China's full of a system that is so not mysterious, so not special, and so not uniquely Chinese I'm amazed it gets so many column inches.  In Chinese it is called guanxi, which translates pretty directly to 'System which arises as there's no transparent oversight, no rule of law, and/or an ineffective system of retribution (probably because of said lacking oversight and rule of la Read more »

A couple of years ago a friend introduced me to the website haoting.com, and I'm amazed I've not shared it since.  The website is hosted in Dalian, and streams music from China, Japan, Korea and Europe/America.  It's pretty fast, especially from China, but is capable of streaming to the US and Europe too.  Here's how to use it:

I was forwarded this by email from Kangaroo Bar in KFQ/Jinshitan.  As indicated in the mail, don't forward it to anyone you don't know.

Pretty disappointing to see this.  Not because it's the year of the tiger, just disappointing, even for country-hick zoos, even for nearby Shenyang.

In perhaps one of the most bizarre re-namings in Dalian's history, the Dalian Swissotel has been renamed Swish Hotel.  Sadly the date is not April 1st, and the hotel appear to be dead serious, if somewhat misguided.

I've always been a fan of the Swissotel, the service has been of the expected quality service for a sometimes surprisingly good price;  Harald the former manager was always very responsive to comments.  But this really has me wondering what direction the hotel is heading, and approaches of smaller local to international markets and quality standards in general. Read more »

After an extended period of downtime, DalianDalian appears to be online again.  I am very sorry to both our visitors for that; a combination of CNY, empty PayPal accounts, overdue bills and bank transfers gone wrong make websites stay offline.  But, we've learnt from this episode, and will be implementing a system to make sure bill payments are made more promptly in the future, which

A wiki is a page that can be edited by many collaborators, the best example of which is Wikipedia.  One of the early plans on DalianDalian was to add a form of Wiki to the site, for information which is essentially timeless and which a lot of people can add information to.  So, when logged into the site and clicking on the 'add, ask' menu

I've gone all green, or at least cheap solar.

I'm lucky enought to have the top two floors of my building, and that means unrestricted access to the generous flat roof and the opportunity to jump on a China-wide trend: installing a solar water heater.

Anyone that's lived in China for more than a week knows that drinking anything other than hot water leads to a short and sickness filled life.  China has a love affair with hot, or at least fears cold.  This extends to breakfast: cold milk is rejected in favour of something warm, often heated leftovers from the past few days.

Furama Hotel Dalian joins World Hotels