Departure Day Minus One…

Our time in Dalian, China is almost over. Classes were finished on Friday, grades turned in, students wished goodbye, etc. We are spending the day finishing shopping for gifts and packing. We have said goodbye to our new friends, the other people that taught here this summer and the LION staff. We are the last faculty to leave, so we appointed ourselves the departure committee, and managed to see almost everyone off as they left the hotel.

We will be up tomorrow morning (Monday, 12 August) at 4 AM to catch a ride to the airport at 5, with our flight from Dalian to Shanghai leaving at 7:30 AM. We arrive in Shanghai at 9:35, depart at 12:35 after clearing customs and immigration here, and get to Atlanta at 3:45 on Monday the 12th. Not bad, a 3 hour and 10 minute flight! If we can clear customs and immigration in Atlanta in time, we will hop on a plane to Pittsburgh and be back at 7:15 PM.

Today is a rainy day in Dalian, and a good day to try and catch up on some of the things i have not written about. The rain is supposed to continue through Thursday or Friday, we are getting the remnants of a hurricane that (I think) made landfall in southern China yesterday or Friday. They are expecting up to 10″ of rain over the course of the storm, we will see how the drainage system holds up.

There are a lot of things i still want to write about and pictures i want to show, but I won’t have time to do it all before we leave. The plan is to continue and finish the account of the journey when we get back, but we will see how that works out. I want to do it to show you the rest of what we saw, and to make a record for us of what we saw and how we reacted to being in China.

Yesterday, Saturday the 10th, we spent with my TA Bangjie. We went to the Dalian Observation Tower, on a shopping mission for our souvenir (Our remembrance of Dalian…), and to an excellent seafood dinner.

Other items i have not yet chronicled are:

The Beer Festival – I think my ears have recovered by now…
Grocery shopping in China, complete with pictures.
Riding the metro to Wal-Mart, and shopping there
More pictures of the China we saw
Riding the bus from the Observation tower back to the mall – you thought Pittsburgh buses got crowded…
The two hour ride from school a week ago
Pam’s two birthday cakes…

I am sure there some other things as well, these are the very obvious ones I can think of.

This is the sea bridge that connects the two sides of Dalian across the harbor.