Birth of a beer festival
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Qingdao's sculpture park honors the town's favorite drink. Photo: Hao Ying |
Drunk-o-Vision
The museum is not all history - a unique "drunken room" uses a slanted floor and optical tricks to cause visitors to stagger and occasionally fall. Afterwards, tourists are given a glass of murky, fresh draft beer, which tastes much better than the "fresh" stuff available throughout the city (fresh draft, which is unpasteurized, goes off after 24 hours). Perhaps most importantly, visitors are also given Tsingtao's special beer nuts - addictively delicious but with a lot of chemical additives.
In the last room of the museum, Chinese tour groups sing, yell, chant, and try to drink each other under the table. The Chinese toast ganbei means "drain glass", and is a call for you to chug-a-lug.
Sadly, today's Tsingdao ads, ubiquitous on the airwaves and landscape across the country, follow the stale mold of branding around the world. But visitors stumbling out of the museum, and onto Beer Street (which, the city's German architects might be pleased to note, is conveniently dotted with clean public restrooms), can see the company has tried various other approaches in the past. A series of old paving stones, featuring cute animals from the Chinese zodiac raising a mug, seem lifted straight out of the Joe Camel advertising playbook.
Meanwhile, an aging neon sign on the Tsingdao factory shows two incredibly slim women with beehive hairdos, and the slogan, "TsingTao Beer can give you passion and happiness" (reminiscent of a promise from the 1947 newsreel that drinking Tsingtao regularly can cure diseases).
Outside, the beautiful tree-lined neighborhoods along the seafront are flooded with wedding photographers, ferrying van-loads of young couples from point to scenic point. Young women in rented white dresses sit on curbsides, waiting for their chance to pose in an authentic European neighborhood.
Such quaint scenes are less likely to be found at this month's Festival, however, which is modeled after Munich's Oktoberfest - albeit with karaoke replacing oompah-pah bands. With street food galore and over a dozen tents featuring beers from around the world, the Festival is "International" in the sense that the Chinese will welcome any foreigners there to chug a beer or share some food with them. But then, in light of Qingdao's history of colonialism, invasion and isolation, perhaps that's the best kind of international there is.
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