There’s something about Dalian that I just can’t write anything while I’m there. I didn’t write once in the four months I studied there last year, nor once in this last week that I very well did not study there. When I feel that things are familiar and routine, I don’t feel like I have much to say. I know that this is a mistake, as just about anything I could write about China would be neither familiar nor routine to my loyal readers (all four of them).

It is impressive how little I can achieve in a week. I arrived in Dalian Monday morning off the sleeper train from Harbin, a ride that was quite a bit more comfortable than the train I now ride (but twice as long and ten times the price). I had grand plans to figure out a way to ship my snowboard back to California, to buy a new camera – continuing my long series of finanicial contributions to Canon corp. – and to get lots of work done on this website (you’ll notice I’ve started importing my Central American travelogue and soon my Indian one as well), and to get something onto my and Chris’s yet-incubescent (why is incubescent that not a word?) grammar-wiki, wixicon.org, as well as get some financial stuff in order and maybe look into planning the rest of my life. Some of those things I sort of did and some not all. I blame the smokiness and slowness of the various net-bars at which I attempted productivity. My current plan, to study in a “village” somewhere, involves a good deal of use of an internet connection somewhere, but what I’d failed to realize was just how depressing Chinese net-bars can be. The have a policy of putting them in basements or else covering the windows, lighting them poorly, and encouraging smoking. What’s more, many of the other customers are engaged in networked video gaming with each other, and as such must, in all reasonableness, shout insults at each other across the room. And don’t you forget that shouting in Chinese is a special kind of shouting. I won’t need a good internet connection, most of what I plan to do is entering text, but I’m very much realizing that if I’m going to be at all productive at doing so, I’m going to have to search well for the least terrible of PCs to use.



As far as the other things I wanted to do in Dalian; I found out that private shipping companies would only be a reasonable deal if I was shipping one thousand snowboards to California, and China Post won’t accept something so long. So, the board, along with various other junk, I’ve just left in Dalian. Luckily Shinji and Nali have a new big bright orange apartment and have agreed to store it for me (even after storing my body on their big orange sofa for a week). Buying a new camera I did achieve, but disappointingly so. Canon, and other non-Chinese, non-crappy brand cameras are quite expensive in mainland China. The basically equivalent camera to the one I just lost would have been more than US$100 more than what I paid on Amazon.com. I just couldn’t bring myself to spend that much, so I bought a lesser model for only sightly more than what I’d paid before. While it’s a fine camera, I’m starting to think I should have just bit the bullet and paid for the better one. But now it’s too late. Better to not lose things at all!

From Dalian I grabbed the bus to Dandong on Sunday (after failing to get up early enough and pack fast enough on Saturday). I decided to try something I’d never done before, namely surf a couch listed on couchsurfing.com. I first heard about this website a year and a half ago, while hiking the John Muir Trail. The idea is that welcoming people list their couches, or spare beds, or floor space, or whatever, and before coming to their town one can contact them and possibly stay at their house. The more people whom you successfully host, or the more times you stay with someone without any trouble, the more references you get on the network, theoretically assuring your trustworthiness to random strangers.
I had my place in South Korea listed, but no one ever came there, so this time in Dandong was my first experience using the site. I stayed with Xiaoxu, a.k.a. Brian, and his eleven year-old daughter, Hui, a.k.a. Anna. Brian is fluent in English, and extremely kind. He said he’s never stayed with anyone on couchsurfing.com, and has hosted people once before, reportedly and American, an Estonian, and a Pole all traveling together. He was very keen on practicing his English, and it seems he wants to expose his daughter to English and to make foreign friends. In the bargain I got a really good experience of staying with his small family and he and his daughter walked me all around town.



Dandong (and I’m not sure what all Chris sees in it) is itself not very exciting. My main motivation to go there was, to be honest, my obsession with North Korea. Dandong lies on the Yalu River, and sports one and a half bridges to the DPRK. The half bridge is thanks to long-ago American bombers, and rather than tear it down, the Chinese have left it as some kind of political statement. One can walk out to the end of it – but only after paying 20RMB. Brian, Anna, and I ate lunch at one of a few restaurants in Dandong owned by the North Korean government. Moral questons aside, the food was quite delicious, and the Kimchi was, reportedly, Made in the DPRK. And besides, who am I to miss a chance to talk to some North Korean waitresses. Also at the restaurant was a man claiming to be Chinese, live in Italy, and to have studied in Pyongyang 20 years ago. He said he was in town to sell raw materials to the North Koreans, and asked my held deciphering the English on a poorly imprinted Chinese customs stamp. There was also a Spaniard and his hisponahablante Chinese associate, with whom I did not speak, and whose shady business with Kim Jong-il I can only imagine.



As far as North Korea itself, all I could see across the misty river was some old docked boats, some buildings that, for all I know, aren’t even real, a still Ferris wheel, and absolutely no movement with the exception of periodic Chinese trucks rumbling back across the bridge. At night, The Chinese side of the bridge is brightly lit with colored Christmas lights. Then the lights stop, and there is all but darkness. The North Korean riverbank had perhaps 20 dim lights, spread out, and a truly eerie lightening-like flickering, illuminating the low clouds from behind a hill. Brian suggested it was a malfunctioning transformer. He should know, as when he was “my age” he worked in a transformer factory.

This morning I visited the Cenotaph of the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea, a large museum and monument built on a hill overlooking downtown Dandong and the Yalu river.
The bilingual exhibits venerated the courageous Chinese “Volunteers” Army, and offered many interesting distortions of history. But the opening up of China seems to have lessened the ability to brain-wash. Brian for his part refused to go into the museum “because it’s all just propaganda” and when I asked Anna, who accompanied me through the exhibits, if she believed everything, she told me “oh? Sorry, I wasn’t reading the signs.”