Dalian, China: Final Days of Food & Karaoke

'Tis the night before our departure in Dalian and I want to take a moment to recap our meals in the last few days. As noted previously, having canceled our trip to Beijing we stayed within Dalian, where we focused mainly on eating and shopping.

This post is a little more photo oriented with captions:

WEDNESDAY

The same day my dad left town, my Mom and I went looking to try out a local McDonalds.

We ordered two "Grilled Chicken Sandwich" meals and I also had a fish filet sandwich. Note that these are actually I think smaller than I make them look in the photo. I believe their "large" drink (not the one I have) is actually the same size as our $1 small in the US...

The fish filet sandwich was pretty small. The grilled chicken sandwich is definitely something unique to McDonalds in Asia! They were both pretty good and the chicken sandwich definitely seemed more... Asian... in the style in which it was made.

What I did notice though was that McDonalds is much larger here than we're used to (and obviously with no drive through). They were pretty busy when we stopped by for lunch, and had basically a full upstairs seating area for customers. I don't know that I'd have it again in Asia, but it certainly wasn't too heavy on the wallet.

After Mcdonalds, we went to the local Carrefour market, where we spent quite some time in the seafood section. My mom really loves clams, and they were on sale (basically $0.50/pound) so we bought quite a lot!

They also have other interesting things and a variety of them as well. For example, this picture is of a tank full of small sea snails. Yes, snails. I should've gotten a video of it to show you, but they were definitely still crawing slowly around in the tank. I watched as one actually pulled himself almost two inches out of his shell as he was barely moving along. Snails are available in the US as well at asian supermarkets, but I guess these were more special to the area. It's also expensive if you live locally at a whopping $4/pound.

Being that my mom loves snails... we bought some and boiled them.

Pointy shell and extremely small. You eat it by removing the snail with a toothpick.

We also bought slightly larger ones as well...

... and here is one out of the shell. I know this might disgust some, but it's actually pretty good. =P

Bowl full of clams in a spicy soy sauce mixture - very good!

THURSDAY

We spent most of the next day doing some shopping with my dad's maid, who showed us around some smaller shopping spots in town where she felt things would be cheaper. Before we headed out to the "mall", we first hit up a local noodle shop:

The noodles are pretty good and the bowl is large - it came in a ceramic pot that was extremely hot too. This was in particular was a hot & sour soup base. By the way, this is sort of considered more to be like Chinese fast food here.

We also ordered these soft biscuits with some kind of meat paste inside - they were fairly sweet.

The noodles are made by bringing a hot ceramic bowl with the soup base, then a plate of veggies and meat is poured into it to cook a little, followed in the end by the noodles.

At the end of the day, my dad returned from his trip and we had a nice family meal at home.

One of the special dishes we had bought at a local shop is Ox feet - literally as you can tell. It's a bit chewy and there isn't much meat, but it was actually extremely good!

FRIDAY

Finally, we ended our week of tons of food as always. Lunch was at a nice place with these wraps and items to put inside.

Check it out! The dishes and stuff come wrapped, sterilized, and dated!

Here were some of the items that we had to put into the wraps that you can see in the last photo. I'm not sure how to describe them - they're sort of made of flour and thin. Though not as thin as rice paper that is used in Vietnamese spring rolls.

I must've ate 8 or 9 of these things...

Our final dinner was a huge hot pot dinner at the only place in town that valet parks. The hot pot is split into a spicy and non-spicy side, and the spicy side was SPICY. Even my mom noted it had a huge kick, though we were told this was actually their "mild". I guess I don't want to know what "hot" must be like! The meat was EXTREMELY good in that it was premarinated and tenderized so well that pieces of lamb and beef felt like they were melting in your mouth.

As you can see, we ate quite a fair number of plates worth of food! I'm not sure I'll ever have such good hot pot ever again, especially even in the US!

KARAOKE

We finally ended the evening, and basically our trip, with a night out at a local karaoke joint. Karaoke here is called KTV (Karaoke TV) and is fairly different than what I've enjoyed in the US. We had a large room with it's own bathroom, tons of snacks and beer, and an electronic touch-screen system for selecting music.

As you can see, the room also included a stage with a screen so you could literally perform for your friends & family. In fact, I was told that they have even much larger rooms that allows room for dancing and more!

Check out the tambourines they provide to help with your enjoyment!

FINALLY

So tonight we are packing up our final items and preparing to leave tomorrow morning. I'm planning to make a final post about observations and random items either in the morning or when I have my layover in Korea. Otherwise, this may very well be my last post here in Dalian!

Hope you've all enjoyed my adventures in blogging and I guess I'll see some of you soon back in San Diego. =)

Dalian, China: Shopping

From day 1 here, I feel like our trip has mostly been comprised of 3 things: relaxing in the apartment, eating, or shopping. It has been interesting because Dalian is really a smaller port city in China (not on the major cities list), and therefore does not have many (or maybe I should say any) attractions necessarily for tourists. During the summer, many swim in the few beaches here, but otherwise during the winter, tourism is at a low point for the year.

Even with tourism, most visitors do not come from the United States, but rather come from Korea or Japan (at least, so I'm told). When you drive along the streets, you find that there are primarily three major things out there: restaurants, bath houses, and shopping areas.

Food I've talked about plenty already. Bath houses I haven't visited, but the basic idea is that people don't have much space at home or convenience to shower, so they typically go to a bath house where they pay for someone to scrub them down clean. My dad's maid here was extremely surprised to hear that we shower ourselves as she exclaimed: "how do you get clean?!".

So finally, there's shopping... and a recap of several moments of it throughout the last week:

Of course there are the street vendors for everything - food, trinkets, shoes, etc. Sometimes I would pass a random street and bam, there's a whole ton of vendors on it.

Otherwise, we spent most of our time in small Chinatown-style shopping areas where stores could be really small. I noticed that there are TONS of shoe stores here. Most have a plethora of boots to select from, probably due to the cold weather.

Most shopping areas are underground as this one indicates. We didn't actually go in this one though because we were told it was not good at all.

These series of photos I took on my point & shoot because I felt like people were extremely uncomfortable in the small shopping area if I pulled out my massive camera.

Yesterday, we went to this small "wholesale" shopping center and from above you can see the random things that were there - "Nike" & "Puma" bags... random kitchen utensils... yes, a "Ped Egg with handle" all the way from the US =P... and even these cute animals on the bottom photo that are actually made all from seashells - yes, seashells.

There were also medium-sized malls with unknown vendors, but larger shops and more people as well. This was for example might remind me of several malls in the Southern California area that are not the fancy schmancy ones with big name vendors.

And then I was surprised to find that on the first several floors of my dad's office building was an "American" style shopping mall, but almost to a ridiculous level considering the stores that were there. This mall was decorated even for Christmas, had guards around warning not to take pictures of the stores (got this one of Gucci anyway), etc. You'll find in the backgrounds of the above pictures that they had a Sephora, Louis Vuitton, etc. In the same mall was a Prada, Fendi, Coach, etc.

What took me almost 10 minutes to realize was how EMPTY the mall was. Aside from a few people walking around, it was virtually empty. My mom and I walked through Gucci and Louis Vuitton and there were only 2 or 3 shoppers in the stores if any at all.

That brings me to another shopping observation: most of these high-end stores had at least 20 employees throughout the 2-story store - often they were eager to help you find something (obviously since there's no one else around). In fact, when people say that in some Asian countries there is no sense of personal space, you got that right. The moment we walked into Louis Vuitton and browsed around the store, there was a store employee following just barely 2 feet back everywhere we went. I know they have a sense of "service", but I find it to have a sense of creepiness too. My mom especially hates it when people tail you as you're shopping - as if you're pressured to find something and to find it quickly.

Ah, and of course, how does a Louis Vuitton store manage to maintain 20 employees when it has 3 people even just walk through every hour? More about this later...

We also spent some time in a local grocery store called Carrefour (my dad avoids this place because of it's "uncleanliness" though it looks fine to me). My mom decided the only souvenirs she could find were tons of coasters for cups and those things you put under plates...

You can see that the wheel of this shopping card has ridges - it's so that when you take an escalator (they're flat instead of steps) the cart sticks to the escalator and does not slide up or down... pretty cool, eh?

A love for American basketball and the NBA. If you turn on the "foreign" satellite cable box that has CNN Asia, Japanese and Korean channels, channel 1 is actually ESPN. Most mornings it's playing some random NBA game that's happening live in the states (+16 hour time difference). Didn't see a Lakers game though. =(

And then there seems to be the obsession with... American or European models on almost everything. Most of the bigger ads you would find never would have an Asian model on it. Seems to me that what they "sell" her is really "Westernization" almost.

Ah, this was the most risque ad I saw in Dalian - actually caught me off guard for a city in China.

Otherwise, my mom's favorite thing to look at a lot of times was... purses. In fact, in her time here she bought FOUR and would've gotten SIX if I hadn't stopped her. I actually regret stopping her on the two because yesterday still she'd mention how nice and cheap they were...

She bought her "snake skin" (made of plastic) purse at this store and really wanted this furry one that I said looked like a big... cat - she said it was "unique".

Here are the four that she got. In American dollars, two were $15 or less.

My dad also selected this "Coach" purse for her that I actually think is really nice.

So there you go - days of shopping in Dalian and I'm sure as you can tell from the photos there are tons of shoes, purses, and random "American" branded items. I ultimately didn't get anything really simply cause there was nothing of much interest for me. In fact, I think the majority of all stores were really oriented towards women.

When I return the United States, I'm not sure whether I'll miss seeing so many stores with so many options at cheap prices, or if I'll be glad to return to our heavily branded lifestyles. Being here really made me realize how utility and even looks without a brand (or with a fake brand, haha) could often suffice. Maybe it'll make me rethink things when I return? Or maybe not...

FINALLY, an apology to friends and others who asked for souvenirs - there simply weren't any traditional souvenirs to get! Being that this is not a major city and not one for American tourism, I never once saw in the shops outside things labeled with "Dalian" or "China". There were no shot glasses or postcards, no great wall or panda figurines, etc. Unless any of you wanted an "Adidas" bag or a "Louis Vuitton" t-shirt, I admit I'm coming home slightly empty-handed... =P