April trip to Dalian

This is what San Francisco looks like out the plane window when your flight leaves on time. Which for my travel through the city is batting less that .500. No fog, no storm, no reasonable meterological phenomenon to blame for a late departure. So it was noteworthy, or at least blogworthy

Unfortunately for this trip, however, clear skies in the bay area were no match for the fogged-in Shanghai airport. I’ve been told that international flights don’t have any trouble landing in China, but the domestic airlines there require clear skies, since most Chinese pilots are not instrument certified, and need to be able to see the runway to take off and land.….Which begs the question what happens if the fog pops up after we’re in the air…
After several hours of waiting for things to clear, the locals started to get a little restless. A crowd of several hundred ganged up on one customer service guy at the counter…fortunately for us we had a Mandarin speaker with us who could go and figure out what was going on. Here’s a short clip of the crowd scene:

Eventually, the crowd prevailed, and the airline sent buses to pick up the stranded travelers and take us all to local hotels that must base their existence on circumstances like ours…think worn out 1970’s dorm room with a swamp in the back yard. It took quite a bit of negotiating for us to all get our own room, since 1) its completely normal to share a room with others in China and 2) the airport crowd scene was repeated again at the hotel, with buses driving up, dropping off the travelers, and then leaving them with nowhere else to go…and not enough rooms to go around.

Here’s the view out the back of the hotel, consisting of an interestingly swampy canal with a few dudes out trying to catch their breakfast. Unfortunately the fog was a little to thick to get a good shot of them in action. Must have been a little too foggy to take the SS Mudsquid out as well. Although it looks to be ready made for the filming of the Chinese version of Huck Finn….or maybe Deliverance.

The next day the fog lifted, and we made it to Dalian for our meetings and site tour. Trusses are going up at the factory. The construction technique they’re using is to actually drop them into place at the end of the building, and then slide them into place.

To better appreciate the scale, here’s a closeup of some fearless ironworkers riding these things into position

A somewhat less impressive construction technique is the one the concrete workers used here to check how dry the concrete was in the freshly poured auditorium…with their boots



We pass this coal fired power plant every day on our way to the factory. Even though it’s not a nuclear plant, the cooling towers always make me think of the Simpsons, and wonder if there’s a Chinese equivalent of Homer at the controls. I need to ask around to find out the Mandarin equivalent of Doh


Lots of shipbuilding going on in Dalian. We passed the shipyard every day as well on our way to the site…I’ve taken a dozen pictures of the gargantuan gantry cranes being used to build the container ships there…and every time the pictures don’t do justice to it. There’s nothing around to give any sort of scale to how huge it is. So I didn’t add it to the blog, but here’s a picture of an oil platform under construction that I thought was interesting, and it actually turned out ok for being shot out of the window of our van going down the freeway