Qingdao, China - 19 September

We pulled into Qingdao, China around 7:00 am on a rainy yucky day. Not an auspicious beginning! The ship was cleared by Customs around 10:00 so we were able to retrieve our passports after that and then eat an early lunch. We were scheduled to gather in the Union at 12:15 to get organized for the trip to Beijing and Xi’an. Eileen and I were the tour/bus leaders and had been prepped about what needed to be done and were loaded down with lots of forms and first-aid kits. We distributed name tags and itineraries to the 83 people signed up for the trip and then took attendance. It took us a while to get all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed. And then it was time to head out to the buses.

I loaded everyone onto my bus and was introduced to Dennis, the Chinese tour guide for the one hour trip to the airport. The moment we got onto the bus, Dennis started giving us the tourism spiel and didn’t stop talking until we got to the airport. Zut Alor! As we were driving through the city, Dennis was telling us that Qingdao is very beautiful. Unfortunately, his timing stunk because we were driving through a rather grim area of the city at the time with a great deal of poverty and grime. It seriously undermined his credibility but you had to give him points for trying.

We finally arrived at the airport and we herded everyone inside and waited while Dennis and the other tour guide dealt with the tickets. We received our tickets with very little trouble and then milled around the gate for about 1 ½ hours. We finally got on the plane after waiting an additional hour due to the bad weather that the typhoon in Shanghai was creating. It messed up air traffic everywhere. We were rather fortunate that our flight wasn’t cancelled.

We arrived in Beijing at 5:00 pm and were greeted by two tour guides-Nancy and Christine. None of our tour guides ever had us call them by their Chinese names. They’ve probably had bad experiences with westerners trying to pronounce their names. They lead us out to the bus area and we were surprised to see only one bus waiting for us. Apparently, the other bus had gotten stuck in traffic. They explained that with the explosion of people buying cars in Beijing within the last several years, their rush hour traffic is from 7:00 am to 10:00 pm with no relief during the day. After waiting about 15 minutes, the bus finally arrived and we all got onto the bus. We then experienced this famous traffic ourselves. It took us 1 ½ hours to get to the restaurant from the airport. We were starving by the time we got there.

We went to the Hepingmen Quanjude Restaurant which is supposed to be famous for the Peking Duck and was certainly the largest and could accommodate 2000 diners at a meal. It was a seven story restaurant and we were led up to the sixth floor where our tables were reserved. The moment we sat down, the staff rushed to all the tables with beer, Sprite, Coke and water. After that, small dishes of appetizers were placed on the large Lazy Susan on the table and we frantically tried to grasp bits and pieces of them with our chopsticks before they rotated to the next person. After a while, they brought out the makings for the Peking Duck. It consists of uber-thin pancakes, thinly sliced scallions, thinly sliced duck and a sauce to drizzle on it. After you get everything on the pancake, you fold it up a couple of times and then enjoy. It was wonderful! It’s the first time I’ve had Peking Duck and it was totally worth the wait. One of the people at our table got a picture of the experience that I will include as soon as she downloads her photos.

Around 9:00 we finally left the restaurant and went to our hotel. They had the keys ready for us but no way of distributing them in an orderly manner so I got the privilege of yelling out the names of all the participants and their room numbers in this really elegant hotel. It was rather embarrassing to be so loud but I was so ready to be in my room at that point that I just wanted to get it done.

My roommate for the trip was Nancy Muleady-Mecham. She goes by Doc Nancy since her last name is a mouthful that people usually mispronounce. She was an excellent roommate and we had similar habits. It was such a relief. We were both exhausted and immediately went to bed.