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Stepping off the bus in Dandong at dusk, there was a tout on the curb trying to communicate prices to me with her hands. I decided I might as well follow her and see what kind of rooms she had to offer. Staring at her fluttering fingers, I asked "What does that mean?" She was very relieved that I could speak a little chinese. After a bit of haggling, I got a tiny room for Y25, which I thought was reasonable especially since it was the warmest room I had enjoyed on my trip so far.
I strolled out to find something for dinner, and got lost of course. But I decided I liked Dandong. It's less chic (and expensive) than Dalian. Probably as a result of the Korean influence, there are lots of barbecue restaurants, where you grill your food over hot coals in the middle of your table. I chose one of these restaurants for my dinner—delicious. People were setting off fireworks and firecrackers all around town, because it was xiaonian ("little year"), a festival day which comes one week before chinese new year.
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| Shooting fireworks at North Korea! |
In the morning I strolled down to the Yalu river which forms the border with North Korea. What are the odds that one of my students who happens to live in Dandong would spot me out the window of a bus and come running to greet me? He seemed a bit flustered, and when some hawker flashed a souvenir set of North Korean stamps at him he quickly bought it and presented it to me, saying that I was a guest in his city and he was the host.
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| My student, Tony. |
I walked around with him for a time, while he complained that the economy of his town wasn't very good. People in China always seem to be talking about which countries and cities are developing slowly or quickly. With the relatively higher living standards of western countries as their goal, the need to speed up development seems to have weighed on the chinese conscience ever since the attempted "Great Leap Forward" of the late 1950s.
Naturally, I did the tourist thing by walking along the remains of the broken bridge (bombed by America in 1950) and taking a photograph of the opposite shore. I could even see some people over there. North Koreans! I felt a bit silly staring at people just because they happened to be standing in a different country to me.
Tony led me all the way to Jinshan Park, and left me there to explore on my own. The park used to be a zoo. Now a lot of the animals have been sold, but some still remain.
I walked up the hill. The few people I saw along the way were mainly old men. From the pavilion on top, I noticed an interesting sight to the east. The modern-looking apartment buildings pressed right up against the tide of single-storey buildings in the outer suburbs.
I was so interested that I walked down and found one of the streets where this juxtaposition occurs:
