2nd month in China
Yes, I just did the two finger math and tomorrow 11/7 will be the first day of my third month here. Life has sort of settled into a round of ordinary events. I have been away from Dalian twice in that Dell Inspiron 2500 Series battery time, 36 hours for a trip to Beijing for some Canadian consular business and 3 hours to Jinshitan (or Golden Pebble Beach) about 45 k-licks from home which is just off E. Zhongshan Rd.
Let me begin by saying unequivocally that the cost of living here in Dalian with two dependents is many times less than living on my own in Vancouver in bachelor digs. And we eat out once a day every Acer BATCL50L battery day of the week. Mind you I haven’t done much, or entertained much. I still have more than half the small bottle of moutai I bought in my first week here. As far as our living environment it compares very well with my modest one bedroom on E 5th in Vancouver and I haven’t had to buy any furniture or appliances. Yuan did spend some of her money on small stuff.
Our basic rule is that we live on Y100/day, which converts to Toshiba PA3009 battery about $14.50 CDN these days with Y6.94 to the CDN $. Cost of the apt with all stuff in comes to about $630/mth for a 2 bedroom modern clean apartment at a good address, handy to all city venues and the beach. Entertainment consists mostly of discovering better restaurants, places to buy english books, certain foods like cheese and chocolate as well as finding english content on the giant screen home TV. I also spend lots of time on the Toshiba PA3395U-1BRS battery Internet with a broadband connection that costs less than $10/mth.
The first photo below shows the view out of our bedroom window to the Peace Plaza Shopping Centre and a glimpse of the area our apartment complex is in between Zhongshan and Goergi (or Gorky) Road. The Dell Inspiron 1400 battery second photo gives a view of downtown from a large park area that is part of downtown, Labor Park. The very silvery white building is the local China Network Corp headquarters building.