Dalian

Dalian was another surprise.

Dalian is "small" city with just over 6 million people (2010 census) it was really clean and modern looking.

So our excursion today was another bus trip to see some of the sites.

The streets here could be anywhere - any city in Canada or USA. Wide, clean, not too busy.

And look at these fine stores - Prada, Giorgio Armani, Louis Vuitton.

Even KFC!

Our first stop is at a pretty decent park with a bunch of locals hanging out. Mostly just old folks looking after young folks.

And a nice view of downtown.

Who knows why this armored police car was here. It didn't look like there were any riots or insurrections planned for today.

And check out the things on the top. They're not for launching fireworks!

And what's with these guys? I mean it's a totally peaceful park with grandmas and grandpas and their grand-babies. Who knows? And if you look close you can see they have SWAT in English writing on their uniforms.

Anyway, we leave the park and go to the next stop.

The next stop is by the ocean side.

This is some sort of museum - right! we're going to visit a museum on a day like today.

There's a huge park here too with great views of some apartment buildings.

And little guys enjoying the clean air.

And the one thing I've learned from all the traveling we do is that people are the same everywhere - I mean look at the goofy hair cut on this character - he's just like a regular dude in any city you could name!

It really is a fantastic city.

The Castle Hotel

More pics here

Next we go out of town for a wee drive.

Not sure what the building is - an apartment? a hotel? - they have a nice beach but no one's using it.

After we got back to the ship we walked around a bit in the local area and were amazed at the development.

This is the convention centre - it's freaking massive and it looks like a spaceship. Very cool.

We also discovered a relatively new development called Montage de L'Eau. It's a replica of Venice complete with canals and Italian style buildings.

Here's an interesting article in a British paper.

This place was HUUUUGE...it went on and on and on. We though it was just at the end of construction but found out later that it was started in 2011 and completed in 2015. The thing is - it was virtually deserted. We found one restaurant open and one pub. All other buildings were empty. There were a few gondolas ferrying people around but not many. Very strange

Here's a shot of an adjacent street. A huge wide street but no traffic. Maybe the "if you build it they will come" doesn't work that well in China.

Some final shots of Dalian taken from the ship as we leave the harbour and head to Japan.

That's it for Dalian.