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This is a warning. The following post contains descriptions of a truly disturbing nature. Those of faint heart or weak stomach should cease their perusing here.
Veteran travel writer Paul Theroux has a new book out called GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR On the tracks of “The Great Railway Bazaar”. In which he more [...]  read more »

Just to state the bleedin’ obvious from the outset, part of the process of getting to know a place is talking to the locals. When you’re a tourist it’s fairly easy and forgivable to whizz through the sights, scoff some of the cuisine, buy some souvenirs, and then piss off out without exchanging more [...]  read more »

Super obvious update: This site is working again. As Alex notes in the comments, we're on a new server. Apologies again for the down time.

Apologies to anyone looking for bars, restaurants or news about Dalian. The site is down with a bad case of DOS.

We (by which I mostly mean Alex) are looking into the matter, which may or may not involve new hosting.  read more »

A few days ago a friend treated me to some sushi. Proper sushi. Having lived in Japan for several years he was familiar with an okay place and the real thing. Dalian's sizeable Japanese population ensures 'the real thing' does exist here, or will do for a while at least.

Near the Railway Hospital we walked under the short 'noren' curtain and through the familiar teak door into a small sushi bar. Two waitresses spoke Japanese. The owner behind the counter purveyed over chilled steaks of fish for most of which there was no translation for (what is Half Beak?) soon to be cut up and digested by the (including us) half dozen diners or so. The place's appearance was typically average, sitting at the bar we faced a poster on the wall of a leggy model holding an overly large glass of Super Dry, elevated directly in front of us the curved glass cabinet containing various fish meat ingredients, under the poster of Ms Asahi a rice cooker kept the rice just above room temperature. On the opposite wall, behind us, was a bookcase full of Sake and Soju. The restaurant was clean but had aged since it's most recent furbishment, it did not pretend to be flash but clearly knew what it was.

Speaking Japanese in a Japanese operated restaurant brought out the inevitable raised eyebrows, cheeky smile and instant banter with other customers. I could only sit back and thinK "Speaking Japanese would be great but I've hardly mastered Chinese, perhaps I could come back 5 years later and participate in this conversation," as Adam bantered on about small-town life in Japan with a customer hailing from the location my dinner buddy lived and worked in. After a while it became apparent the owner had a ticking clock over his establishment: a month to move. The owner of the building was increasing the rent and no nearby locations seemed appropriate. (The sensibility of kicking out a long term client during a global financial crisis has yet to be determined.)  read more »

All three parts. Featured Devon, Rick and Adam. If you'd like to hook up for our next Podcast stick a comment on the end here.

hello everyone, i am a girl living in DaLian for more than 7 years, i am palnning to go abroad, i never go abroad before,so i pay a lot of effort in improve my english skills.
I like shopping and chat with my firends.I like coffe,music,dogs.I also like outdoors sports very much,if anyone want to go swimming, go hotspring, or go skee in the coming winter,you can call me to go together,i know a lot of nice and cheap places.

Big News! Obama won the American general election!
Thanks to the mighty power of blog I can tell you this momentous news literally years before future generations will hear it.
Remember…you heard it here first folks!  read more »

shahemenkou posted a photo:

Sometimes toilets of restaurants are a little dirty. This is an example of such.

shahemenkou posted a photo:

Sometimes toilets of restaurants are a little dirty. This is an example of such.

hello all my dear friends !

I wrote about this once over on Lost Laowai, but I think it's worth an update.





There seems to be a lot of interest in watching NHL hockey online, and now it seems that you can on Hulu.com. The only catch is you need a US IP address.





Now if you install HotspotShield.com's vpn, you'll be in the clear, and the site will stream hockey games easy as pie. There aren't a ton of games on there, but it's something at least. And I'm sure someone out there will find it useful.





You can also browse this page to see the latest games that hulu has online: http://www.netvibes.com/chinatv

In a comment on yesterday’s post about making news easy to find and easy to share, Alex reminds me that he and I have had this conversation before. Now that I think about it, we’ve had this conversation a lot, especially about finding relevant news based on location.
And about this time last year you and [...]  read more »