Days 229 to 238 - Fri June 19 to Sun June 28 - Pierre's trip to Dalien

If I didn't travel much in the first half of my semester, I seem to have made up for it in the second half. As luck would have it, the university students are given one entire week without class time in order to study for their exams. In this case, lucky for them is lucky for me, as I too have been granted an entire nine-day period with no teaching constraints. I thus decide to take this opportunity to visit my best friend Dan, who is also teaching at a school near the northern China city of Dalian. Indeed it was a lucky week, as I also manage to get return air tickets for a steal.

Dan and I have been best friends since early high school, but our relationship goes back much further. Our families have known each other since I was about five years old. Back then, however, we didn't like each other a whole lot. Chalk it up to our one year age difference if you will. He and my brother André have always been best friends, but we didn't connect until a little bit later.

It had been almost exactly a year since we had seen each other last and this is the second time that I've gone to visit him in a distant place. The last time, we were in Alberta, camping in the Rockies and this time it's northern China in a rather upscale beach resort town called Jinshitan (or something like that).

He's currently teaching in a Canadian school accredited by the British Columbia Board of Education (following a BC curriculum even). Most teachers there are from the West Coast and most students are from very well-off families, as education is not free in China and this is an expensive school.

The beach is only about a 10 minute walk away from his apartment, but who needs to walk when you have a motorbike.



Yes indeed, with dirt cheap fireworks (you could put any small-town Canada Day celebration to shame for less than 50 bucks and if you pitch in with a few friends, you could pretty easily outdo Ottawa) available to anyone and even cheaper beer you've got the makings of some pretty sweet beach parties.

So I got a week to spend with my best buddy and his lovely girlfriend Vicky -who is originally from Greece and is also a teacher at the school- and though they are still officially working, they've got plenty of time off. Though the first day is rather quiet, we hop on the commuter train and head into Dalian on our second and third days.


Dalian is quite a new city, with wide roads and plenty of traffic, which makes the experience of crossing the streets a little bit different than in the rest of China. Traffic flows a lot more quickly and this conflicts a bit with people's traditional habits of just subtly insinuating themselves into the stream of cars and trucks and expecting them to go around. It can make for some pretty hairy situations, which I eventually discover while riding in taxis (whose drivers have the tendency to be rather merciless). And while we're on the subject of taxis, aside from regular cabs, Dalian had some of the most unusual little vehicles I've seen in Asia.

Note that the people in the first picture are mostly crossing at a traffic light, so it's not always chaos.


Our second day is spent shopping, eating and wandering around downtown. I finally find a good pair of shoes that fits me at a large, Western sporting goods store and Dan and Vicky want to visit a Korean commodities market in the city. If you're unfamiliar with Asian commodities markets (or so we call them) picture a building that looks like a large warehouse with about half a dozen floors all crammed full of things ranging from kitchen goods to clothing to Chinese brush paintings and Buddhist sculptures. These are the places to go to get things at a good price. Buying most household goods or souvenirs anyplace else means you're probably paying too much.

On our second day we play the role of good tourists in Dalian. We decide to visit Ocean world, which is sufficiently kitchy, but also interesting. It's got nautically themed corridors and passages with fish tanks displaying all kinds of marine life along the way.

It's got a shark tank, a dolphin and Beluga show -complete with a real live mermaid- and it's even got a UFO (... the question is, why not?)



One of the big draws is a huge fish tank which you observe through a glass tunnel with a conveyor belt that moves you along at a pleasant pace.


It's also got some odd things for goofy people like us (or for kids, if you prefer) like masks on poles and a big shark head that can swallow you.



So after that we decide to take a walk along the water front and partake in other activities, such as zip-lining and enjoying a cold refreshing beer.




The waterfront area of Dalian is lined with amusement parks, real estate developments and apartment towers, the biggest city square I've ever seen and some nice green space. There are Modernists statues all around town and somewhere in the city is a gigantic soccer ball sculpture. It can make for an odd blend indeed. One of the strangest features, however, would be the full-size European style castle on a mountainside right beside several groups of apartment towers. It's being used as a seashell museum, and though we didn't actually go to visit the exhibits, I can't help but wonder about how the museum is laid out (seriously, what would you put in all those narrow turrets?)


The rest of the week is mostly free, but Dan and Vicki have some exams to supervise and corrections to complete. We have an exam party on one day and finish all of Dan's papers, assembly line style. A beach party with some of Dan's teacher friends happens at some point in one of those nights, as does one of the teachers' birthday parties, and on my last day there I grab Dan's motorcycle and go for a ride in the hills while he's busy collecting textbooks. However, before that, we return to a part of town that we had seen in some of our outings, but that I hadn't really gotten the time to explore. It's called (phonetically) Kai-Fa-Chu and it's got an unusual area referred to as Five Colors City, which is decidedly different and has a bit of a theme park feel about it. We've got a gingerbread house type building.


Some storybook characters, with which I'm seen in one of the photos.




I have no idea what this one is, but it functions as a bizarre gate to one of the avenues.


And here is what appears to be a totem pole made from various pieces of fruit, each with a different goofy face and expression.


Of course, there's the food. China having an abundance of inexpensive and delicious restaurants, Dan and Vicki introduce me to all their local haunts. They developed the interesting habit of calling the restaurants in town by the names of their favorite dishes that are served in each one, since this is more memorable for them than the actual restaurant names. Local specialties are always fantastic to try, and two restaurants which stuck out as excellent had been called Tudo-Ni and Guo-Bu-Ro for their mashed potatoes/gravy/chives concoction and their eggplant/fried potato/pork dishes, respectively. Tudo-Ni also had some very interesting donkey meat dumplings.

I must say that one of the things that has struck me the most while on vacation is how quickly the days go by. I try not to blink too much. I had a whole week to spend with my best friend and before I knew it, it was gone. On our last evening, Dan and I take a bike ride to a fishing village near town and we stop by the sea to take a few last pictures.

When we did this last summer, we were on a mountaintop in Jasper and the summer before that Dan and I spent a lot of time together, as he was the best man at my wedding. This year, we're by the sea in northern China. These past few visits have been memorable indeed, but it's hard only seeing your best friend once a year.

photo credits: all P

Days 211 and 212 – Monday June 1 and Tuesday June 2 - Suzhou and home again

Our second day trip from Shanghai is to Suzhou. Technically we’ve already been to Suzhou – we passed through it on Day 210 to get to Tong Li – but we didn’t see much more than the train station and whatever happened to be outside the window of the bus/train we were on.

Our first impression is not that great. The train goes past some decidedly un-scenic cityscapes of dusty and unused land lots, as well as row after row of both run-down and up-and-coming apartment blocks. So far, we haven’t seen any evidence as to why it once had the reputation of one of China’s most beautiful cities (this was around Marco Polo’s time) and why old Chinese proverbs refer to it as a paradise on earth.

A lot of its reputation, then and now, comes from its gardens. There used to be hundreds, now there are just a few remaining, but they’re in excellent shape. Some are hundreds of years old.

We start off with the North Temple Pagoda.

We’re a little temple/pagoda weary at this point, but at the very least on a hot day a temple is often a nice cool place to enjoy the shade...

…and the view:

This temple offers a few added bonuses: a lovely bicycle still-life...


…and a double-header of bad-English signage for our collection:



(The first warns of low ceilings, while the second warns that the floor can be slippery.)

We have two gardens on our list – first we head to the Humble Administrator’s garden in the north-west corner of the city center. It’s from sometime in the 1500s and is the largest one left in the city. We walk around all five hectares of it (I believe that works out to about 50,000 square metres) past manicured gardens and ponds…



…and buildings intended for drinking tea, watching theatre and looking at the moon:

There are lots of details…

...and about 25 or so points of interest, in addition to it being really hot and humid and our 5th walking, so we’re pretty tired. Pierre wants a picture of me in the doorway; I’m feeling frumpy and tired – here’s the compromise:
 

The second garden - Garden of the Master of the Nets - is about a 30 minute walk away, and we trudge over to check out this much smaller garden.  It's originally from the 1100s, but it gets its name from its 18th century owner who decided to take up fishing after he retired from the government.  

During our last few trips, I’ve wondered how some of the site fared during the Cultural Revolution , and why some locations survived at all. The Red Guard were  especially thorough about eradicating the “four olds” (“old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas”) during their rampage across the country in 1966, and even in the years afterwards it was often "out with the old" to make room for the new.

At this garden we get a hint of how things worked out in some places. When we enter the first building of the Garden of the Master of the Nets, we are right behind a group of North Americans whose tour guide begins with a story about the Cultural Revolution.

She says that the garden's groundskeepers at that time realized that it would be targeted quickly and that many things would be destroyed if they didn’t find a way to protect them. Some things could be hidden or buried, but there still remained the problem of the larger items, and the lack of time to get things out. In the end, the groundskeepers took newspapers and posters with Mao’s image and glued them all over whatever they could. At that time, the cult of Mao was at its peak and doing anything to harm or destroy Mao’s image was very taboo (punishable by death, I believe). So, when the Red Guard arrived, there wasn’t really much they could do – destroying the artifacts would mean destroying or defacing the Mao images they were covered with. In the end, the things were left alone.

As a result, some things, like the clay carvings at the entryway seem like they might be fairly new, as part of the ongoing restoration of the place…

…but the rest of the area is pretty intact, and seems like the original detailing:

The garden covers a small space but is organized in such a way that it feels much larger and it takes over an hour to walk around the entire area. By the time we catch the train back to Shanghai we're pretty knackered.  We top off the night with a dinner of Indian food at the lovely, amazing and incrediby tiny Kaveen's Kitchen , and then bus/fly/bus our way home on Day 212.