Be flexible – Things will Change

That was the statement that Brandon shared with us on Saturday as a general rule for while we’re here in China. If we only knew how true that would be today.

Our local host Karen was kind enough to arrange a tour of the city for everyone. After breakfast (better now with my peanut butter I might add), we all boarded a small bus to go around the city.

On the way, Karen was sharing some interesting information about Qingdao. My favorite fact came up after we commented on how many trees there were in the city. Karen said that one of the government officials made it a priority several years ago to get them planted. Which sounds great, right? Well, come to find out, he was buying all the the trees from his cousin and getting kickbacks for overbuying. They would tear down old mature trees to overplant new ones… maybe not so good after all. In any case…

We started off by visiting one of the highest parks in the city that had a small temple at the top of it. It was very nice looking and was at the top of a hill, which gave a beautiful view of the city and one of the several beaches in Qingdao.

It was at this point when we were going to go down to the bus that we could see that Karen was getting very upset. Apparently our bus driver had illegally parked at the bottom of the hill. And he got a ticket. And started arguing with a police officer. And was arrested because of it. Karen told the officer about all of the foreign visitors so they didn’t tow the bus, but we had no driver for it. “Be flexible. Things will change.”

So while we were waiting for a new driver, we decided to walk to the next destination – which was not too far away. It was at this point, i had my first of what I would later several embarrassing moments. I was chatting with one of the local team members, and we started talking about names. I was laughing and couldn’t resist bringing up the Chinese name I was given in Beijing, “高富帅”（ 高 == tall，富 == rich，帅 == handsome ). Then she said quite seriously, “I’m sure you know Erik that Chinese girls find you very attractive. You have very big eyes, you are very fit, and have a great smile.” Embarrassed I quickly moved on to another topic… and we were fortunately very close to our next destination.

We went down by the Qingdao Aquarium, but opted not to go inside since it was very busy. Summer is the height of tourist season in Qingdao. So instead, we had a little bit of down time and were able to spend some time hanging out next to the ocean. We climbed out on some bit rocks and were able to take some pictures.

After that, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that our driver got out of jail and rejoined us. He was very apologetic, but as you can see, it just turned out to be a story, not a problem. We then went to a nice Korean restaurant for lunch, again family style. We had many types of kim chi, some really nice pork belly and some delicious beef something.

After lunch, we went to see a local temple. There in the middle, there was a big bell in the middle where you could throw coins for good luck. The temple itself was interesting. However two things stand out in my mind looking back.. 1) the bathrooms were absolutely disgusting. The girls refused to go in. One said, I’d rather get a UTI than go in there! 2) we definitely attracted some attention. Several of the girls and guys had random Chinese people come up to them and want to take random pictures.

The last stop of the day tour was to China Mobile which was a bit of mess. We handed over our passports and were just hanging out there for quite some time. In the same respect it was fun to just hang out with everyone and get to know our teams a bit more.

We then walked back to the hotel for a bit before going out to dinner. I took that opportunity to get situated a bit more in my room and just lay low for a bit. The internet is horrendously slow, so I ended up just reading for a bit.

We finished off the night with a very nice Chinese restaurant that the Pyxera team provided for us. We had a huge assortment of food to choose from. You could tell that everyone was a bit tired, but Jose was the life of the party with his jokes… the only problem is that all of the punchlines involved the wives dying.