We arrive at 9:00am to this very busy port and industrial city of 5 million +. It has had a very interesting history due to its proximity to Russia and Japan, both of whom occupied the area in the 20th century. After WWII, it was under the control of the Soviet Union but administered by China. The USSR ceded the area to China in 1955. It is the 8th busiest port in the world by tonnage, most likely because of an enormous oil refinery here. It is also the 12th busiest container port in the world. Three auto plants are located here, as well as ship-building and chemical enterprises.
Here is a quote from our daily Currents: “At the end of the 1800s, Japanese and Russian invaders successively set their feet on the Chinese mainland here. Both the Russia and Japanese colonists dreamed of establishing a city of their own on this land in those colonial periods. A group of Russian architects fascinated with French culture came to Dalian with their construction blueprint of Paris and built all sorts of elegant squares with artistic sculptures, lush lawns and western style fountains. These formed the architectural basis for the present city – taking squares as the center and radiating outwards.” And they have a vintage and quite elaborate public tram system, a legacy of the colonial days as well.
But we are ignoring all of that and are continuing our hiatus from touring. Our friends Barbara and Brian O’Dell (the couple pictures in the photo at the beginning of this post) have invited us to join them and stay at a fancy hotel for a night just for the heck of it. We have become very good friends with these two very interesting and interested people, and we happily accept their invitation.
Barbara is an engineer who received her education at MIT and Stanford. Her career was primarily at Boeing Airplane Co. in Seattle where she worked her way up to being a vice president. She retired a few years ago. Brian started an E Bay site where he traded classic toys and apparently it went very well. He has since closed the site in order to travel. They are ATW people as are we. We met them at lunch on an excursion in St. Lucia and hit it off immediately.
We gather up our passports and paperwork and disembark after lunch in the Grand Dining Room. We are staying at the Shangri-La at 66 Rem Nin Road, the main drag of the city and right down the street from the eight-story Friendship Shopping Center where the shuttle bus from the ship delivers people interested in an upscale shopping experience. The Shangri-La in Dalian is one unit of a small chain of five-star hotels located in Asia.
We were originally going to take a taxi, but end up on the shuttle bus, one of the reasons being that the bitter cold wind is howling and the shuttle bus is nearer than the cab stand. The shuttle bus is provided by the local tourist board, and there are adorable, friendly young Chinese women to greet us at the bus and the shopping center. It’s a twenty-minute ride to Friendship Shopping Center, and a ten-minute walk to the hotel from there.
Check-in is only slightly confusing. There are several young ladies eager to check us in, but their command of English, while way better than our Chinese, is limited, except for one that more or less has to take over the process. Of course, the first thing they want is to see our passports, which they scrutinize very carefully, including our visas. We are both on the 26th floor, the top floor of the hotel. Barb and Brian’s room is ready, but ours is not. The staff invites us to go to the concierge floor on Floor 25 for a nice snack while the room is prepared. Our luggage will be delivered to the room.
So that’s where we head. What a nice spot. Snacks, soft drinks and a fantastic view, as well as an introduction to the great service provided by this hotel’s very attentive staff.
One of the things we have noticed about the Chinese language is that when we hear people speak to each other, to our Western ears it sounds like they are yelling at each other. We had a direct example of this when one of the receptionists brings Barbara an additional key to their room. We think our room is ready now and stand up. The woman says “No! Your room not ready! When your room ready, I tell you!” Feeling chastised, we sit back down. But it is just the way they speak. In a few minutes, we are notified that our room is ready and we both head up, deciding to meet at 5:30 back in this same area. We are in 2602 and the room is fantastic. It seems positively cavernous, especially the bathroom. This is going to be a nice break from our 216-square-foot home on Insignia. We crash for a while.
At 5:30 sharp, we step out into the hall and there are our friends. We are apparently all eager for Happy Hour to begin. Down we go to begin our evening.
Well, we certainly are in the right place. There is a very large selection of all kinds of `“heavy hors d’oeuvres” that Chinese, Japanese and Western style foods and beverages.
We spend the next two hours there, making it totally unnecessary to seek out a place for dinner. So after a very fun time, the four of us go back to our rooms after a very fun day – with tomorrow’s plans up in the air.
