Qingdao and Zu Cheng

My colleague Terri and I made the flight to and from Qingdao (pronounced "ching dow") without incident. After the one hour flight, the company with whom we were meeting had a driver at the airport to pick us up. It was about a 1.5 hour drive from Quindao to Zu Cheng (pronounced like it looks!) to the food processing plant.

I don't think Chinese drivers are much worse than Greek or Italian drivers, but they certainly are right up there! There's a lot of passing into oncoming traffic, sometimes even two lanes over into oncoming traffic! Lots of horn-honking too. Not irate, yelling and gesturing horn-honking like in Italy though. This was more like just letting the driver your passing know that you're passing as well as the three vehicles coming straight at you in the oncoming lane! Since they are always in the oncoming traffic lane, the horn is constantly honking.

The drive between Qingdao and Zu Cheng was quite rural with lots of farmland. There were dried up corn stalks piled up everywhere. When asked, our host explained that the stalks will be tilled back into the fields as fertilizer for next years' crop. Most of the ones stacked up right on the side of the highway would be hauled off by folks as fuel for the winter. We saw every kind of "vehicle" you can imagine on the roads and stopping to pick up the stalks. The 3-wheeled truck is quite popular out here. Kind of like the little ones on Crete, Greece, but these are much bigger.

There was a ton of construction on the roads going on, but all by hand. No kidding, they are building and repairing roads without large equipment like back in the States. There were large gaggles of people wearing road construction vests and regular old clothes with shovels and rakes paving roads with a wheelbarrow. The guy sleeping in the three-wheel truck was a road worker. It looks like napping by road workers is universal!! Dumptruck size loads of dirt and rocks were sitting in the middle of two lane highways without any markers or detours. Common sense dictated that drivers would go around a large obstacle in the middle of the road! It's amazing how few incidents we witnessed on roads that have no stop signs and right of ways seem to be understood but not posted.

One of the more amusing sights on the roads was street sweepers. Not street sweepers like back home, but again, a large gaggle of people with road constructions vests actually sweeping the road with homemade brooms. We traveled for miles down roads out in the middle of nowhere with a whole bunch of these street sweepers out doing their thing. Notice the street sweepers mode of transportation on the right side of the picture (a large trike bicycle). Those things and old motorcycle/bikes with engines were everywhere!

I don't want to go into much detail about our meetings today since this is a competitive environment (plus yall know I don't like to talk about work on this blog!). Suffice it to say that our Chinese counterparts were educated in the States and seemed quite comfortable doing business with two very direct, American women! Not only did we not create any international incidents, our meetings were very successful and we made new friends to boot! We were treated to a huge, fancy, traditional lunch about which I will do a whole other post on later!

After just having had a one hour full body message for only 260 RMB (32 US dollars), I am totally relaxed and ready for bed. Tomorrow is another day of meetings and activities (here in Beijing), so I need to get a good nights sleep! Until tomorrow. . .