Dalian

Dalian

We recently returned from a trip to Dalian. Dalian is a city known both for shipping and tourism. We went with our friends Andrew and Jessica, since it was the last weekend that Andrew could get away from Beijing before the Olympics really kick it into high gear.

Sadly, Dalian didn't really live up to the hype. We had a lot of fun hanging out with friends, but we had also hoped to get away from the pollution of Beijing, as Dalian is supposed to be one of the top ten most beautiful cities in China. It turns out, however, that Dalian is like a lot of other cities in China: polluted and packed with people. Imagine Atlantic City and Newark combined into a single city, labeled a tourist attraction, and with daily flights from Vladivostok.


Due to its proximity to Russia, Dalian is a big tourist spot for our old pals from the former evil empire. Inevitably, if we saw a Caucasian person walking around in Dalian, the odds were pretty good that they did not like the ending of "Rocky IV" as much as I did. Also, oddly enough, Dalian has a gigantic faux castle built into a hillside that looks to be straight out of a really cheesy renaissance fair, but is in fact a nautical museum.



We did eat some interesting stuff, though, as you can see in the video above. While the depicted meal did not exactly live up to expectations, we did have a much better meal earlier in the day, and even managed to find a nice little expat brunch spot called "I-55" the next day which was loaded with good old-fashioned American carbohydrates and genuine American engineers taking some time off from their joint venture to grab some sausage and eggs. The poor guys commute back and forth from Dalian to southern Indiana every couple of weeks, all for a joint venture between Cummins engine and a Chinese auto manufacturer.

The most amusing part of the trip, however, involved the Dalian airport. There are two very important rules to follow in Dalian: 1) haircare products may not be brought on board an aircraft as carry-on luggage, for fear that pomade can be used in a terrorist attack, McGiver-style; 2) you may not play cards in front of a window overlooking the check-in area at the Dalian airport, but you may play cards by moving five feet forward into an area not in front of that same window. Now that we know these rules, we will never bring Pert or a deck of cards into the Dalian airport ever again.