The QingDao Trip Part 3

The plan was after walking all day along the coast to get back to the hotel, change, and grab one of the busses that runs from downtown out to the fairgrounds of the beer festival. Instead, we got back and passed out... hard. When I came to, it was dark outside and after fighting through the momentary panic of "oh my God, I slept away the whole night", realized that it was actually just 10 o'clock... which meant it was still to late to make the 40 minute trip out to the beer festival. So, as usual, we turned to our trusty local tour guide, the doorman, who pointed us in the direction of a "fun beer street." This "fun beer street" turned out to be white-guy-no-man's land and the crowd of locals treated me to a nice little walk of shame as I wandered down the street, a laowai (foreigner) with a Chinese girl... at least now I know how it would feel if I picked up a prostitute and wandered into Church with her...

The stares ended up being a small price to pay for the incredible meal we had at a huge outdoor restaurant. Seafood is the QingDao local specialty and we spent a solid two hours drinking beer and picking through mounds of steaming fresh muscles, clams, oysters, shrimp, prawns and fried squid. Very full, we decided to make a return visit to "Feeling", the dance club from the night before, except when we arrived, instead of listening to cool remixes by an awesome international DJ, the crowd was going nuts for a little Asian dude jumping around on stage and singing what I can only assume are popular boy-band-type songs in Chinese. Alice and I watched for a little while but it was sort of anti-climactic so we left the club and wandered down the street to a club called "Babyface" (which is a huge chain in China, there's a really big one in Shanghai and a couple in Beijing.) Besides ridiculously large Long Island Iced Teas, I also got to watch my first bar fight in Asia; let me tell you, they don't mess around like we do in the states with any sissy one on one or "fair" fights... this was a crazy battle royal that started on the dance floor when, seemingly for no reason, a guy got cracked in the head with a huge pilsner glass which shattered and caused a nice massive head wound. I'll save the rest of the play by play but eventually we managed to skirt around the edges of the melee and escape back to "Feeling" where we ended up dancing until about 4am and then cabing it back to the hotel.