relatives. It was really nice to meet all of them and what surprised me is that everybody were so warm and welcoming, even that we didn’t have common language to talk. But it was really nice and I felt that I was really welcome to family. And the food… First, I think I have never seen so much food on the table at once (expect our christmas dinners), that was a lot of all kind of clams, seashells, fish, meat, everything. I don’t even know what I was eating some of time, I do remember though that meat was of course really good and tasted as good as always, but my favorite ended up to be clams called in local name ‘kala’, which is funny as ‘kala’ means fish in finnish language. But they were small and tasty clams.

Clams to be eaten

One of more exotic and more difficult thing to eat was a whole big octopus. It was still alive when waitress put it in to hotpot, but quite soon it was ready go eat. Have to admit, I had some troubles to eat it at first as it was surprisingly heavy to hold with chopsticks. Eating octopuses and squids had though nothing new for me as I have eaten those in korea already, but eating that size of octopus was something new. In korea they usually come as chopped versions (as all food here). But good thing was that I liked it, specially as I ended up to having two of those in my hotpot…
After a dinner I was so full that last time i’ve eaten so much has been only in christmas. But I definitely know now why seafood in Qingdao is so famous, it is really tasty and good.

After dinner we went back to home where quite soon after we arrived their neighbor came to visit with his son. As I quickly learned, his son also wanted to practice English speaking, so once again I had fun time to chat little bit in English and I got little bit feeling of being superstar.

As I wrote in my previous post, my winter vacation started with a flight to Qingdao. My first impression of the city was small surprise, I got surprised how much there were construction sites all over the city. And they weren’t building few small houses, but lots and lots of tall skyscrapers. Clearly this is fast growing city.

Nearby street

As previously mentioned reasons, I was tired when I checked in to the hostel and after getting into my room, despite it was cold, I just relaxed on my bed and got a good long nap. After waking up, I took my camera and walked around neighborhood a little bit, but only to discover soon that weather in Qingdao was really cold at this time, specially the wind was really strong and made weather even colder than it actually was. So I was quickly back to my hostel where the New Year party had started already, so I stayed in hostel, enjoyed free food, good Tsingtao beer and nice company. I met many nice people who stayed also in the same hostel all over the world – though amazing amount of guests were from Korea, in the party at least half of the people were coming from Korea and mostly they were English teachers there. Well, it was nice to share some experiences…

Smaller nearby street

Next day wasn’t any better for sightseeing as my New Year celebration got little bit longer and I was sleeping long on the next day. It wasn’t until in the evening when I got out with my friend to find nice restaurant to have a dinner. Our choice was a neighborhood that was recommended by hostel reception, and we took nice looking restaurant and had hotpot.

Finished hotpot

Hotpot was Beijing style, looked nice and had traditional coals to make stuff hot, but the part where the food was were shallow and deep, making it quite difficult to find food with chopsticks. In the end I managed to find though all mutton pieces and clams. And have to admit, that was good dinner. Chinese hotpot is just great, specially when it is cold outside.

Bridge

After dinner we walked a little bit in the neighborhood but as it was getting late and weather was still cold, we headed back to hostel. There was second day of new year celebration, but I skipped this day as I felt tired and was just relaxing in my room. At this point I started to really realize that hostel dorm rooms were not so good as although AC has been on in my room all the time, it was still freezing near the floor. In my bed, which was directly opposite of AC, it was somewhat warm, but bed felt still cold. Partially. But also while in bed, it was sometimes little bit too warm as AC was blowing directly into my bed (as I set it to do so though).

Red trees

My China trip started by taking airplane from Seoul to Qingdao. Reason for this was simple, it was cheapest flight to China After very late packing, I had too little of sleep, I woke up early (5am, which is way too early for me), and after some last minute packing, I ealized that I was going to be late from airport. I quickly took metro to Seoul Station, switched to Airport Express train, took and paid express train and got to airport just after the check-in time was over, but luckily they were still checking in people and I managed to check my self in without any problems. Then quickly running through security check and immigration, switching to correct terminal and again, I was almost late from boarding – expect that they weren’t boarding at all at that time. So all good, I got on the plane just in time and my China trip was about to start as planned.

I arrived to Qingdao at 9.20am, after getting through immigration I got taxi to my hostel. It is nice place, on top of the hill, and it is located in old observatory. Place looked great but after checking in and getting my room key, I noticed that my room is terrible cold. Putting AC on full power helped a little bit but not too much. Anyways, as I wasa really tired of not sleeping enough last night, I just started to taking long naps. After waking up, it was night already, so I just took my camera and walked around the hostel area to get my first view of Qingdao. And that was just bloody cold. The wind was just amazing and I was freezing so badly. So I walked back to hostel, pretty much just in time to get in the New YEar cparty that hostel was arranging. Free food, free glogi and really cheap Tsingtao beer, not bad. After year changed, I actually ended up to go to bar with couple other hostel guests but still feeling quite tired I left there before others and got back to hostel around 3am. And next day went pretty much of sleeping and surviving previous day.

In the evening I went with my friend to have hotpot, it was nice looking restaurant that offered hotpot in Beijing style. It was delicious but little difficult to get food out of hotpot as the space to get anything was narrow. Anyways, as always, chinese food is just great.

I do have some photos to share from my couple first days, but I don’t have Internet access on my laptop right now, so you have to wait a little longer to see more photos. And to hear my family visit to Jiaonan…