Saturday, May 26th, 2012 - Made it to Dandong

Saturday, May 26, 2012

• Forgot that people can snore
• I shared the night with 5 other guys at the Dalian South Mountain Youth Hostel and I woke up this morning at 4:30 AM to a sweet symphony of snores
• I was able to fall asleep to the tune until about 5 AM and then I said “screw it” and woke up
• Learned my lesson to always take a taxi
• It was worth the 9 RMB to not get lost for two hours (like I did twice the day before) and I highly recommend that anyone who might be reading this if you don’t know a whole lot of Chinese, please get a taxi
• Dinner rolls for breakfast
• I went to a Chinese supermarket in the train station (and I would have taken a picture but it looks exactly like the inside of a quickie-mart in an American gas station so it wasn’t anything special) and I couldn’t tell if I needed to cook some of the food or not so I just saw some dinner rolls and (at least I think) I know I can’t get salmonella from that
• I love people wearing shirts with terrible English on them

• Taking a train to Dandong from Dalian was a terrible idea
• I saw in my travel guide that it only takes 4 hours by bus to go from Dalian to Dandong but I didn’t want to risk missing a bus so I took the train
• Turns out the train is a 10 hour ride through cities that either look really nice or like Detroit but at least the scenery in China is absolutely gorgeous even if half of the houses would be condemned by American standards

• Finally got asked how much I make
• I had been waiting since I got to China to be asked this and I was finally asked on day 5
• I gave him the correct, true answer but then I told him that in America I make $72,000 a year which is kind of right because I have a chemical engineering degree but kind of wrong because I don’t have a job in America
• Why do men in China like to show off their stomachs?
• I finally caught a guy napping with half his shirt up and like most men who do this, they do not have a six-pack

• Met Sharon on the way to Dalian
• She was a very nice 26-year old Chinese woman whose English name is Sharon attending medical college in Peking (Beijing) who liked yoga and the TV show Big “Bong” Theory
• After I told her what a “Bong “ was in English and that it's used to smoke marijuana she said, “Oh no, I’m not like that”
• She fed me all of her mother’s dumplings filled with pork, cabbage and love
• So I got to skip a meal and make fun of my own Chinese skills trying to pronounce what's inside a dumpling all at the same time
• Checked into the hotel room in Dandong
• But not before taking this photo that will probably be used against me in any political ad for the rest of my life if I seek a job in public office in America (that's me and my buddy Mao Zedong in case you're curious)

• • I was going to check into this cheap hotel recommended by Lonely Planet that was in a pretty sketchy neighborhood but they didn't have any vacancies so I went to this “Hanting Inns & Hotels”
  • It cost me about $10 more per night than I wanted to spend for a hotel in Dandong but as long as I got some place to sleep with free internet, a place to hang my dirty clothes that I washed in the sink, and 24 hour hot water  I was happy

• Even this bloody towel that they gave me didn’t dismay me (mainly because there were 2 more undirty ones to choose from

• And I had a nice view of Dandong