common ground: Destination:Dalian Day1

I never heard about Dalian before my cousin Elsie moved here, but Lonely Planet touted it as "the most relaxed and liveable city in the northeast" with "plenty of 20th century architecture, an impressive coastline....and some serious shopping to dub it as the Hong Kong of the North". That last part alone was enough to lure me across Bohai for the weekend. This is what I saw when I first stepped out of the train station.

So Dalian owes much of it's cleanliness and modernity to the fact that much of it's infrastructure is barely one hundred years old when the Russians leased the land from the Japanese after the Sino-Japanese War in 1898 and named the area Dalny to be their main Asian trading post. The Russians did most of the city planning with streets that radiate off of circular parks. It looks pretty on a map, but a mess when it comes to way-finding. The city cycled through a few more occupations before finally being handed back to the Chinese in 1950 after WWII. As a result, much of the architecture is a Euro-mash up of many different styles. We'll start with the touristy Russian street which is Dalian's first street.

Towards the financial district around Zhongshan Park, most of the buildings are Renaissance revivals. Below is my favorite building built in 1909 with a modern addition recently added. It is currently used as a branch for the Bank of China.

This is the Dalian Hotel, a Baroque Renaissance recreation built in 1914 by the Japanese and what is now Citibank, built in 1908.

I really enjoyed a lot of the entrance doors I saw and might do a series on that later.

I would like to do a series on mailboxes too, but I doubt I will be seeing any more this quaint.

Religion is a growing trend in China, but many places of worship are owned by the government and therefore share resources. That means if you donate to your church, there is no telling where the money will go; it may end up buying incense for a Buddhist temple in an entirely different city. Therefore, there are also private churches (which basically just operate out of someone's home) and a slight ideological rivalry between the two. Below is the church that my cousin, Elsie and her family attend which is public.

Elsie's daughter Johanna made deviled eggs for the Easter potluck.

They don't have dishwashers in China, but they do have a dish sanitizer which uses positive and negative ions to kill bacteria. Interesting. It reminds me of the air purifiers I used to sell at Sharper Image before they went out of business. I still don't know if there's any truth to ion technology.

As the day was winding to an end, I was itching for a drink. However, as the visiting "aunt" it was definitely better to set a good example. So, I opted to press my face up to some windows instead.