Dalian Art Center. We'd gone earlier in the month for a painting exhibit
by local artists, mostly landscape paintings of the seaside town of
Xiamen. At that time they told us the photo exhibit would be open on the
22nd, so we planned accordingly.
We also planned to pick up a family picture we'd taken just before the
Chinese New Year at a photo studio in town. After that, we'd meet J's
friend at one of the city parks, go out to dinner and then maybe do a
little karaoke (which they abbreviate as "KTV" here).
Well, it turned out that the photo exhibit wasn't open yesterday and J's
friend had something come up and couldn't meet us. We called her cousin
to see if she wanted to go out, but she was unavailable as well. J tried
calling the Dalian Shell Museum, a huge, sandcastle-like structure in
the south o the city, to see if they were open, but the line had been
disconnected (apparently the museum is closed now). Luckily, we were
able to pick up the family picture without a problem.
In the afternoon, we ended up at a bookshop where we were initially
looking for a sort-of "coffee table book" of Dalian. They didn't have
one that we liked, but we started looking at all the maps, both local,
national and world, that the store had available. It was a lot of fun
just checking out geography of different places, including a molded
plastic map of the world that showed elevation, so there was a big chunk
of the world raised high above the rest where the Himalayas are located.
On a Chinese map, that's closer to the middle of the world--the U.S. is
stuck near the right margin. We ended up buying two huge wall maps: one
of the whole world in 1:25,000,000 scale, and one of China in
1:4,500,000 scale, both written in English and Chinese.
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