Apartment Views

I recently realized that I have put up very few photos that give a sense for everyday life in Dalian. To be fair, that is partially due to the fact that I haven’t been taking many that would qualify. There is something about moving abroad for an extended period of time that has not inspired me to take ‘documentary’ photos. I know that it has a fair amount to do with a lack of urgency to take those photos. On foreign vacations, everything is new and exciting. You take a lot of photos in case you don’t get another chance to do so. For me, I don’t take photos of the kids I teach because I am all too aware that they will be back a week later. I don’t take photos of where I live because, well, I live there. It loses it’s novelty pretty quick. It is easy to forget that people at home might want to see what has become mundane or routine for me.

To begin fixing this problem, I took some photos of the various views from my apartment. I hope that these will also help to fight the derth of Dalian images. Googling images of this city will bring up plenty of pictures, however, they either focus on the same places (the government buildings in People’s Square are not nearly interesting enough to support their internet bandwidth) or they give stunningly little perspective. To be fair, most of this city just doesn’t inspire great images. Dalian is very good at appearing like it could be any city, so there really isn’t any reason to document most of it any more than there is to document [insert mid-sized city in a developed country here].

With that, this is what I look at every day!

This is a southeast view from my bedroom window.

It takes about ten minutes walk from my apartment to the prominent building in the photo above. It would take twenty-five to thirty minutes to walk to the distant blue building.

A view to the southwest from my bedroom.

The three buildings in the background with sunshine still hitting them are about five blocks from Shane English School. It would take me about twenty-five minutes to walk to them and five minutes to get there in a taxi.

A view to the east from our living room.

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