Taidong Murals
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but rumor has it China is hosting the Olympics this year. And it just so happens that Qingdao gets the privilege of the sailing events. Of course, the city government wants to make sure that we live up to the title of “Top Ten Clean Cities China 2005.” Every street in the downtown core has been repaved, flowers planted, and all the prostitutes have been whisked away from the pervy foreigners to where only the local bureaucrats can access them.
While I’m looking forward to everything falling back into disarray after the Olympics are done with, there is one change I’ve noticed that I hope can withstand the eventual battering air pollution and lack of maintenance.
The western half of Qingdao consists mostly of older (pre-70s) and very old (German Colonial) architecture and urban layouts. One particular quadrant is called Taidong. Here you’ll find one of the long wide pedestrian street not unlike Nanjing Rd. in Shanghai, or Wangfujing in Beijing. Adjacent to this street is a plethora of fashion stores, hair stylists, cafes and internet bars. Harajuku it ain’t, but it’s definitely worth a check just to see what the kids are up to these days. There’s also a night market, but it closes early relative to other Asian night markets, and is more of a tourist trap/pickpocket magnet than anything else.
In one giant building on the street there’s a Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut, KFC, video arcade and a movie theatre that shows western films dubbed in Chinese. Naturally, this building ensures a steady stream of foreigners into Taidong. With this in mind the government has made sure to clean it up to whatever wacky standards are swirling around in the minds of those local bureaucrats during their 3-hour liquid lunches.
Turns out they decided to repaint all of the buildings along the main drag with murals, and some on the side streets as well. Now I’m no artiste, but I don’t think any particular mural is very striking. What is impressive is the fact that they put these up in about 2 weeks and the scale of it. In typical Chinese fashion, there’s a few random things painted in there that make you scratch your head and say WTF?!
I’ll give you this shot as reference to what it mostly looked like before…..
And after….
Other interesting things to do in Taidong:
Filed under: qingdao
Quite colourful! Have to say I much prefer the original appearance.
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those buildings look better than the rows of gray drab apartment buildings (and those with white tiles) that we have in Suzhou. Looking at those buildings, sadly, only makes me think of what condition they will be in when the world forgets about Qingdao and its sailing compititions.
hek
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Just went to that Mexican place yesterday, and noted the murals too. But I didn’t take the fun photos. Wish you’d share them and the tale with RedStar.
Have you been to their Unplugged?
I live in HKG too, and want to applaud your blog. How did you get started? And it’s not censored?
I’m also in my 50s, and am from Wisconsin via Utah, teaching English at a private school, of course…
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I appreciate your comment Jay.
The Redstar crew are good guys, sometimes I check their stuff out, but I don’t get too involved cause I’m often busy and I don’t want to overly segregate myself into the expat community so to say.
Web censorship here really only affects the big websites, or ones that have excessive use of forbidden text strings (i.e. the 3 t’s.) If you start one using your own domain and avoid talking about starting a militant revolution you’re golden.
If you ever hang around 乐邦 you may run into me, but I prefer to keep semi-anonymous just for fun.
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