I'll suggest a way to get a hold on $\mathbb{C}_p$ in a "pictorial" way. It is supposed to be similar to viewing $\mathbb{C}$ as a plane acting on itself via rotations, scalings, and translations.
There's a usual picture of $\mathbb{Z}_p$, which looks like the thing below for $p=3$ (taken from the website of Professor Katrin Tent):
alt text http://wwwmath.uni-muenster.de/logik/Personen/hainke/AlgebraSeminar/p-adic-rus4.gif
Here the outermost circle is all of $\mathbb{Z}_3$; the three large colored circles are the residue classes mod $3$, the smaller circles are the residue classes mod $9$, and so on. If you want to think about $\mathbb{Q}_p$, imagine this picture continued infinitely "upward," (e.g. this circle is accompanied by two others, inside some larger circle, accompanied by two others, etc.).
Now the operations of multiplication and addition do something very geometric. Namely, addition cyclically permutes the residue classes (of each size!) by some amount, depending on the coefficient of $p^n$ in the $p$-adic expansion of whatever $p$-adic integer you have in mind. Multiplication by a unit switches the residue classes around as you'd expect, and multiplication by a multiple of $p^n$ shrinks the whole circle down and sends it to some (possibly rotated) copy of itself inside the small circle corresponding to the ideal $(p^n)$.
Now zero has the $p$-adic expansion $0+0\cdot p+0\cdot p^2+\cdots$ and so it is the unique element in the intersection of the circles corresponding to the residue class $0$ mod $p^n$ for every $n$. So we have a way to think of zeroes of polynomials over $\mathbb{Q}_p$---namely, a Galois extension of $\mathbb{Q}_p$ is some high dimensional vector space $\mathbb{Q}_p^N$ (which you probably have a picture of from linear algebra) acted on by $\mathbb{Q}_p$, in a way that twists each factor of $\mathbb{Q}_p^N$ and permutes the factors of the direct sum, according to the Galois action. Ramified extensions add intermediate levels of circles between those that already exist, whereas unramified extensions add new circles. That the extension is algebraic means that there's some way to twist it about (using the previously described actions) to put any element at the $0$ point.
Now, the algebraic closure of $\mathbb{Q}_p$ is some maximal element of the poset of these algebraic extensions---which is hard to visualize as it is not really "unique," but for the sake of a picture one might think of choosing embeddings $K\to K'$ for each $K'/K$, and then taking the union. Finally, think of the completion in the usual way, e.g. by formally adding limits of Cauchy sequences.
Trying to draw pictures of some finite algebraic extensions of $\mathbb{Q}_p$ might help, and figuring out what the actions by addition and multiplication are is a fun exercise. I hope this "word picture" is as useful for you as it is for me.