I made a pilgrimage back to Canada to confirm my intuitions that the last of the chocolate chip cookies was indeed gone, and that the Christmas lights were taken down at exactly 11:59PM December 31st, I’ve returned to Qingdao to help the Chinese make up for everyone else’s decreased carbon footprints.

Ok, for those who don’t know, in Japan they have these places called hostess bars/clubs. You go to them, you sit down and you drink with girls (the hostesses). Yep that’s it. There might be some really shady places that operate differently but that’s not par for the course. For some reason Qingdao and the neighboring Huangdao have a plethora of these places. I can’t really figure this out, because there just aren’t that many Japanese dudes lacking in balls to go to real bars.

Yes. I have been to one. When you walk in, you’re greeted by a bunch of girls who will escort you to a table usually surrounded by shoulder height walls to give you some kind of false sense of intimacy. You’ll then be given a menu which upon reading you’ll be shocked to see that all the prices are for glasses and not bottles as the numbers would have you believe. Oh yeah and you’re expected to buy the girls drinks too. You’re probably thinking why the hell wouldn’t you just go to a bar and pick up ladies the old fashion way… using a drink spiked with rohypnol?? Well, I suppose if you’re a cranky old Japanese man with lots of dough, and a shriveled wiener, it would be more fun to piss and moan about your boring salaryman job to some Chinese university students pretending to be classy Japanese babes while you try to get hammered on 12 dollar drinks.

So as I was saying before, there’s a whole whack of them in Qingdao, and for some reason beyond the comprehension of man, they intrigue me. There’s gotta be about 20 in my immediate neighborhood that I walk by every day, and I’m completely mesmerized by them and occasionally their contents. For me it’s like driving to work on the highway and seeing some massive signs with random objects like pogo sticks and turkey basters but with obscure subheadings like “Tomorrow is yesterday’s future” and “Magic trombones kill”. One neat thing about them is their exteriors. It makes them look like a secret ninja club. That is, if secret ninja clubs advertised their whereabouts by large booze adverts, gaudy colours and names like “Loves You”. I’ve thought way too much about them and I’ve come to the sociological conclusion that they look the way they do cause Japanese businesses here tend to get pooped on whenever Sino-Japanese relations go down the crapper (both literally and metaphorically). Windows sure make good target practice for all manner of projectiles hence the speakeasy look. It’s ironic that by trying to be low key, they actually stick out like a hot Scandinavian model at a sausage party. Part of the allure is not knowing what’s going on in there, so it’s a little annoying that nothing is what’s going on.

I went for a walk and took a bunch of pictures of them so that you have an idea, these were just the ones near my place in Hong Kong Garden, there’s lots more smattered about the city. The ones in Huangdao that I saw on my brief visit there a while back were on sketchy side streets, and also had much lower key look with peep windows and security cams. According to one of my Japanese friends, Qingdao and Huangdao have some of the most well known hostess bars outside of Japan. I can’t vouch for the veracity of this claim, but judging by the number of them and the fact that I’ve never seen them anywhere else in China to this degree, there must be some kind of funk going on in there.

I’ve asked my friends about them, and they don’t really seem to care or have an opinion on them other than the fact that their customers get robbed blind. I suppose if you use money for toilet paper, they would be worth checking out. Just know that if you don’t speak Japanese or Chinese, it’s not going to be a very conversational time and as such, I would recommend forgoing the destruction of the mystique and instead heading to nightclub, which coincidently I will be elaborating on next…dun dun Duuuuun….

Filed under: quick guides