China Life

Well, going into another week in Dalian China. What a wonderful experience so far. This past week has been interesting as I start to settle into some routines. I am actually really starting to enjoy my driver. He is really helping me to learn Chinese. It takes an hour to drive to work each day and an hour back at night depending on the traffic. What we do during the drive is teach each other our respective languages. On the morning drive, he teaches me Chinese and at night on the way home we work on his English. He is a very quick learner and already I am able to communicate pretty well with him. We started with me counting to 4 the first day. Ling, yu, du, san, chi. Then he said, "tomorrow 5" The next day we went from 5, wu, lui, qi, ba. Again, "tomorrow, 9. So, this morning I learned jio, shi. I also learned a number of words like today, policeman, traffic jam, good morning, work, wife, phone call and good. By the time I leave here I should have a pretty good vocabulary. Problem is that there will be no one to talk to with it at home.

Over the weekend I spent time with Brian and his wife, Barbabra. We went around the city and explored some of the shopping sites. We used their driver because he is very good at English and he helped explain many things about the city, tradition, how to shop and bartered for us. We started the weekend on Friday night where a bunch of us went to a place called the Brooklyn Bar. Yes, it was just like New York. The food was totally American and they have the best burgers, pizza and other American food in town. It appears the word is out to all the Americans here because it was full of many folks from Intel. The next day I decided to do some walking by myself. I walked for many miles. I ended up down by this Russian part of town. There were street vendors selling the normal tourist type stuff, but also different fruit for the locals. Here is a picture of what it looked like.

After this little stroll I decided to walk over and buy myself a local cell phone. This cost me 400RMB or about $50.00. I can now call my driver and all the folks I work with. Now it was time for dinner and I wasn't sure what I was going to do. It was actually raining and I wasn't sure about where to go. I found a place that looked clean and friendly. I was able to go in and order something that wasn't fishy smelling. It was a rice dish with chicken and an orange sauce. The dinner was very good. I ordered a diet coke with no ice and enjoyed a good meal. This meal cost me 20RMB or basically $2.60. If you stay away from the big hotels you can find meals very cheap.

Sunday, Brian and Barb came to my place and gave me an alarm clock. Our apartments do not have any clocks and I told them I was going to pick one up. They did it for me. I used it today, boy, is it annoying. It is one of those old type with the 2 bells on the top and a clanger between them. That woke me up this morning. We then decided to go and do some shopping. Their driver, Jacky, took us where the chinese go to shop for clothes. It is cheaper then most of the places around town and most of the stuff is knock offs, but you can't tell, it looks like the real thing. There is a lot of that around here. Anyway, the store he took us was about 2 blocks square and was 4 floors high. It was packed with individual stores inside. Everybody selling everything you could think of. There was one floor just for shoes, one floor for just clothes, 2 floors for trinkets and "valuable goods" Stuff you just can't live without.

After all this shopping we were getting pretty hungry. So, we asked Jacky where he likes to eat. Guess where we went?

It was very popular and it tasted just like home except they had a seafood pizza and served escargot if you wanted it. Where else but China can you get snails at Pizza Hut.

After this we did a little more shopping for a couple of hours and then we decided to meet some other friends at a very traditional tea house in China. In this tea house I found out that the girls serving the tea go to college for 3 years to learn the history of tea and how to serve it. Once they graduate they are able to go all over the world and serve tea to various people in special settings. The girl who served us was in her third year. They can also get a job at this tea house or one in Shanghai. This was a wonderful, relaxing way to just sit, drink tea and eat fruit, sunflower seeds and watermelon seeds. We had green tea this time but there were hundreds of types to choose from and they all are for something different for you body.

That was it for the weekend. Today was then the start of my second week in Dalian China.