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5/28/2005

In the morning, we took bus to Modern History Museum of Dalian near Xinhai Square. Students seemed to handle it well. On the way from the bus stop to the museum, we saw a female cross guide in uniform. She was tall, slim and very pretty. David asked to take a picture with her and she graciously agreed. Just before the picture was taken, David put his arm around her shoulder. She jumped off and said sternly “no touch.” David was pretty good nature about it. As a result, a major international incident was averted.

The museum was impressive. It illustrated the modern history of Dalian from the turn of century to present. The pace of the development, especially in the last decade, was neck breaking. I was proud of the progress being made thus far. Even more importantly, Dalian knows where it would be going. I was so overcome that I wanted to come back and spend more time here.

Everyone but Tyler was at the entrance ready to leave. While waiting for him, I made up two pop quiz questions for the students. What US city was the sister city of Dalian and in what year did Russians transfer the power to Chinese after the WWII? The students seemed to have paid attention because they knew the answers. Do you?

After a long while, Tyler made his appearance, but sometime was lost. As a result, we decided to implement “Tyler Rule” in which we would preannounce a time and place for us to meet before we dispersed into another museum/place.

While walking toward the seashell museum through Xinhai park, we saw people after people wear the same t-shirts. It was the 3rd int’l walking festival. In addition to the walking event, we saw others play kites and lion dance on poles.

It was already 11am and we decided to go back to school because Dick wanted to prepare for the class. There was not enough time to go to the Seashell museum. One the way back, we decided to have lunch on the way. Cliff selected his favorite Sichun restaurant. The cooking was really authentic and the food was really spicy. We saw clusters of whole pepper in most of dishes. I purposed ordered Kong-pow Chicken and Ma-po Tufu to let students know the difference between the Chinese food they had in American and here.

After class, we were invited to a disco on campus because they now knew that I was a dancer. We decided to meet in front of our building at 7:30 and went to the ball together. I had not danced disco for ages so I was afraid I did not know how to do it anymore. Since some of girls were late because they had to put on make-ups, we got there a little before 8. The four guys were David, Tyler, Dick from DUFE and I and the rest were 12 girls. The admission fee was 5 yuan but we got a discount of 50% off. The room was a typical disco establishment: dark and smoky. We put three small tables together to form a big sitting area. After a little while we got situated. David and Tyler got itchy and got up and started to dance. The girls and I followed. I felt energy circulating around and I started to dance disco. It is just like riding a bike, as people say. The girls were really into it and danced like pros. Strangely enough, later Sharon, Rose and Vivian told me that it was their first time to dance disco. The way they danced did not convince me of that claim at all but I trusted them.

The room got hotter and hotter and smoky and smoky. Tyler’s t-shirt was dripping. It was around 10pm when did we decide to exit. On our way out, Rose became a little panicking because she left her bag in a studying room which was supposed to close at 10. I offered to run over with her to the building to retrieve the bag. After saying goodbye to the rest of group, we hurried toward the study room. Once we got there we found that we had a problem. She did not remember the room number. We searched 3 floors but couldn’t locate the lost material. Finally we gave up hoping her friend would take the bag for her.
On the way to her dorm we started to talk about many interesting issues. She gave me an impression that she was an intelligent, worry-free, truth seeking individual.

Once getting back to my room, I wanted to take a shower really bad because of the sweat and smoke from the disco room. But hot water refused to come out. I didn’t feel like to take a cold water shower, so I decided to go to bed without it. Next morning the first thing I did after getting up was to turn the shower on. In the beginning the water was still cold. I became a little concerned. If I could not take the shower, I would smell really bad. I was going to use a water heater to boil some water and then fill the sink with both cold and hot water and wash myself. Thanks heavens, I did not have to do it. Hot water came out from the shower and I jumped in with joy. To my dismay, the water started to turn cold in two minutes. I rushed to finish. Oh well, some shower was better than no shower.

posted by Unknown @ 8:57 PM