July 1, 2007

Polar World, originally uploaded by eiratansey.

Another rainy weekend. Yesterday we went to Dalian and saw this aquarium/polar zoo place. It was interesting in a vaguely sensory overload sort of way. I liked seeing the beluga whales. I always feel guilty visiting zoos because the animals rarely look happy, and their spaces almost always look cramped. There weren’t any big areas for the animals at this aquarium/polar zoo. I felt really bad for the polar bear – no buddies around stuck in an indoor enclosure that was far too small. They had a pretty cool dolphin show, though.

After that we had lunch and then had a ride to our teacher, Tong Laoshi’s family’s house. They were very gracious and welcoming, and had a nice apartment – her dad is a judge and apparently pretty well off. Her mother and a friend made us some delicious dumplings, and then her father took us out to a huoguo, which is a hot pot restaurant. You sit at a table, and there is an electric hot plate in the center. They turn it on, and place a divided pot on top. One side of the pot has a spicy broth, the other side has a mild broth. You choose what kind of meat you want, and they bring out slivers of the (raw) meat on plates, along with tofu and greens and potatoes. Then once the broths start boiling, you start tossing stuff in and pulling it out once it’s cooked. Yummy yummy. We split our table into two sides (lamb and beef), though we ended up sharing a lot of the meat. I stuck to lamb, and my, was it tasty!

Tong Laoshi’s dad got wind of our interest in finding some fireworks (since July 4 is around the corner and the boys are always joking about setting off fireworks near the construction site next to our hotel), and through some connections, got us a ton from a friend who works at a fireworks place. They didn’t think it would be a good idea for us to set them off at the school, so after the hot pot we set off a ton of them in the lot behind Tong Laoshi’s apartment. We drew quite a crowd – a bit awkward – as someone pointed out, wouldn’t it be strange if a bunch of non-English speaking Chinese showed up in our neighborhood back home and set off a ton of fireworks? I tried to keep telling myself we were the family’s guests and to enjoy the show – some of them were quite big and spectacular.

Today we made another trip into Dalian. I think they think if we aren’t kept occupied constantly, we’ll get a) bored, b) subversive, or c) both. We really didn’t do anything except go to some stores (I ended up going to two Starbucks, so today was very good. At the second, Jade treated me to a red bean frappucino, which was unremarkable but still pretty tasty). And one of the school officials took us out to lunch – where we had some really great beer. It was in nice cold mugs, and the best part was it didn’t taste like Tsingtao. The bathrooms at the place (which was a “Brazilian style” BBQ place – that still tasted very Chinese) were quite intriguing. At first when you go in, you see this older attendant – and then there’s this badly lit room with all these weird frosted glass tubes. You grab some toilet paper before going in, and the attendant shows you to a tube. The whole set-up would have been incredible cool, but a) the bathrooms were pretty dirty, and b) because the tubes were frosted glass, you could kind of see people inside. Weird. But the sink was cool – the faucet spit water down this glass disk, and it splashed down onto this angled pane, away from the handwasher. Reminded me of a pub I visited in Bristol.

I’ve developed this fascination with spotting white people (I should really amend this to say Westerners or something more appropriate – not all the foreigners we see are white, but they certainly constitute the majority). You always see some at Starbucks and at the touristy stuff (like the “American Gun Show” at Discover Kingdom). And I CAN’T STOP STARING AT THEM. Now I know why we get stared at – it’s like seeing a Bengal tiger in the old crazy neighborhood cat lady’s house. Actually that’s a horrible analogy. But it’s kind of weird to see non-Chinese people. I mean, I know it sounds dumb, but there are so many Chinese people everywhere – white people/Westerners stick out without even trying.

Alfred and Kellie get the most staring – people ask Kellie to take their picture with her frequently. I wonder how that feels…? Kellie is always very gracious about it.

I need to pick it up with the journalling – we’re more than halfway through our trip (three weeks, I think?) and I’m a bit behind in keeping this journal. Jade quasi-designated me the unofficial-official journal keeper of the group. She says she wants me to type it up when I get back – which I will – the abridged version, of course. I’ll leave out the stuff about pooping.