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Published: August 31st 2006
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being 5 days in dalian was a break from travelling just right in the middle of my journey. meeting someone you know already for quite a long time - namely bianca - here in the outer most eastern part of china was a nice experience. since bianca had to work all day long i had all the days for me on my own. well, dalian is indeed not the most chinese city i have seen up to now. actually it's the most un-chinese city i know - er, at least in china. streets are very clean, houses are european or russian style and i thing even the traffic seemed to be more controlled than anything i have seen in the last month. people are also not the same here than in the rest of china. they don't give you that many stares and you hear less "hallo!"s. probably it's because a lot of russians use to come to dalian so they are already used to these non-asian faces. thus i didn't do as much sight-seeing as in all the other places i've been yet.
one day i went to the zoo. i expected this kind of zoo as i was used
to from my childhood. a lot of animals in pretty small cages so that you really watch them while they're going crazy. it took my about 2 hours to get there but just because i walked most of the way to see at least some of the city. at the entry they charged me 120 RMB. that shocked me, since it's the same fee they charg you in schoenbrunn. however, i didn't feel like leaving again since it took me so long to get there.
inside i started to look for animals. i found some flamingos and some goats, rabbits and so on. not very impressing. i went to the tropic haouse, there were just some plants. i started thinking that the chinese probably have another idea of a zoo. but then i found a place where there were some busses leaving. i got on one of them and we drove into the animal part. it was quite nice. we had a pretty enthusastic driver who tried to show us something like lettein the bears crawl up to him through the window or letting them run along the side with the bus on two feet. at some point he walked through the bus to collect some money. some people gave some not. when he asked me, i wasn't sure what to do. he made some gesture and the sound of some wild animal. i thought, well, that's not really worth it, but let's see what happens and gave him 5 RMB. i'm still not sure what this money was for but some minutes later another guy came with a dead chicken and they threw it into the cage of the wolves and we could watch the wolves fighting for it.
after about one hour we came back and i could watch a "thai elephant show", as thay called it. some elephants in strange costumes playing soccer and doing other stupid stuff. fortunately, when i already wanted to leave a little bit disappointed i found a map of the zoo. there i could see that there was a cable car going over the hill to another part of the zoo and the cable car was included in my ticket. so i went over the hill, had a good view on the sea and on dalian and was happy to see more.
on the other side of the hill i could see the real zoo. just what i had expected. a lot of animals in small cages. you were allowed to feed and tease them, no restrictions. there were also a lot of young bears, monkeys and tigers. i have no idea how they do that. they must buy some of them every year because i can't imagine that any of these animals would feel like reproduction under these circumstances. they would also put some of the tigesr on chains and run around with them in the zoo or tou could also go in a cage to some young bears on chains to touch them. must be a great experience for these animals to be touched by humen beings every day. all in all it was a nice day in the end.
bianca and me spend then the rest of the weekend with going out and hang overs and on monday i finally left for beijing.
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