Sorry it's been a while

Dalian is an old city but it was occupied by the British in 1858, returned to the Chinese in the 1880s, and then occupied by Japan in 1895. In 1898, the Imperial Russia leased the peninsula.

Our National Holiday trip to Dalian and Qingdao was good. As we told you, five (this is including us) of us foreign teachers joined a Chinese tour (of about 20 Chinese people) for a 5-day trip. We had one tour guide per city and of course, they didn't speak any English but we got lucky. There was a second year college student on the trip with his parents and he ended up being our translator and now, friend.



His name is Tony and he lives and goes to school in the city of Hangzhou. His mother works for the insurance company (owned by the country) and his father works for a bank (again, owned by the country.) Their situation is that the father works in another city and comes home once or twice a month to see his family and so, this holiday for them was important.

Anyway, we got lucky that he was there because if he weren’t, we would have been up a creek with no paddle. He got lucky (of course we think this) because he got to have English Corner every day of his holiday. His parents were thrilled that he had this opportunity with us and showed it by sitting with us every meal and even took us out for dinner one night.

Dalian and Qingdao are coastal cities and beautiful. We flew to Dalian and stayed 2 days. We visited the seaside, saw some interesting buildings, stone carvings and went to an underwater adventure type place with all the bells and whistles -- just like in the states. There was a lot of riding around in a cramped bus and stopping at dried fish and health related buying opportunities. Really, they are both nice places to visit but basically, this trip was an overview chance and if we are interested we’ll go back on our own to see more.
crab on a stick -- we didn't eat any but took a great photo!

Biggest adventure of the holiday was that to get to Qingdao we had to take a ferryboat. We walked into the huge boat (picture attached) at around 9 and left the dock at 9:30PM. We docked at around 3:30AM but paid an extra fee to stay onboard until 5:45AM. Well, this was short time period made for one long night. Let's just say that the bathrooms were horrendous, unforgettable and the people loud and happy. Luckily, the five of us purchased a whole 8-bunk room so that we were by ourselves. This way we didn’t have card playing, seed spitting or endless smoking in the room.

We'll put some more pics from the trip and get back on-board the blog soon with more stuff.

Oh by the way, if anyone knows the answer to this question, please leave a comment or email us – PLEASE.

Question: If a person honks their horn all the time does the mechanism ever break?