We started our visit to China with three port calls on the Diamond Princess, to Qingdao, Dalian, and our final destination, Tianjin. We'll tell you about the first two in this blog, and Tianjin in the next.
As many of you know, there have been two major systems of writing Chinese using the Roman alphabet since westerners started turning up in large numbers 170 years ago. The one officially adopted by the Chinese government in the 1950s and internationally in the early 1980s is called pinyin, and it is relatively easy to use if you remember a few uses of letters that are not the same as in English, the two most prominent of which are probably Q and X, the former pronounced "ch" and the latter something between "s" and "sh." So Qingdao is pronounced more or less like "ching-dow." However, it is one of those place names, like Beijing's former spelling "Peking" as in "Peking Opera" and "Peking duck," whose transliteration in the nineteenth century Wade-Giles system refuses to die, thanks in this case to Tsingtao Beer.
And Tsingtao Beer came to be China's first and most famous beer, still made here in Qingdao, thanks to the colonial ambitions of Germany. Germany only became a nation in 1871, long after Britain and France had created vast colonial empires, and even small European countries like Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands had colonies many times larger than the mother country itself. As a suddenly large and powerful European nation with no shortage of feelings of superiority toward other races, Germany felt quite put out. It assuaged its inferiority complex by picking up a few African colonies in places other European countries had not bothered to conquer, probably for good reasons, and then in 1898 it coerced China into letting it run Qingdao. China by this time had given up trying to stop European countries from gobbling up its best cities, having lost a few wars that tried to do just that, so in short order a quiet fishing village began to become a city with place names like Berliner Strasse and Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse, and of course a brewery. [Click on the map to enlarge it if you'd like to see the full set of Teutonic names]. Alas for the Germans they blew their first attempt at the domination of Europe in WW I, and part of the price of losing was the loss of Qingdao.
We spent about 6 hours of shore leave exploring Qingdao's Germanic heritage, but started the day with a hearty breakfast and a look out our dining room window on Deck 14. By golly, we were looking straight across to a sleepy crane operator perched, like us, 125' above the dock. Never could figure out why he was up there when his crane was clearly not going to be getting any business that day, but maybe that's one of those inefficiencies we saw so often in China that we no longer fear the supposed juggernaut of an all-conquering Chinese economy, an image that certain politicians pull out and polish up around election time each year. More on this in future blogs, we're sure.
In any event, those buses waiting on the dock soon took us for a 3 or 4 km ride to a location in the heart of downtown Qingdao, where we took off to explore with another couple from the boat, Joe and Betsy. Within blocks we had struck some architectural gold as we came upon the Catholic Church and some surrounding buildings that any German city would be proud to show off.
As we continued our Teutonic Tour, we passed many buildings that continued the theme, such as this apartment house in a side alley, or the Government Building put up by the Germans in 1903 and now given some Chinese touches with flowers and lanterns.
Our second major destination was the other church the Germans put up, of course a Lutheran one. And sure enough, there were several sets of brides and grooms round and about, but something was a little different here -- by golly, they were actually getting married! As we entered the church on the heels of a newly-blessed couple, we heard that another wedding would occur shortly. Hmmm, why not stay and see what a wedding in China is like? Soon enough the flower girl we had seen before entering was marching up the aisle with a flower boy, the bride and the bride's father, marching to something by Handel. The service lasted 15-20 minutes, much of which was in the form of a homily by the minister and then the familiar words of attachment -- at least, we assumed they were -- and then the choir sang a hymn, the couple bowed deeply to the choir, and out walked China's newest married couple. We looked at each other and said, this Chinese wedding was a more typical American wedding than our own!
If you're going to establish a colonial barony in a foreign land, you've got to put up a suitably baronial castle for the guy in charge, and this home met the bill. Met it so well, in fact, that it became a favorite of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and other top officials after the Communist takeover in 1949. We took the tour and got to see, in fact, Mao's own bed and Mao's own phonograph player, made in China in the 1950s!
We also saw the "Golden Hall" where the German Governor formally met guests, and where the Politburo convenened in 1957 for one of its classier meetings. Another room had some old photos, such as this turn-of-the-century ball, and a light sconce whose nose was battered in by radical students inspired by the May 4th Movement in 1919. Luckily for "big-noses," i.e. Westerners, the students attacked this big-nosed sconce instead of actual Big Noses as part of the students' reaction to the raw deal China got in the Versailles Treaty announced that day. Thanks to the fondness the Communist bigwigs had for the mansion, there was no similar incident or worse during the far more chaotic Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
Having finished our German Tour of China, we headed down to check out the waterfront. For a nation on the Pacific, China does not have all that many cities of note on the ocean itself, and this is one of the ones that gets special mention in many guidebooks. With hazy weather limiting visibility, it was not having one of its better days. There are a number of beaches along the full shore, but the ones we visited near downtown are not known for swimming, and we only saw one or two folks actually in the water, though good-sized crowds did mill about alongside the water or on the pier sticking a half-mile out into it. As we walked along, we saw 4 or 5 stands selling slices of something that appeared to be full of grains, nuts, honey and dried fruit, but our worries about the sanitary standards, especially the old door the food sat on, held us back from trying a wedge. Sadly, we never saw this delicacy in any of the other cities we visited, when our standards had slid somewhat.
As we walked back to the meeting place for our shuttle bus, we had to cross a busy road by means of an underpass. Here was a new lesson, or rather an old lesson from our previous visit to China reawakened. The lesson is this -- if someone, sometime, might pass a place with an appetite, some entrepreneur will soon be there with a food stand. Here are just the first two of a dozen stands we passed before emerging on the other side of the street!
As we got closer to our final destination, we turned down an alley and entered a full-fledged food street, a common feature of many Chinese cities. Octopus, squid, sea urchins, even star fish, all those and more were there for your eating pleasure. Even the sculpture glorified food vendors. Jeff played it safe and had a stick of sticky rice balls dipped in a soy-based sauce then rolled in sesame seeds. His adventuresomeness does know some bounds.
By late afternoon we were back on the boat and wondering how much of the haze was natural and how much Made in China. As we glided out to sea, we passed one more interesting sight, a Chinese submarine base. According to the internet, there is another submarine facility nearby, out of public sight, where the nuclear sub fleet makes its port calls.
Our final port call before we disembark in Tianjin was the next day, in Dalian. We visited here in May 2009, and you can revisit our photos and commentary from that visit by going to http://redtandem.blogspot.com/2009/07/two-smaller-stops-dalian-and-jeju.html. Since that visit, Jeff's son Matt plus his wife Akiko and son Tyler have come here on a work assignment from Citibank. The Diamond Princess did not give us a long time to visit, but it was precious all the same.
Tyler was now exactly 3 1/2 years old, and of course quite a bit more verbal than when we last saw him over 2 years ago. However, at that time he spoke with equal facility, or lack thereof, in both Japanese and English. While he clearly understood everything his Dad said to him in English, he clearly wasn't buying the bilingual bit and conversations with him were particularly challenging. However, he was all for playing ball games in his apartment, and for doing jigsaw puzzles. He really knew the puzzle Akiko pulled out, and put each piece where it belonged without having to look at the nearby pieces. Nope, didn't care to talk about it. Just do it, like the ad says, just do it.
After our play date at the apartment, we headed off for, of course, some Chinese food. We were joined, as we were in the apartment, by Akiko's visiting Uncle Motoi. We didn't know it at the time, of course, but it proved to be one of the best meals we had in China.
It was a much-too-quick visit. We had planned to remedy that known shortcoming by returning to Dalian as part of our Tour de China, but after the cruise had been locked in it turned out that Akiko and Tyler had to return to Japan for Tyler to take an entrance exam of some sort (yes, we know, he's 3 1/2 -- but we're talking Japan here, home of the perpetual school exam). As Louise knows all too well from her own years in Japan, to play the system you've got to get kiddie into the right nursery school, which then makes it easy to get into the right elementary school, the ideal middle school, the best high school, the top college, the premier . . . life??? Lucky for us, Tyler aced his first exam, and his future as a Japanese exam-taker looks bright. As for us, we've arranged for Matt to meet us in Beijing for some sightseeing several days from now, which will be his first trip outside Dalian since arriving 6 months ago.
We'll hop off the boat tomorrow and tell you all about Tianjin, our first stop on the next phase of the trip (Jeff and Louise on their own, trying not to get hopelessly lost), in our next posting.
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