dalian again

last week i went to dalian on business, being the big important businessMAN that i am. once again i found it a lovely place, though quite a bit colder than last time. dalian is definitely a modern city, not hyperfuturistic like tokyo but i think comparable to some of the smaller cities i passed through in taiwan. besides some horrid parking issues traffic moves pretty well, there's not all that much construction anymore and the streets are clean. i think two factors help here (urban geography geek alert!): 1) the city is quite small both in terms of population and physical geography, which has allowed it to concentrate development into a relatively small area; and 2) the heavy influence of russian, european and japanese occupation on the city's design in terms of things like hub-and-spoke road layout, narrow streets with buildings right up on the sidewalk and a streetcar system makes it seem more modern to my western-oriented mind.

my activity this time mostly involved walking around shopping malls and business parks. exciting stuff, i know. but i did come across a great bar that i wholeheartedly recommend to anyone in dalian. it's called brooklyn, and any sort of google search will find it for you. it had actually been recommended to me by a former english teacher from dalian that i had met more than a year ago in beijing. luckily i saved her e-mail and the it was still around. it's probably the most happening place in the city. say hi to wayne for me if you go there.

as i final image, i leave you with the image below, which i snapped of the tv in my well-appointed hotel room. they were playing a dvd rip of avatar in german and streaming it to all the rooms in the hotel. this is a little shameless, even for china. i mean, at least put it on full screen so you can't really tell it's playing from somebody's computer!

just sad, really