Goings on in Qingdao, China

We spent a nice day yesterday wandering the port city of Qingdao.  We went to check out some of the historical buildings around town including some old churches.

 

Late afternoon we decided to go for a walk out on the pier at No. 6 Bathing Beach right near the centre of town.  There were heaps of people there walking out to some kind of temple or pagoda at the end.  Along the pier there were heaps of vendors setting up their mats spread with seashells and other trinkets to sell to all the tourists.

 

We walked along the pier but decided not to go to the temple because it cost money (it seems that everything costs money in China - even the churches charged admission).  Still, we spent an interesting few minutes watching all the vendors scramble to hide their goods when the cops did a random sweep of the pier. Most of the vendors just gathered up their mats with all their goods inside and stuffed them into a bag before quietly disappearing amongst the crowd.  The seashell vendors couldn't do that however.  Mostly they just dropped their huge bags of shells down under the pier and hid them amongst the concrete piles.  It was quite obvious where the seashells all went but the cops didn't seem to be looking too hard because they only nabbed one guy.

 

On the way back to shore we went past a couple of vendors (as soon as the cops turned their backs the mats all came back out) selling these funny little toys.  They were soft balls about as big as a golf ball with a face on them.  They had two gangly legs about two inches long hanging down.  They all seemed to be jumping around all over the mats by magic.  The vendors' hands weren't anywhere near them.  After we past about three vendors selling these toys we still couldn't work out how they were moving - was it batteries?.. or maybe magnets?  Some of the vendors also seemed to be able to control the toys, telling them when to dance and when to stop.

 

After a while Paul could stand the suspense no longer.  He went up to a vendor and said (in Mandarin) "How many batteries does that take?".

"It doesn't take batteries" said the vendor.  "You have to train it".

"How long can it dance for?" Paul asked.

"If you train it properly it can go for a year" the vendor said.

"What about after a year?" Paul said.

"Look, if you really wanted it to, it could go for about three years" the vendor said.  "If you buy one I can show you how it's done".

Suitably impressed, Paul started haggling over the price.  He got the vendor down to 3 yuan.

The vendor handed over the toy. "Just read the instructions inside" he said.

Paul ripped open the packet and took out the instructions.

"What?" he said.

"What's wrong?" I said.

"It's on a string!" he said.  "He was pulling the string!  I've been conned!".

"Ha ha" I said.  "Don't worry, it was worth 3 yuan for the laugh".

Paul felt stupid for the rest of the night.