The Travelling Life of Silvan Colani
August 2000 - Qinqdao Beer Festival 
The Qingdao Beer Festival - what an amazing event! It's hard to describe however, given that after four days of virtually swimming in beer, your brain capacity is reduced to the most basic: name? (...Silvan something...), age? (...hmm...pass), favorite drink (...here we go again!!!).
Here's what I remember: the event is hosted in a theme park-like area appropriately named International Beer City (if I were king of Colaniland, I would name my capital that way). The main building of the park (the Temple of Booze) is packed with Chinese of all ages in various states of consciousness. Gulping down anything from plain old Tsingtao Beer to pink colored strawberry-flavored beer and munching on squid tongue and cucumbers, they welcomed us in their midst with a never-ending encouragement to "gan bei" (bottoms up). There's non-stop Karaoke from a stage (no German humpa-humpa music) interrupted by the occasional drinking competition. Foreigners are a rare sight and we were constantly mobbed to either drink, eat, dance, sing or all together. (My solo rendition of "Det aene am Bergli", a Swiss folk song, sent the crowd screaming for more - beer that is!) There's the occasional fight over a beer or a girl, but those are swiftly contained by a hoard of Public Security Bureau guys, who whisk the offenders off into the unknown. And then there's more beer, more beer and even more beer. All the rest you can read in the local paper:
There is, of course, a lot more to Qingdao than beer. And, contrary to what you may think, we did see quite a bit of it. There are these amazing German-style buildings from the colonial days, plenty of parks and beaches and the beautiful Laoshan mountains. Of all the cities in China I have visited, Qingdao certainly is one of the prettiest and also cleanest - outside the walls of the International Beer City that is!!
The brave members of the Qingdao Beer Safari playing a round of Cho Dai Dee and drinking Tsingtao Beer - what else?
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