Dalian China, Anybody Been There?
My father in law, a Thai born in China, he had neither a Thai nor a Chinese passport, refusing to take Thai citizenship and could not get a Chinese passport and he travelled on a scrumpled up old document issued sometime in the 1940's and renewed every few years at Thai immigration.
He was over 90 and every year he would take off for a month to roam around the land of his birth, visiting long lost cousins. He had no mobile phone and would just laugh when his family advised him to stop travelling in case something happened to him.
He would just get up on the day of his trip and announce to everyone at the house that he was off to China today and would be back in a month. Nobody knew which part of China he was visiting. He didnt think it was important to tell anyone.
Well, yesterday, whilst in China, he died. The family in Bangkok got a phone call from someone who could not speak English or Thai and just said 3 words "father, China, dead"
None of the family can speak enough Chinese to have much of a conversation and so thanks to a Chinese speaking friend who called the number back it was ascertained that whilst in a town called Dalian, he had a heart attack and died and was now in the mortuary of a small local hospital.
So now the family have to go to Dalian and negotiate the tricky bureaucratic path of getting his body released and arranging a cremation there. It was always his wish to have his ashes scattered in China and so there is no point in bringing him back to Thailand for a cremation only to have to take his ashes back to China.
We (me and my Thai wife) are in the UK at the moment and will travel to Dalian as soon as we can get a visa ( 48 hours at least, they open on Monday) and meet up with the in laws and arrange the release of the body and the cremation.
We will probably be there for 2 weeks or so and once the hard part of the trip is over we would like to get out and about a bit and have a look around before returning to the UK and so my question is: has anybody been to Dalian and if so, what is there to see there?
I see from the map that Dalian is very close to the border with North Korea, dont suppose they do day trips ????
