My time in Qingdao has come to an end. Instead of pissing and moaning about the unending stupidity that flows like draft Tsingtao, I’ve made a laundry list of things I’ll miss, but not necessarily enough to pull me back into its slimy black tentacles. This would also make an excellent PowerPoint presentation, except that excellent PowerPoint presentations don’t actually exist.

Random bits of Qingdao/China I’ll yearn for:

Life in General

• 40 kilometres of the Pacific lined non-stop with beaches, paths, parks and scores of people getting their wedding photos taken. Perfect for scoping out the cutting edge in wedding fashions such as pink striped tuxedos, jean tuxedos or much more classy black tuxedos (matched with white Nike Air Jordans.)
• If smelling fried squid and watching the makeup melt off brides’ faces gets old, Fushan and Taipingshan mountains are mere minutes away for people who like to work that ass like Richard Simmons.
• Money makes the world go round, as Liza Minnelli circa the Third Reich would like you to know. Same deal in “Communist China”. Taobao makes eBay look like my local Pennysaver. After being used as toilet paper by a hamster.
• Anything can be repaired for prices that make you question if it’s really getting repaired or not. And I don’t know what I’m going to do with my days now without the mission of explaining to the call centre peeps what’s wrong with my thingamajig with technical terms in Chinese I’m not familiar with, then repeating the process all over again once the repair dude arrives.
• In the West, buy local is all the rage. Because everything is already made in China, their already ahead of the game. Hell, living in Qingdao I was able to buy most stuff made from factories not very far from my apartment, instead of some heat trap in Canton. Another perk of locally made stuff is being able to toilet paper the company’s bosses house and key his beamer when your shit falls apart.

Movies

• Assigned movie theatre seating. Forget being ahead, China is lapping us here. In a time when fewer people are going to the cinemas to check out Michael Bay’s latest 2 hour ode to explosions, you’d think the fatcats might try implementing something as simple as this. No more waiting aimlessly in the theatre 45 minutes before the show starts to avoid permanent damage to your neck. Gone is that annoying random distribution of empty single seats throughout the theatre. No more having to deal with fucktards who insist seats are taken when they aren’t. The whole concept is so damn simple it makes me want to strangle an aardvark for no apparent reason.
• Being able to walk into the theatre with your OWN damn food, drinks and booze, and not being harassed by night vision wearing pimple faced narcs. I know the cinemas’ lifeblood is their concession stands, but why not at least charge a “corkage fee” so that we don’t have to deal with the weak selection of toxic substances that they serve.
• Nahh, cinemas be damned. High quality pirated DVDs are commonly available with all the new releases and many random films of yore. Like Troll 2!

The Roads

• No taxi ride costs more than $10. …Well as long as you don’t take a “Beijing Shortcut”.
• Right of way for the biggest vehicle users on down to pedestrians. I know I’m going to lose what few friends I have left for this point, but the fact is that it’s easier for a person walking to notice if a relatively loud car is coming than for a driver to see a silent humanoid dressed in drab clothing pop out into traffic like a whack-a-mole.
• Vans that look like loafs of bread. Everywhere.

Food (no this is not a joke)

• As much as I love to hate on the “can I have some food with that oil and MSG” Chinese cuisine, there are some dishes that will knock your socks off, if you’re socks had little mouths that got the munchies after getting high on dope. 锅贴, 烤饼, 羊肉串, 清真烤饼, 新疆拉面, 火锅,蛤蜊,上海炒面，小笼包，just to name a few.
• Plentiful Korean BBQ that will pick you up, knock you down, and make the word Aardvark wish it had three A’s.
• Japanese izakayas hidden away where you won’t find them, but will turn into a redrum raving madman if you don’t.

And most important of all:

Booze

• My Mao-given right to walk into a variety store, buy a big bottle of beer for 50 cents and then have the clerk open it for me so I can start drinking right away. The alcohol laws in Canada now seem as if they were concocted by fascists.
• Watching 10-year-olds walk up to the draft beer vendors on the street to fetch a kilo bag of beer for their parents and hobbling away with it like leprechauns with their pot of gold.
• Bars stay open as long as customers continue feeding the bartenders banknotes. The archaic and absurd concept of closing time can go rot in outerspace.
• Binges at the beach with 10-buck kegs, BBQ’d beef and where’s waldo searches for bikini clad girls in the sea of budgie smugglers, banana hammocks and good ol’ fashioned speedos.

I’ll no doubt be smacked on the head with more, as the vexations of life at my current locale do the same, but no use flogging a dead horse…unless you’re into that sort of thing.

Filed under: dragons