Last week InternChina and all or our interns had three days off during the May holidays, so we decided to go to the  Shilaoren Sightseeing Garden 石老人观光园, which is located about 30 minutes by taxi from the city centre of Qingdao. The whole day was quite an adventure!

The first 15 minutes in taxi were ok, with no major traffic. Halfway there, however, there was a huge traffic jam and we couldn’t go forward anymore, everyone was stuck. Our taxi driver tried to continue but after 15 minutes he told us that it would take at least two hours to go there instead of half an hour…

It turns out that the right part of the road was being renovated, and the left part was divided in two, creating a huge mess with lots of stuck cars and buses.

We decided to leave the taxis and met all the interns on the side of the road, our question was: what do we do now? Should we continue on foot? Or should we go back?

As the beach was very close from our location, some of the interns decided to go there and enjoy the beautiful weather. So finally only 6 people stayed and we decided to go to the garden on foot.

We could see the temples and the garden from the place where we stood, so we thought it wouldn’t take long to get there. We had to walk between all the cars, we could see how a slalom event looks like at the Olympic games!

But we really had the impression that we were walking in the desert, lots of wind, hot temperature and lots of dust. It took us 45 minutes to arrive to the garden. We were quite happy… until we saw that we had to climb on the mountain to see all the temples. More exercise, bring it on!

It took us some time to find our way on the mountain but when we arrived on the top we could enjoy the great view on the sea and a part of the city centre of Qingdao. We could even see some monks who are still living in the monastery and we prayed in a temple, one of the monks said the prayers and we had to bow three times in front of three huge statues.

After two hours there, we started to walk our way back to the city. The weather was really nice and all in all it was a really interesting day. If you want to see some traditional Chinese architecture I definitely recommend you go there!

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