Tsingtao Beer, at the Qingdao Beer Museum. Yes, they have a museum for beer.

Fear: Oh, nobody will speak English!

Rebuttal: This latest entry on the Laowai Chinese language blog. No, I'm not saying you can learn Chinese. It's an English teacher in China complaining about how hard it is to actually learn Chinese because everyone speaks English. (I'll add a "sort of" to that.) Calls them "yingwen bandits" -- the people who come up to you to try to practice their language skills.

Fear: Heck, you can't drink the water!

Rebuttal: There's plenty of water to drink. And lots of tea. And the country's social life runs on beer (thanks to breweries set up by German monks, so you know it's good). It just doesn't necessarily come out of the tap. (The water, not the beer.) Although, you know, I think I'd trust the water coming out of most five-star hotel taps more than I'd trust the city water in New Orleans (that's before Katrina, when all you had to worry about were leaky refineries and chemical plants along Lake Pontchartrain). Anyway, it's ridiculously easy to boil water in yer rooms, and there's bottled stuff everywhere. You can wash hands and everything else with the tap, although you might want to reserve the kettle water for toothbrushes and baby bottles.

Fear: The food will all be weird.

Rebuttal: For one thing, the food -- even the weird stuff -- is really, really good. OK, some of the stuff served on China Air's domestic flights is a little sketchy, and I'm not really a fan of the super-salty century eggs, but in general, it's an outstanding culture for food.
And if you want to stick to the familiar, fear not. Or, you know, well... I promised myself I wouldn't editorialize here. Anyway, they've got pizza joints and bistros and that, too. Not just the franchises. (Some folks even say pizza, like spaghetti, was really a Chinese invention. I don't know about that, but the best spaghetti I've ever had was at the Acme Pizza in Chongqing. Something about the garlic....)

Fear: People are going to look at me funny.

Rebuttal: Well, OK, not a rebuttal. They are, more than likely, unless you have an Asian-looking face yourself. But you know, once you're back stateside (or in Sweden or Spain or Australia or wherever), people are still going to look at you funny. You learn to live with it. The hard part, of course, is teaching your kids to learn to live with it. That's why *you* have to do it *first*.