Wednesday, January 13 - First Day in Dalian

I woke up at 7:00am after a good nights’ sleep. Although I only received about 6.5 hours of sleep, it was pretty solid. I showered and headed down to the buffet breakfast that I am now quite familiar with. I had tons of juices, mini pancakes (w/ peach toppings), sausage, a bowl of peaches, and a pastry w/ kiwi on it. The familiar breakfast got me to thinking that nothing had seemed to change in the hotel at all since my last visit – about a year and a half earlier. I mean the breakfast was exactly the same; my room was exactly the same, still the old tube TV in the room (although the picture seems much clearer than last time). After just staying in the brand new hotel in Shanghai, the Swisshotel, while nice, suddenly feels a bit dated. For Mike Fuchs, if you are reading this, the hotel rooms still smell the same, kind of a stale pollution that I had forgotten.

I then headed out into the sunny, cold morning to walk over to work. It was about -10 deg. C out as I made the routine 5 block walk to work. A couple of things, however, had changed outside. First, I saw cleaning crews out picking out garbage (I actually noticed a large number in Shanghai), so it seemed a bit cleaner outside. Also, one of my favorite restaurants was now a shell of a building that is either being torn down, or was just gutted to its frame (later in the office I learned that my restaurant moved, so it is not gone). One final surprise met me on the way – At a particularly busy and dangerous 5 way intersection (I was told later in the day, it is Dalian’s busiest), which was always a challenge to cross (because traffic lights are treated so optionally), they built an underground pedestrian tunnel to get me to the other side – hooray.

In the office I met up with my main contact, Winson, who gave me the updated tour and introduced me to some new people as well. I worked in my office until about 11:30am, when we took our lunch break. Can anyone guess where they took me? You faithful readers would know that the Japanese restaurant behind our building is the favorite around here, so four of us headed over there. I had a new dish (same as Winson) a baked fish w/ sushi - absolutely delicious. Carol and the other guy had the eel, which I also remember being very, very good. Damn – I just remembered that I was going to take dinner pictures - will have to take a picture next time – sorry about that.

Around the office, things had changed a bit since my last visit. Many of the people have moved locations in the building. Rockwell has floors 20, 22, and 23. So, it’s a bit confusing to where everyone is now after having it in my head for the last year that they are somewhere else. A few Nintendo Wii’s are setup in break areas, and every floor has a nice sized flat screen TV.By about 4:30pm I was getting pretty tired so, I decided to head back to the hotel for a quiet evening.

At the hotel, I ordered my standard room service meal here – the California burger (cheeseburger, w/ onions rings and bacon on top) and the tasty tomato basil soup. I polished the whole thing off with a can of Coke.