Our Beautiful City

So last week was our New Staff City Tour. Usually they do this when the new staff first arrives, but this year the Olympics sort of put a wrench into everything. It was fun to see a lot of places we hadn't been to yet.

For those who aren't aware of Chinese geography, Qingdao is directly on the coast, sort of on a peninsula. This is really cool because just about anyway you turn you run into the ocean. In fact, our commute to school every morning is along a beautiful coastal route. Leaving the house at 6:30AM may not be fun, but a lulling tour along the coast with a rising sun backdrop usually makes it worth it. Our school is also built on a hill, so we have a beautiful view of the ocean from much of our campus. I can even (barely) see it from my office!

Enough about the ocean though. I don't want to make you poor landlocked souls too jealous.


Here are a few pics of the city:






The night before we had our city tour, we had a karaoke birthday party for one of our staff members. Turns out karaoke is really big here, and they have a lot of karaoke bars with private party rooms. We had around 30 people there, so we even had the VP suite with a large screen to read the lyrics on.

Karaoke in China is even more fun than in the states (for all of you non-karaoke fans) because on the screen behind the lyrics they karaoke machine projected cheesy music videos to go along with the music. However, sometimes it seems they weren't so sure about the translation. Sometimes the lines were mixed up (we're still not sure how they got "I want to floor you" from "I want to hold you"). The funniest was the background to "Oh, Come All Ye Faithful." Yes, the Christmas song. Someone thought it would be fun to sing it...what was more fun was to see the music video that went a long. Here are a few shots...



Yes, that is a beach on a warm summer day (I don't think that was in the song), and I think the couple is adoring each other more than the Christ. :-) This video was absolutely hilarious. It started out with a bunch of shots of Buddha, and then went to a very sultry, cheesy, 1980's video. I'm sorry to say we were not able to focus on the words...