"I don't know".......these are the words that we most heard in Dalian. Although our nephew Trevor lives there, he has not embraced all the sites so we learned and guessed a lot about the city. We had a wonderful time and were quite happy that we were able to find each other so quickly in such a big place. It was wonderful to have a guide that spoke the language as most of the taxi drivers don't. Walking across the street in China i as Trevor says "a real life game of frogger" it is crazy. There are millions of people and cars here and they all need to get somewhere so often you will see people standing in the middle of traffic along a busy street trying to leap between the cars to get to the other side of the street. We have been smart so far and just follow a local in hopes we will make it across safely. Cars do not yield to people, however they seem to be more careful with foreigners as there is too much paperwork if they hit you. We had a huge cup of coffee to start the day and then headed to labour square. This is right along the water and it s beautiful site. There are many olympic statues here of all the events, which is odd as Dalian did not host any part of the olympics. It is amazing to see all the development. Large areas of the city have demolished homes where new ones will be built. The building standards in China are not nearly as good as ours and therefore homes do not last very long. There is no property tax here so people shabbily build homes and apartments buildings and then demolish them 10 - 20 years later as it is cheaper to rebuild then it is to do it right the first time. There are many traditions in China, too many to tell, but you want to make sure that you follow them as the Chinese are a very superstitious bunch. It is perfectly ok to spit, hack and blow your nose by holding one nostril and discarding the remans of the other on the street but you cannot point your finger at anything. That has been difficult for Kevin and I as we are constantly trying to find places and pointing is the easiest way......that being said, we are getting better. The Chinese are also very random, we walked through Xinghai Park where people were playing card games, tai chi, singing, dancing....you name it, they are doing it. It is quite fascinating to watch them. People also dress very oddly here....no explanation for that, they just do. Our time was very limited as it was a short stop for us so we did not get to see everything, however what we saw was amazing. It was great to spend time with Trevor as we were his first Canadian guests. We had a great Japanese meal, yes Japanese in China and then we headed back to the shuttle stop. We were lucky to find an international phone and I was able to call mom, sorry about waking you up at 11:30 mom, the time change makes it tough to communicate with our friends back home. We headed back to the ship for an uneventful evening as we had to be up at 5 am Monday morning to go to Beijing.
5 am comes very early and as most of you know I am not a morning person. We headed to the bus for a 3 hour drive to Beijing. Some days it can be shorter and some longer based on the traffic. One of them most interesting things about China is their forward thinking about infrastructure. You have to build the roads and the home/apartments before you can bring the people in. As we drove to Beijing there were many "ghost cities" the funniest part is that the roads are completed with the exception of the off ramps so you will see a road that suddenly ends. I would suspect that when the factories are built and the people need to move to these cities that the off ramps will be completed and there will be access to the towns. There is also a huge amount of money here. As we drove to Beijing we saw all the beautiful mansions that were nestled away from the roads. There is very much a class system here and only certain people are able to live in certain areas, this was more prevalent years ago but still has some relevance today.
Our first stop was the Forbidden City. Crazy!!!! This is like nothing I have ever seen in my life. It is on 142 Hectares of land and it was there for one person "the emperor" He was the only man that lived on the premises.....yes, there were other men, but there were all castrated in order to work there so that the Emperor would be the only one who had access to the woman. There was an Empress but she did not see her husband very often. Everything was done on his schedule and they lived in different palaces. There were up to 3000 woman on the premises at any given time and they were all chosen by way of beauty contests. The more the emperor liked a woman, the bigger her living quarters would be. She would give him one child, preferably a male and once she had the child it would be moved to another area in the quarters for someone else to take care of. Not sure what these woman did every day but it seems to be a good life. There is a square that the emperor would make his speeches from and I would suspect that most than 10,000 people would be in the square. We stood in the spot where he would speak to these people, quite daunting. The temples all look the same, the only thing that is different is the size. There is an outer temple area where the fortunate were able to come to, and then the inner section was only for the Emperor, his wife and the woman and servants. We were only able to spend 3 hours there but I suspect you could spend an entire day and still not see the entire area.
Off to Tianamen Square........wow.....the entire population of Calgary can fit in the square. There is a mosoleum for Mao on one side of it and a huge photo of him on the other side. It was a Chinese National holiday last week, this holiday is like our Canada Day, but it lasts 3 days and Trevor said that most people take the entire week off. Because of the holiday the square was decorated with many beautiful flowers and there were paper lanterns lining all of the streets. Not sure how many people were in the square when we were, but I would hazard a guess that it would be around 50,000. If we were there last week during the holiday it would have been packed.
We had an amazing Chinese lunch, I actually ate everything except the duck egg rolls. I wished that there was more as it was so good. After lunch we headed to the Temple of Heaven but time was running short so we were only able to stay for 30 minutes and then headed back to the bus for the long ride back to the ship.
Tuesday is a sea day so we were able to sleep in......we had to move our clocks forward an hour (we are getting closer to home) but both of us slept until noon......we missed the first half of Monday night football!!! Lazy day today as we prepare to go back to Pusan, South Korea tomorrow. We were there already last week but loved it and are excited to go back. There were only 300 people that stayed on the ship from Whittier so there are a lot of new/confused and lost faces on the ship now. I guess we must have looked like that 16 days ago:)
Here is some stats from our cruise from Whittier Alaska to Tianjin (Beijing) We travelled 3011 kilometers, which equates to 5052 Nutical Miles with outside temperatures ranging anywhere from 10 degrees to 22 degrees. We travelled anywhere from 13.4 - 19.6 knots an hour.
We both wish all of you a very Happy Thanksgiving, we are both very fortunate to have such wonderful family and friends and are thinking of all of you while we are away.
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