Heading Back Over: A Brief Introduction of Qingdao

I've finally received the acceptance letter to the Qingdao program. The feeling was so much more exciting than when I got accepted into SYA. The reason? The SYA letter pushed me out of my comfort zone and gave me thoughts of being excluded from friends and possibly living a life of loneliness. Of course, that didn't happen. But this time around, I'm going back to what I love and exploring places I've never been before. Instead of Beijing, I'll be heading to Qingdao, a port city in Shandong Province. Most of you might know it as Tsingtao, the place that brews Tsingtao beer, but there is much more to the city than that. In terms of economic growth, the city has been growing at an average rate of 16% per year. It's got a wealth of resources including the best use of wind power in the region. Qingdao's port has established trade with 450 ports in 130 countries.
Around 1897 Germany took over Qingdao because they felt that they were getting too strong due to the construction of a defense base against naval attacks. The Germans turned the fishing village into a strategic port. The Germans put their Far East Squadron here and started building the infrastructure of the city. The German fleet fled before the outbreak of WWI and Japan took over the city. After the war broke out, the failure to return Chinese rule to the city apparently led to a movement of some sort, changing China and setting it on the road to what it is today.
Qingdao is famous for it's seafood, something that I can't wait to try out.
Also Shandong is the cradle of Confucianism thought. The hometown of Confucius and Mencius are at the most a few hours away from Qingdao. Having befriended a few friends here at OSU from each of their hometowns I plan to take a few trips and visit them and the home of Confucius.
Well, considering this is a somewhat of a preemptive blog post, I'll see just how similar my research is with the actual city.

Thanks for coming back and reading.

Sterling

(Here's the link to last year:　http://platinumster77.blogspot.com/）