Hotel Oriental Palace Dalian

Ok, I did it, I ate some western food. I still haven't eaten at McDonalds or KFC yet. KFC is everywhere. I wonder if they were the first American chain to come to China. McDonalds are prolific as well. No, my roommate and his friends wanted to go out for a western meal and we headed down to a place called "The Real Eddies" Not sure of the story behind the name. But here goes - Eddie was trained as a cook/chef in the ...

... saw some security guards sitting in front of their little station. So I asked Wo keyi ma (Can I?) They yelled &#8211; Bu keyi (No you can&#8217;t) Clear enough for me. And I headed down the hill and back home. Maybe I can get up to the space ship before I leave. The ride down the mountain was definitely more fun than the ride up.<br><br>On the way back to the apartment I had to stop for one more picture. One thing you do notice here is interesting translations on signs and shirts ...

... the first item on the Dalian agenda was laundry: happily the chap at the laundrette near my hotel was happy to do my underwear too, after sprawling it all over the counter and personally counting the number of pairs, without embarrassment or hygiene concerns.<br><br>There isn't a tremendous amount to do in Dalian except go to the beach. So I went to the beach. My first choice turned out to be rather posh, evidently a favourite of high ...

The first time I had even heard of Dalian was when I asked my Hangda (name of a company that repairs airplanes and makes some joint thingy that connects the gas thingy to the plane so it can refuel) class where they would choose to live, if they could live anywhere in China. One of my students said Dalian, because it is clean, modern, beautiful and by the sea. People I asked about Dalian since have all given positive feedback. I even looked into working in Dalian, fairly ...

... didn&#8217;t fess up right at the beginning. She was happy with her massage, but after some comparisons I definitely think I got the more skilled masseuse.<br><br>To top off the evening, we headed to Susan&#8217;s, one of the only true western restaurants in this part of China. I went all out and ordered an orange Julius and a poutine. It is not quite the same, but a pretty darn close replica, especially for China. The ...

... to look over all the 'opportunities' I was looking for something that would be small, and over quick&#8212;the festival itself was three weeks long.<br><br>One of the roles was to assist with the Opening Ceremony... which totally fit the bill. Small setup and only scheduled to last ten minutes. Well, I was kind of right.<br><br>The students who were responsible for this part were sweet, but extremely indecisive, which meant that we kept having meeting, after ...

... br>Before we arrived in China, the one thing we were told was that it was really hard to get the students actively involved in the class&#8212;that they remained stoic, sombre, and serious. That was NOT our experience. With very little prompting, students were up, out of their seats and rapidly trading, wheeling and dealing. <br><br>One student I watched kept making deals right before whatever stock he sold went up by hundreds of dollars, groaning at his misfortune ...

... a day on a war and still maintain a thriving economy." He was serious, completely befuddled by the wealth of the US, even more so than we are about what we should be doing with it. Except for the airlines, neither country is outright about their reliance on US technology, which is endemic and universal. There are many individuals and ...

... really neat. At one point we had some little boys (around 7 or 8 years old) yell hello to us. I said hello back and they said something in Chinese to each other and laughed. I think they might have been saying something about us being foreigners, but I'm not sure... :) After we got home we hung out in the living room and did homework and discussed watching a movie, but we finally went to bed and I journaled. Yesterday, we went to the bank and got ...

... was fun and kept me surprisingly warm. i got a good video of al doing his thing. the north tombs are where some old chinese guy is buried and was basically a mini forbidden city. it was well worth the visit as it was practically just ourselves and very peaceful and nice architecture etc. after that we did some exploring around the city, the shopping areas and some other not too exciting places. we ran a little low on time and were lucky to catch our train but we made it ...