Living Life On the Edge with Stan and Mel: Stan's Trip to China

I attended a conference in Dalian, China September 11th-13th for work.

For anyone who doesn't know where Dalian is, here is a map. Thank you Wikipedia.

The only camera I took was an old school wind up film disposable point and shoot, so unfortunately some of the photos didn't turn out well. Luckily, one of my colleagues sent me his pictures.

Group photo of some of the conference organizers and speakers

This was the view from the hotel, we were up several stories

We were in a hotel building like this one

There was even a river next to the conference center

On the flight, my phone died but a nice taxi driver let me borrow his. Good thing I know some Mandarin Chinese!

We took a taxi to the conference center/hotel, the ride was pretty crazy. They would kind of weave in and out of the lanes and use the horn. It was like organized chaos. And nobody wore seat belts. That evening, the conference organizers took us to dinner. It was a seafood place that was good, but the food was a little bit interesting...

They had live seafood, at least we could see what we were eating before they cooked it.

This is one of the fish dishes

This was one of my favorite dishes

It was good!

Then we went on a tour of the city. Dalian is on the coast and we could see the bay. We walked around on a plaza.

I gave my talk on the first day of the conference and it was well received. We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the conference center.

Breakfast, mmmmmm.

I think this was a lunch. (this was one of my colleague's photos so I'm not 100% sure.)

These are some of the pictures of the town at night:

After the conference on Saturday, we went out to the beach. Dalian reminded me of the Oregon coast. It wasn't tropical like Hong Kong; it was a lot farther north. These next few pictures are kind of like a panorama.

They were giving boat rides and our hosts asked if we wanted to go. We said 'sure'.

The dock where we loaded onto the boat

We took a boat ride around this island and then a little bit to the left. It was called "Wooden Stick Island" and we saw the wooden stick

These are probably fishing boats.

Returning to the dock

We walked a little bit farther down the beach.

This rock had a quote on it.

Then there is this gem. Children always remember to play with the guardians.

We went on a hike.

If I remember correctly, this translates to: "Look, see place"

The trees really reminded me of Northwestern USA

There is the "Wooden Stick Island" through the trees.

Then we went to dinner. It was even more interesting than the first night. Members of our group picked the food. There are some pictures of all the choices.

Sea cucumbers, we didn't actually eat these.

The front one is duck head, we had some of that. It was really well spiced but not much meat.

After selecting the food, we had dinner. They had a huge rotating wheel on the top of the table that let you turn it so you could grab whatever dish you wanted. If you look closely below, you can see the glass wheel.