The Beach at Dalian : China's San Francisco

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The Chinese are rather shy when it comes to their bodies; most Chinese girls consider it indecent to take off or put on clothes while facing a man. When I took off my sweater in class, it must have amounted to a strip show: the students tittered and the teachers smirked. I never could reconcile this with bathrooms with glass doors or the spectacle of skirt-clad women on bicycles. In any case, the beaches attract a mostly geriatric crowd: I saw no one under 60 in a bathing suit. I watched one old man carefully wash himself after emerging from his swim.