A few of us opted to join the professors for a seafood dinner. We entered the restaurant and chose which seafood dishes we wanted (many of them still live when we chose!).

I was excited to eat!

Among some of the more standard seafood dishes, we opted to try starfish. The shell is cracked open to expose greenish colored meat.

I dug in!

It was actually a lot better than one would think.

After the delicious dinner a little fruit stand right outside of our restaurant caught my eye. There was a man selling cherries of a few different varieties. I bought a pound of them half red, and half yellow.

I had an insatiable hunger that night so I proceeded to immediately chow down on these cherries.

Little did I think of the repercussions of eating over half a pound of unwashed fruit, especially in China. I’ll spare the details but most of the next day was spent on the toilet.

I’ll apologize to anyone who I offered these unwashed cherries too. If you got a bit sick, just know, I was much sicker!!

We went out that night to see some of Qingdao's shops and what not. There was an area that we walked through a tunnel of sorts where there were different stands set up that you could buy things at.

There were some really cool little flute-like instruments that I wanted to get but never actually did.

They had ocarinas as well but I opted out from buying them. After walking around there for a while we found ourselves at one of the common Chinese BBQ areas. We walked over, requested what foods we wanted, then sat around this small table talking and laughing about things.

The food there was really delicious and the atmosphere made it even better. It felt like a very authentic thing to do on a Saturday night in China. I'll never forget that night.

— Dan Copes, a junior health sciences major