And, special for June, I can see blogspot.com websites again.

Yesterday, while walking to meet Alex at the gym, I passed a mother and her two little boys, playing on the sidewalk. The older one, perhaps four, ran a few steps after me, shouting at the top of his little lungs, “Waiguoren! Waiguoren!” Foreigner! Foreigner! One of those things where it’s over before you really have a chance to think what the? By the end of the block, though, I knew what I should have done — turned around and shouted back, “Zhongguo erzi! Hao che!” Chinese child! Good eating!

On Tuesday night I went to Beijing Green Drinks (and next month I’ll go to Seattle Green Drinks) and had conversation with many people in English, which was a little odd. Even though I am by no means speaking Mandarin (not even close), my English language conversations have been relatively isolated here, and I found myself a little rusty at forming eloquent sentences quickly. Anyway, plenty of white folks there, and at pretty much any gathering of expats, conversations always begin with covering where you came from, why you’re here, and how long. Bragging about language skill is optional.

Perhaps showing my own naivete, I asked a pair of white women, one of whom was a redhead, how they got along with being stared at. I decided early on that perhaps the only way I could get more stares would be to have red hair. The redhead shared that she had seen villagers on the subway, sitting on their bags, who attracted far more attention than she; the other woman trounced us both by saying that she had had people point and run away, not to mention children bursting into tears at the sight of her. In Shanghai, no less. She left shortly afterwards to talk with people who were more connected.

It was pretty different from the Green Drinks I attended in Seattle (although I only went to one). For one thing the drinks weren’t sponsored/free — I paid 20 kuai for a glass of OJ (that’s about $3, and pretty over-priced, I think). The people I talked to who were actually working for environmental organizations seemed to dismiss me once they learned that I wasn’t. The first person I talked with was from Greenpeace; she abandoned me the moment a man came up and introduced himself as being from an energy company. Then again, maybe she had other reasons to prefer chatting up a man over a woman.

Time is moving quickly now. I am leaving in five days. Yikes. This Monday was a holiday (Dragon Boat Festival) and we flew up to Dalian, a city on the northern coast. It is a place with many carnival rides and two aquariums, and a shell museum inside a giant, European style castle. It was mostly so garish and over the top it was amazing.

We flew in on Sunday morning and went to the site of the first aquarium. There were a bunch of carnival rides outside, one of which was a kind of bungee-slingshot. You put on a harness, and there are rubber cords leading from both sides up and out to a couple precarious looking outstretched poles. Alex immediately had to try it. I opted to stay on the ground, and took photos of him and his friend C who was traveling with us. The guy running the attraction holds on to harness at the waist and jumps up and down with you a couple times – his feet touch the ground, but not the person in the harness – and you go higher and higher with each bounce, then he lets go at the bottom of a jump and you go up and up, and down and down. You can do a couple flips on the upside.

I took a bunch of shots of Alex grinning like an idiot, somewhere up in space. He spent the next day and a half trying to convince me to try it every time we passed a similar ride, but I refused. I’ve never been that into the adrenalin kind of carnival things. Maybe I just wasn’t exposed enough as a child — no amusement parks in Alaska.

C has befriended the Chinese girl sitting next to him on the plane, also a tourist visiting Dalian for the holiday. She had a brother in town, and after consulting with him on the phone, we decided not to go into the first aquarium, but to go to the other one, which the brother said was better. But first we had to have lunch.

With being on the coast, and having aquariums, and plenty of tourists, Dalian is all about the seafood. All the carnival areas included fried squid on a stick. We stopped into a small restaurant that looked relatively decent for lunch. They brought us a menu, but after realizing that only one out of four was literate, the waitress asked for the three laowai to follow her. Our new Chinese friend indicated we should go, and she would watch our backpacks. So we went.

The waitress led us out of her restaurant and down the street, smiling and beckoning, and holding onto her notepad for orders. We went around the corner to a larger restaurant, where they had rows of tanks near the door, filled with edible, as-yet-still-living sea creatures. Crabs large and small with their claws rubber-banded closed. Snails large and small. Eels. Flat flounders. Silvery round fish of several types I couldn’t identify. Abalones. Small octopuses clinging to the walls of their tank. There were styrofoam flats of clams and jumbo shrimp (expired) on ice. The waitress grabbed a net and held up a plastic bucket. We could choose any critter that we wanted to eat.

After a while, we settled on two abalone, a flounder, and four big shrimp. Although we ended up having some with dinner, I think, I refused to order an octopus. The waitress wielded her net with great purpose and extracted each item from its tank, deposited it in the bucket, and weighed it. Then we all went back to the original restaurant, seafood in tow, and waited to see in what form they would appear on a plate.

The shrimp were skewered and grilled, much the same as you would find on the street. The abalone were sliced up in a crosshatch pattern, the way they often cut calamari, and served in their shells. The flounder came last, pretty much in its entirety, in a pool of sweet and sour sauce. It was melt-in-your mouth soft.

Abalone is probably right up there as one of the most endangered things I’ve ever eaten, after beluga (whale, not caviar).

Coincidentally, belugas were the first creatures we saw in the “Pole Aquarium.” They were the first in a line of tanks which included Stellar sea lions, fur seals, sea otters (elderly), polar bears (two), and penguins. One area had a great many penguins of several varieties, but there was also a smaller enclosure with a single Emperor penguin all by his lonesome. Well, not entirely alone — he had two plastic Emperor penguins for company, who were both standing, face to the wall, in corners. The live one stood on the edge of the water. We watched for a while, and at one point he walked a few steps towards one of the plastic ones, then turned back to his original spot, and hung his head, giving him the most abject appearance I have ever seen on a bird. He looked like The Saddest Penguin Ever. I suppose that partly his anatomy gave him a turned down mouth, which is easy to anthropomorphize into a sad face, but it didn’t look like much of an existence. It very much reminded me of the part in Happy Feet when the penguin was in the aquarium, but this guy didn’t look like he was going to start singing and dancing anytime soon.

From there we went and looked at a big tank containing fish and various sharks. On the upper level, you can walk through the tank in a giant Plexiglas tube. The tank included potato bass, which look like gray rockfish, but four feet long. Huge fish.

Then we went and watched the whale/dolphin show, after which I didn’t feel so bad for them, because they obviously get mental stimulation and training in addition to living in a tank. I still have mixed feelings overall, but here’s what was in the show:

First, it was a really large hall with bleachers ringing a large pool. The hall was nearly full, so we ended up sitting at the top, too far away for photos. A man in a red velvet tuxedo jacket and white pants came out as the announcer or ringmaster. There was also a succession of animal trainers in wetsuits. The first critter was a beluga, who came out, waved its flippers and tail at the crowd and did addition and subtraction by pressing a lever to blow a horn the number of times corresponding to the answer. They made a big deal about it misreading a 9 for a 6. (If they had taught it the Chinese numbers, it wouldn’t have been a problem.)

After the beluga was a trio of dolphins. The did jumps, twirled hoops, and towed a small child from the audience around the pool in a boat. A trainer got in the pool with them and was lifted out of the water, balanced one one foot on a dolphin nose, and also did a pass riding the dolphin like a surf board. I felt appropriately amazed.

The pole aquarium also included two experiences. A polar experience: walk through an icy tunnel, past a mangy stuffed caribou. Basically a walk through a giant freezer. Yay? A waterless ocean experience: walk through another tunnel, with rippling colored lights to imitate light underwater, with rocky textured walls and many fake sea creatures stuck to them.

From there we went out and sat on the beach for a bit before making our way to the other marine mammal exhibit — seals of many shapes and sizes: sea lions, fur seals and harbor seals. This open air exhibit was a contortedpiece of architecture which looked like a barn mated with Theodore the Tugboat mated with a pirate ship out of Disney’s Peter Pan. I guess that’s what we’ve been missing at the Seattle Aquarium — they just didn’t take the maritime theme far enough. I guess we could probably step it up a notch at The Center for Wooden Boats as well. All the seals were swimming around of chilling in the sun on either large rocks or treasure chests. A bunch of the big bulls were barking and harrumphing at everyone else, and I was deeply regretful for not having brought my digital voice recorder with me.

The next stop was a rocky outcrop of the beach which features a ginormous seashell. You can walk into it, and part of the shell is broken out so you can look out to see. About that time a fog bank rolled in, so there wasn’t much to see, but it sure was an impressive looking shell. We climbed down to the beach, where I found the tide pools filled with tiny snails, a few hermit crabs, and some little anemones. I also found a wee sea urchin. No little fish or sea stars, though. Higher up there was a ton of beach glass. I collected a handful, then reminded myself I really didn’t need any of it, and settled on just two pieces that are perfectly triangular.

Back in the aquapark proper, we went to the seal/walrus/otter show, which was unfortunately just ending. I did manage to see a walrus blowing a horn, though. We stayed after the audience filed out, and I got my picture taken with two sea lions. That’s my grinning like an idiot photo. They were trained that anyone who came and stood in the spot between them, they would press their wet whiskery noses to your cheek — seal kisses. Afterwards I was worried that I probably smelled like fish.

All in all, it was probably one of the most ridiculous places I’ve ever been to. To make up for my lack of photos, here’s a link to someone else’s blogpost about visiting the same place, with lots of photos. I guess going to somewhere like Disneyland would probably be equally cheesy and over the top, but I’ve never been to Disneyland.

We had a dinner adventure and a trying to find a bar adventure (Lonely Planet advised that the area near our hotel was filled with small coffee shops and bars. It was not.) and a morning finding and eating tasty street food adventure. Then we went to the shell museum, which I may have mentioned is in a castle. (This only adds to the Disneyland-esque qualities of the town.) It turned out to only be a small wing of the massive edifice, which seemed to be otherwise empty and used only as a backdrop for wedding photos. Seriously. On the way down the long driveway after looking at the shells, we passed three or four photo shoots.

Initially we were disappointed – the museum was, indeed, glass case after glass case filled with neatly labeled sea shells, of all types. But after looking at them for a while, they were quite fascinating, in a mathematical sense, as well as aesthetic. Many of them had very striking geometric or fractal patterns, including ones which looked very much like children’s drawings of mountains — jagged snow-capped peaks. Our Chinese friend tagged along with a small tour for a while and translated snippets for us. One tiny shell was worth $200. This case was all full of shells which contain poison — you can’t touch them. The best was one of the last things — a case full of shells in the genus Xenophora.

Once I looked it up, Xenophora means ‘carrying foreigners,’ which is an accurate description. Each species used the shells of others to add to its own shell, in a regular pattern. Some species used rocks. Some were generalists, picking up rocks and shells of any sort, some were specialists, only picking up rocks of a certain type and size, or only a certain kind of other shell. It’s crazy cool. Nature is amazing.

From there we went to Dalian’s Labour Park and rode a chairlift up a hill to ride a sled down a steel chute at high speed. After we got down and had some lunch it cleared up. We didn’t want to pay to go back up and look at the view, so we lay in the grass in the sun until it was time to head to airport and catch out flight back to Beijing. A very fun weekend overall!