Western Food? In... Laoshan?

The centre of Qingdao centres on 市南,Shinan, City South, and 市北, Shibei, City North. I live in Shinan district along with my university campus. And every other interesting thing in Qingdao. There are the new, glossy financial centre skyscrapers, the 5 star hotels, the lamborghini shop, western restaurants, Korean cafes and Japanese supermarkets. Outside of this little oasis, the city of Qingdao stretches away, acres and acres of sad, ugly high rises punctuated by wasteland and building sites. At some point this fades away to the bit I call "zombieland", reason being it looks as though World War 3 has already happened. Every old, stone, one storey building appears to have been half-heartedly bulldozed and wizened human forms live in the bits still standing. The roads are made of brick and potholes. There is nothing green, except for the odd row of cabbages.

This is Laoshan district.

The edge of Laoshan district, the bit nearest the coast and the 21st century, is also where they decided to build Qingdao's concert hall, which is a rather beautiful modernistic design. Predictably, it was by western architects. It is rather indicative of the Chinese educational system and mind set that out of 1.3 billion people, they cannot find someone creative enough to design their showcase buildings.

Anyway yesterday we, that is a group of miscellaneous nationalities, went to see a Korean show at the concert hall. We went for dinner beforehand at a restaurant just opposite the hall. The restaurant was western style and owned by a Canadian and I was rather surprised to find something like that in Laoshan district. It's not what you expect. Slowly modern restaurants are creeping away from the safety of the Marina and financial district into the hinterland.

The Korean show was called Nanta. This means "crazy drumming". The show consists of 4 chefs and a maitre d' combining slapstick, magic shows, traditional drumming, and tango with preparing a meal. Using knives as drumsticks they play on chopping boards, while chopping vegetables. This is rather spectacular. And messy. All in all, though, it was a very enjoyable show, although not for the cerebral, with the added bonus of a very hot Man performer with long hair and biiig muscles who took his shirt off at the end.

I told my students that "diarrhoea" is the hardest word to spell in the English language and to ask their other teachers how to spell it just to see if they can:P