Friday, December 10 - Saturday 11 - "That Dragon had a Brother!"

Sorry for the long delay - had to travel to Singapore and wait until Monday night to work on these posts...

Friday lunch in Dalian was the typical business lunch, Nancy (a colleage and friend from previous visits, and another enginner) took me out to lunch to the Japanese restaurant close to work. As I had been discussing the great hand-made Chinese noodles that I enjoyed on my last visit, we ordered the Japanese noodles here for a comparison. In case you are wondering why I have not returned to my favotite noodle shop from January's visit, it is because they CHANGED their menu and no longer serve the hand-made noodles. Arrgh. One of my all-time favorite meals (and at $1.25 US - one of the cheapest) is no longer available. To make matters worse, I have learned that the reason we have not gone for the crab yet is because they are all squeemish about the local crab after an oil spill that heppened near here. Anyway, I had my meal and the noodles were ok. I really liked the side plate of lightly fried prawns, however.

After work, Winson took me to a local shop on the East side that still, in fact, specialized in the handmade noodles. This restaurant had two levels, and was clearly suprised to see a westerner. For appitizers, they had KimChi and another Korean vegetable that seemd familiar. For dinner, we had the seafood flavored hotpot and the hand-made noodles. As a side dish, we had spinach with seafood. Now, as I took a bite of that side plate of spinach, I ate of of the seafood and asked if it was oyster. Indeed, it was. Oh oh. I immediately queried if they were cooked, and the answeer came back , yes. Now, as you can guess from the title of this post, I suspect that if the oysters were cooked, they weren't cooked thouroughly. More on that later. Anyway, we finished up the dinner, and by the way, the noodles were good, not great.

After dinner, we took a short taxi ride over to the bar that we visited Monday or Tuesday night.
We heard the same talented singers (really talented) singing a mix of Chinese and American songs. Some of the Chinese ones I recognized from our earlier visit. The night flew by, and by 12:00am, the singing was done. This time, two of the male singers came over to our table to talk to us. They were excited to hear I was from Milwaukee, as they are huge Harley fans. Additionally, the younger one, performed a couple of Stevie Ray Vaughn songs both nights, and did them extremely well. Since I don't know half of the lyrics to English songs anyway, it never got in my way of enjoying the songs that were in Chinese. So a good time was had by all.

I got back to the hotel by 12:30am and settled in for another restful nights sleep...

(Queue the ominous music here)

At 8:00am, I awoke, not feeling hung over from the beers, but a familiar grip in my stomach. As my worst fears were realized, by 8:30am, I was in the bathroom upon orders from my body. I will spare you the absolutely gruesome details, except to state that my stomach did not rest for more than 15 minutes until - I kid you not - 6:00pm on Saturday. Another top 5 worst medical days of my life - again complements to the Chinese oyster. Here me now on this - I will NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, eat anything close to an oyster in China again. I may have a tough time eating one at home after this one. By 6:30 pm on Saturday, I was able to finally hold down some water, by 8:30 pm a Sprite, and at 11:30 pm, I ordered a fruit plate from room service and was able to keep down 2 small pieces. I dozed off and had a rather poor nights sleep.

So much for my last free day in Dalian. To make matters worse, a few brief peeks out the window that day showed the weather to be terrific.