Friday, May 25th, 2012 - Dalian is (something that is pretty that rhymes with Dalian)

• Whoever came up with the whole “one Chinese time zone” is an idiot
• It is not right that a place like Beijing should have sunrise at 4 AM, that’s way too early
• No wonder why people in China take naps in the mid-afternoon, it’s probably because the sun is on full-on blast mode at 6 am they can’t sleep anymore
• Thank goodness for the EPA
• We were passing this river on the train from Beijing to Dalian and I could have sworn that if someone tried to flick a cigarette into that thing it would have caught on fire
• Plus the whole smog thing is getting old, at least in Dalian it was nothing but beautiful skies and sunshine
• The sunshine is good because I lost my umbrella on the train but luckily I can just buy one for about $1.50
• Met a good person on the train to Dalian
• I practiced Chinese with her but it was just super basic stuff
• It took me about 5 minutes to explain to her that I like to ride bicycles and after I finally got that point across she said, “me too!” in Chinese and we shared bicycle scars
• She was a 20-year old  free-lance make-up artist in Beijing and she seemed to enjoy it
• When she wrote down the characters I thought she said she was a chemist and I broke out my dictionary to point that word out and she laughed at me saying “nooooo”
• It took me a while to get used to her pronunciation of 那个 which according to my audiotapes is pronounced “Nah-geh” but the way she and others around her pronounced it made it sound like she was saying “N***a” i.e. derogatory racial term against black people
• The first couple times I heard it I thought, “Wait a second here, what does racism have to do with talking about why you like to eat pork” but then I figured out what she was getting at and that the Chinese use the word kind of like Americans use the word, “uhhh”

• Got so lost in Dalian
• I wanted to walk around when I got to Dalian train station because I had been sitting down for 14 hours  so I thought that I could walk from the train station to the hotel with no problem at all and avoid paying the 8 yuan (about $1.25) for a taxi
• I bought a tourist map for 3 yuan (which was originally priced at 5 yuan) so I thought I could manage getting there
• I was dead wrong
• I went up so many side streets by accident hauling my luggage that I probably looked the dumbest white these people had ever seen
• Plus I was definitely the only non-Chinese person in maybe the entire city that morning so English was definitely not going to get me far
• I finally swallowed my pride and took a taxi
• And fate decided to punish me, so he dropped me off half a mile away from my hostel
• And as fate would have it, when I got lost again trying to return to my hostel for the night and spent an hour and a half walking, the taxi driver again dropped me off a half-mile away from my hotel

• Longest boardwalk in the world
• Dandong’s coast is absolutely beautiful but I recommend that if you’re ever in Dandong you don’t need to see the entire thing
• I got on the coast at the eastern terminus thinking it was going to take me 1 hour to walk it
• What I didn’t know was that on the western terminus of the boardwalk was this sign that commemorated how the Dalian boardwalk is the longest in the world

• And I walked all 13.04 miles of it thinking, "Ok, it can only be a little farther"
• Luckily I did get a lot of nice pictures out of it

• Ever-so fun game of what in the world did I eat?
• So I got hungry walking around Dalian and I saw this play with the characters 餐厅 which means restaurant and I decided, “why not, I’ll give it a shot and try some seafood”
• Well the guy gave me the menu and of course it just happens to be in all Chinese characters so I just picked one and hoped for the best
• It cost me 36 yuan for the dish and he could have substituted it for something really cheap and I wouldn’t have known the difference but I was willing to try any seafood and any seafood would have made me happy
• It was actually really good, it had a good taste to it and it looked like something that had a mommy and a daddy as opposed to some fake stuff processed in a factory

• At least for dinner I knew I was eating a spicy cooked squid on a stick

 

• Had a first in China
• I found the first anti-bacterial soap in a restroom since I’ve been to China in the ICBC bank at Zhongshan Sq. 
• I needed it because I went there to exchange money and I screwed up the form that I had to fill out to do it 3 times so there was a lot of exchanging of hands going on
• It was mainly my fault because I just happened to pick the woman whose English vocabulary consisted of “Hello”, “Bye-B ye”, and “Passport”
• Just thought of how I could mess with the Chinese
• It didn’t occur to me until today that people assumed I could speak English, so in Dandong I’m just going to start saying, “Bonjour” just to see what happens