Beertown: Qingdao

It's been tough finding good internet access that was at the same time cheap since the last post in Shanghai, but to bring you up to date, we are now in Qingdao. We had some bad weather in Shanghai, but the city was still very impressive despite the remains of a tropical storm. Happily there was an excellent museum in town to keep us occupied that day. We weren't quite sure where to head next, but a brief search on the internet revealed that we could fly up to Qingdao for about the same cost as an overnight train ride. Qingdao is of course famous for being the home of Tsingtao beer (the old style spelling of the city name). Beer and German architecture is everywhere here, the former being sold in plastic bags with drinking straws. With this in mind, we took ourselves over to the old brewery today and took a somewhat surreal tour, which featured a whole room of pictures of Chinese dignitaries who had visited over the years and a bunch of weird ads. I had the "Duff Beer for me, Duff Beer for you..." song from the Simpsons going through my head the whole time.

Computer time is short here, so I'll leave it at that for now.