-Finally it's time to add another chapter to this blog thing. For a while I was questioning whether or not I even need to keep it up, as my days have become more routine and there wasn't so much to write about other than "my roommate said something funny today..." But! That is not true. I guess it's just getting to the point where it will take a bit longer to accumulate enough interesting things to justify creating a post. So here we go:
-First off, I have to talk about how I finally EXERCISED today! It was pretty amazing. As cold as it's been so far, I haven't had any desire to do anything physical outside. And there aren't exactly any indoor basketball courts for me to play on. Even the gym only has weights outside. But the weather has gradually improved, and suddenly it is amazing out! Today it got up to 65 degrees, and a group of us went out to the sports fields to play some soccer. The pickup game was huge, with a good number more than 11 on each side most of the time. Yet we were playing on only half a field. That turned out to be a blessing because, in case you hadn't heard, when you haven't done so much as run in over two months, it becomes a little difficult to do so. I still had a ton of fun, getting the old endorphins going and remembering how much I love the game. We split teams between Chinese and foreigners, just a team could actually communicate. The locals here are pretty good and SOMEHOW beat us. But I blame it on the fact that it was really a game of 'which team is outnumbered this time?' as people kept coming in and out so often. I came back feeling good, and the pollution was not so bad, as far as I could tell.
-My teaching job has been going pretty steady. It looks like I've locked down a regular time on Sundays, which is the best anyways because it's movie day. Last time we watched Casablanca, a much more interesting movie than I had remembered. We put the subtitles on, and I wrote down difficult words or expressions as they came up. Then every 10-15 minutes or so, we stopped and explained the words. My roommate Mike helped me out this time. Him, combined with the fact that we had such a structured format, made things a lot smoother and sooo much more fun.
-I can't exactly say the same about my OTHER teaching job, however (yea that's right). I walked into the Study English Bar one day and the Peng, owner immediately jumped on me. "Do you want to teach tomorrow at a high school? They will come pick you up." Sure why not, I thought. I had to be there at 1:30 the next day, and a gruff Beijing man came right away to take me. He of course didn't speak any English, but I was able to hold some conversation with him on the way. He pointed out a good place to hike in the mountains and an indoor shooting range...surprising because I had always thought guns were illegal in China. I guess you can only use them there. The school turned out to be way out on the outskirts of town, a 30 minute drive with no traffic. When we arrived I was brought into a small room with 3-4 young women, all of whom were teachers. They all were very happy to have me there. One woman introduced herself and gave me my brief instructions. The regular English teacher had suddenly told them she could no longer come on Wednesdays, so they were very glad that I could come on such short notice. Apparently I was to be teaching two classes. The students' English was very poor she said, which makes sense because middle school is usually when kids here begin learning, at the earliest. I asked her if she wanted me to speak only in English. She told me that I should for the most part, but if they have a difficult time understanding I can speak Chinese. She then quickly had to leave for a lecture but told me she would come get me when my class was to start. I had 'some time to prepare,' but that didn't mean much because they didn't give me anything to prepare with. All I had was a pocket-sized phrase book that Peng had given me before I left. The book began with various things you would say in the morning. "Good morning." "Did your alarm clock go off?" "Did you sleep well last night?" Pretty simple. I wrote down a number of phrases and copied down the characters and pinyin to make sure I could explain their meaning. While I waited I talked with the other teachers. They were all about my age and were very, very nice. A few times people (I couldn't tell if they were teachers or students) would come into the room for a minute, and they seemed to smile when they saw me there. I got the impression that foreigners aren't so common at this place. After about 45 minutes, I was taken upstairs to a small classroom with 12 desks, a blackboard and some chalk. The students came in pretty quickly, and I immediately could see that this was going to be very different from the adult classes I had been teaching. These were not people that came to learn of their own accord; these were kids...who had to take English because of a requirement. There was a large amount of apathy, and they acted pretty much the way you would expect a high schooler to act around a substitute teacher. However, there weren't too many problems. Those who were being disruptive I just made participate more, and the woman who had given me instructions sat in the back to help keep order. I started with a few phrases and had them repeat. Then I would put them together to create a short dialogue and had them recite it, with one or two blanks in each sentence where they could pick their own word to use. I was a little surprised at how long it took them to understand, but I guess I had overestimated their language level. The only difficult part was the complete blank stares I got. On difficult words I wrote the meaning out in Chinese characters and tried to explain it in Chinese. Still, they barely even reacted. The time actually went by pretty quickly, and I was told the next group would be middle schoolers, who would be "better behaved." They were for the most part, except for one especially loudmouthed kid. He was funny, though and loudly said "Hey teacher!" when he came in. This time I decided to try to make things more interesting (the last class had seemed painfully bored) and skip the book for a while. I just started talking with the kids and asking them what they liked to do for fun. I again made a little dialogue that I put on the board. But once again, all I got was blank stares. This time it was even worse. They didn't seem to know hardly any English at all. Whenever I asked them a question, they looked around, confused, and could only respond after I basically outlined what they should say. Again, my Chinese didn't help either. After class I was invited to eat at the cafeteria. The food was all Korean...pretty good, but not quite up to the Chinese food I usually eat. I guess it was cafeteria food anyways, what should I expect? At that time, I learned something that was good to know. It turned out that all the students were KOREAN and spoke Chinese about as well as they spoke English. That explained why their dialect sounded so foreign! Plus it was good to know that I didn't need to bother speaking Mandarin anymore. Though I realized it is going to be really difficult to teach with no common language whatsoever. After dinner the teachers sat with me and asked what kind of schedule I wanted. Apparently I was not just substituting for the English teacher, I was the new English teacher. We decided that I would come in on Sundays and Wednesdays, and they would come pick me up every time. Not a bad deal. When I went to the English Study Bar again, however, Peng told me that he needed me to work for him Sundays, and he had already arranged for one of my classmates to take over for me at the school. That was actually a relief, because I wasn't sure I wanted to deal with that twice a week.

My New Hangout Spot

-So it has been a long time since my last entry, but there is good reason for that: not too many eventful things have happened. I’m at the point where I’ve settled in pretty well to my routine, and there aren’t many new and crazy things I do during the day. That isn’t to say I’m not enjoying myself; I’m still having a blast!

-I’ve been hanging out at the Study English Bar a lot lately. It started when we didn’t have internet in our dorm because they have free wireless, delicious free beverages (the first time there they gave us kiwi milk tea—soooooo good), and plenty of Chinese-speakers eager to converse with you! So now I’ve gotten in the habit of bringing my laptop and schoolwork there a couple times a week. It’s a great place to do my Chinese homework because if I have a question about anything, I can just ask anybody there. I got my best grade so far on my latest weekly journal because I had people there look over it and give me suggestions.

-I’m also really happy at how many people I’ve been able to meet there. I now have a few people I exchange emails with. It’s unbelievable how much of a difference it makes to have native speakers to practice Chinese with. I feel like I’m starting to turn the corner in my understanding of the language. A while ago I realized that my biggest problem was I didn’t know hardly any vocabulary. So I decided to work on memorizing as many helpful terms as I could and to just throw them together in a sentence, worrying about grammar later. It worked, because by conversing with native speakers I started to pick up on how their sentences are structured. The next step for me is to improve my listening comprehension, which I suppose mostly means vocabulary. I can express myself pretty well, but if someone speaks to me I often have to think for a minute before I fully understand what they said. My teacher and some friends have told me that watching Chinese TV actually helps a lot. It gets your ears attuned to the language. So I think when I’m sitting in my room doing nothing, I’ll trying turning on the tube for a while.

-The weather has been surprisingly nice lately. I guess it’s becoming Spring! The more I think about it, the more the New Year here makes sense. Whereas ours happens randomly in the middle of the bleak, cold winter, the Chinese New Year takes place at the end of the winter. So the new year actually feels new, as the weather begins to warm up. I’m amazed how on 40-degree days we’ve been ecstatic as to how nice the weather is. Back home I would be huddled up in a blanket in front of the fire. I guess my body is toughening up! Apparently the temp got up to 50 degrees this week! Simply amazing. There have also been several days of blue skies, something that just doesn’t happen here. I learned last week that there are mountains outside of Beijing. I just could never see them before. A friend from the English Study Bar actually invited me to go hiking on one of them, which apparently is a big thing to do around here. I’ll have to check it out.

-Thursday I began my first day teaching English at the study bar! It was actually a bit harder than I was expecting. They just gave me a “common phrases” book (that had obviously seen better days) and put me in front of a class. Most of the students that day were also coming for their first time, so I wasn’t exactly sure where I should start. It was an adult class, so everyone could speak really well. They just needed to learn commonly used colloquial phrases. It was difficult to find where to start, but once I got started on a subject it became really easy to find related topics to jump to. I taught them things like “going off on a tangent” (because I seemed to keep doing that), “take a hike” and “put on an act.” By the end they were just asking me various questions, like the difference between jogging and hiking, American holidays, and other stuff. I’ll be teaching again at 6pm today, I hope it goes well again!

-On to the important stuff, the Chinese New Year. At the wee hour of 8:00 on chuxi (New Year’s Eve) we packed into a bus and headed to Taiyuan, a big city near to Pingyao, where we were to spend the next few nights. They took us to Taiyuan for the New Year just to make sure we got the real experience of the holiday. Boy, was I glad they did.

-The scenery on the way up was very beautiful, yet strikingly bizarre. I could not really compare it with any place in the states because it was such a mix of things I hadn’t seen together. We traveled through mountains with 10-ft wide terraces. Cities contained regular buildings mixed in with structures built in to the mountains, similar to the cliff dwellings in the Southwest US.

-Before arriving in Taiyuan, we stopped at a Buddhist temple. Very beautiful and peaceful, as well as HUGE. We walked about a quarter of a mile in what I thought was the temple, when it turned out we were just in the “front yard.” There were many buildings, ponds, and streams, the place was surrounded by mountains, and it was filled with tall trees. One giant tree was growing at about a 30 degree angle, which it had apparently been doing since the temple was built, over 1000 years ago. There were many buildings with statues of Buddha surrounded by incense, where people would come to pray and leave an offering. Unfortunately Buddha is not supposed to be photographed, so I couldn’t get any pictures of the elaborate statues.

-At one of the few rest areas, I got a taste of what New Year was going to be like. There were all these strange exploding sounds coming from all around us. Were we in a bombing range? No, those were firecrackers, going off literally every second. When we arrived in Taiyuan, it was exactly the same, only getting more intense as the day went on. By the time the sun went down, I felt like we were in a war zone. We had a little fun making fools of ourselves running and ducking behind corners to give ourselves the full effect. Then! Starting around 11:30, fireworks really started going off. It was like the climax of the fireworks on the 4^th of July, but it lasted for over an hour, all around us. It seemed as though every point in the city had someone shooting them off. Simply amazing. I made sure to take a 10-minute long video of it while leaning out our hotel window, just to prove to people how ridiculous it was.

-On the road again, we stopped at some fancy mansion or something to visit. I remember so little about the attraction because of what happened before I got to it. When I first got off the bus, I had to immediately find a bathroom. Dr. Li pointed one out to me but said it’s “probably not very good.” Considering the state of most bathrooms in China, I wasn’t afraid. It was probably just a bit dirty, like most of them, right? No. The women’s room was a small shack, while the men’s “room” was a curtain with a bucket behind it. HA! I couldn’t help but laugh. What really got me was that as I left, two people ran out saying “Wu mao! Wu mao!” They were actually trying to charge me for that. My first reaction was to just crack up. Somehow I didn’t feel like that restroom cost them very much money in upkeep.

-We then went to find some lunch. Eerily, there was a row of restaurants that all looked exactly the same, inside and out. And none of them could serve more than one table of us because they said “it would take too long.” A group of us went into one place, mainly because a woman ran outside with her menu, very intent on getting us to eat there. It didn’t seem like the best idea to eat at the one place that’s desperate for customers, but they all seemed the same anyways. As we were sitting down, the woman ran outside again and chased after another group from our program and convinced them to come in. They seemed very friendly when taking our order, and they brought out the first dish someone had ordered. It wasn’t bad. But we didn’t get another dish for about 45 minutes. A group of Chinese people came in and sat down about 20 minutes after we had gotten there. We didn’t think much of it when they got one or two dishes before us, but soon it became apparent that they were getting their entire meal before us. We had a deadline to make in order to get into the mansion place with the group, so this was ridiculous. Yay for the “American” service. We couldn’t even do much other than think about leaving because we had no idea how to say what we needed in Chinese. Fortunately, one of our program directors came in, and after hearing what was going on, gave the owners what was coming to them. Our food then came out immediately, but I feel like they just threw together whatever they could as soon as possible. It was by far the worst food I’d had in China. Frustrated, we threw money on the table and left. In the states I wouldn’t have even considered putting money down, but I’m not sure I could have done that to people in China who are obviously so poor.

-Our next stop was Pingyao, a small, very historic town. The weather was much colder, though not as bad as Harbin. However, it was made 10 times worse because for some reason our hotel did not have HEAT! Well, that’s not fair to say. There was a guy who appeared to be working hard shoveling coal into an oven, which apparently was supposed to heat the rooms. All I know is that I could touch my radiator without it feeling hot at all, and I could see my breath in my room. We went outside to huddle around a brick oven when we wanted to warm up. I should be fair and say that not everyone was stuck without heat. The town was so small that no hotel could fit our entire group, so they split us up by gender into two hotels. The boys got what I like to call “the shaft.” We didn’t have heat, the girls did. We slept on wooden platforms with a blanket folded over it as a “mattress,” the girls had normal twin beds. Our bathroom consisted of a toilet that didn’t flush, a “shower” that was simply a faucet sticking out of one of the walls (you were expected to just stand in the middle of the floor to shower), and an overbearing stench of feces. Take that back, the entire room smelled of it. The girls had a standup-shower with jets, JETS! They also got full-sized towels, while we were given a nice, 1ft by 2ft loincloth to use when we showered. I was at least happy to see that what I thought was a tiny towel was actually TWO really thin, tiny towels. Great! I can dry off BOTH my hands now! Also we only “got hot water” between the hours of 7-11pm (I actually never found any hot water during those hours even), while the girls had hot water the entire day. But! I’m not complaining. I actually thought the hotel was very pretty, especially the little courtyard area outside. I just find it funny to list the infinite number of ways in which the girls had it better than us. This is China! Whatever happened the Confucianist chauvinism? The town was very charming, with narrow stone streets that felt like a labyrinth and reminded me of my time in Antigua, Guatemala. The streets were filled with merchants selling statuettes, swords, furs, and whatever else you wanted. I bought a very ancient-looking xylophone-type instrument and a GORGEOUS vertical landscape painting in watercolor.

-You could, however, tell how much of a tourist town Pingyao was, and once again, everyone did their best to rip off the foreigners. I can’t say I blame them, considering how much wealthier I’m sure we are than any of the merchants, but it did get pretty annoying. We learned the best call for restaurants was to find the ones where a). There was no English writing on the outside and b). The inside was filled with Chinese customers. We managed to find the best food I’ve had in China so far using that strategy.

2/11/2008

-Once again, I’m back in Beijing, this time after a slightly less frozen adventure in Taiyuan and Pingyao for the Chinese New Year! I return to find that most of the city is still on vacation for another week (slackers). This means:

1. I have no internet. We’re not quite sure what the story is, but it’s not here. I’ve heard that all the IT guys are on vacation, so nobody has fixed the internet after one of its routine breakdowns that happen once every 30 hours or so. Others say that the school intentionally cut off the internet because it interferes with the school’s wireless systems, if that even makes sense. There is also rumor that a giant beast invaded the server while we were all in Harbin, to only release its grip on the school’s internet after a so-called “chosen one” arises to slay it. Either way, I am stuck without internet in my dorm. Somehow the PKU campus wireless still works, as does the internet at our program directors’ offices across the street. I think once again we’re just getting the “American” service. If I do need to go online I can easily go to the SIS building across the street. The Study English Bar also has free wireless, and they give you delicious free drinks like kiwi tea! So it’s not actually that bad.

2. None of the cafeterias on campus are open. Well, that’s not actually true. There is one eatery I have dubbed “the rice house,” simply because every other campus food place is called the _____ house, and this place serves rice. And they do have many other things! The typical choice is a selection of stir-fry dishes that they will then dump a bowl’s worth of rice onto. Yet, in the morning they have baozi (delicious, delicious dumplings, bigger than regular Chinese dumplings with a thicker breading) and we were happy to find at lunch today that they also had jaozi (the regular old Chinese dumplings). The place is not bad, but I’m a little afraid I will tire of it soon. There are usually about 6 eateries in our immediate vicinity to choose from, plus the eight jillion random other ones spread about campus. And I miss the noodle house!!

3. The banks are not open. Well, that’s not true either. The only bank that is of any use to me is not open, that is the Bank of China. I went across the street to the Bank of Beijing to happily see it was open. Yet, for some reason, despite the many transactions they were obviously performing at the time, I was told I could not cash my traveler’s checks because “they were on holiday.” Oh well. It’s not like I spent all of my cash and don’t have a check card to get money out of an ATM. …wait, it is like that? Hm. In all seriousness, it isn’t much of a problem. Since RMB has such a low value compared to the dollar, it’s very easy to borrow money from friends here. It’s just a bit annoying to think I will have to do that for a whole other week.

-So you may have noticed I never finished retelling the Harbin trip. In a nutshell, we went to snow world the next day, it was fun but not as fun as ice world, we flew back home, and that’s the end of it. A few noteworthy events to mention:

1. While in the shower Saturday night in Harbin I noticed the phone was ringing. I was especially surprised because this was a bathroom, and what the hell was a phone doing there? Obviously I couldn’t answer it at the time, so I continued on with my business. Perhaps our room phone was located in the bathroom, or maybe you could call the bathroom phone from the room and my roommates thought that was the funniest thing in the world to do? Could be anything. Once I stepped out of the shower, the phone rang again, so I answered. A bunch of incomprehensible Chinese followed, until they realized I only spoke English, when they said “Beautiful girl?” …what? I was confused. “You want…beautiful girl?” HA! Ohhhhh. No no no no no was my response, and I laughed hysterically after hanging up. Although I was so curious as to what exactly would have happened if I’d said yes.

2. The next day we took a gondola to cross the river to snow world. It was fun.

3. That night a few of us decided to wander into the bright, flashy club across the street. There were so many lights, it had to be important! We were led to a table immediately. Hm, I thought, I’d never been led to table in a club before. Wait a minute, there are poles everywhere here. Wait a minute, a GIRL just walked out and started DANCING on that pole. Ohhhhh. I started to wonder what section of town we were in. Laughing, we quickly left, but not before noticing the menu. It listed items around the range of 5800 kuai…I’m not sure I want to know what that was.

4. The next morning I tried to watch the Superbowl at 7am, but no! The best we could get was espn.com’s gamecast, which is a sad, sad thing. The fact that the Patriots lost made up for it a little, and seeing a pot of porridge labeled “gruel” at breakfast made up for it a lot. Ohhh translations in China. How poor they are.

5. At the airport restaurant we were handed menus in Cyrillic. I guess we look Russian.

Ice World!

2/5/2008

-Ice world! We had made it. Words really cannot describe with justice the beauty of this place, so hopefully the pictures can do a better job. Even from the outside we were amazed. The entrance was set up like a giant castle, and a ten-foot high wall of ice surrounded the perimeter. I was actually surprised at how big it was. It really was an entire amusement park…made of ice.

-First things first, after the longest, coldest walk of my life, we needed to warm up and get some grub. There was a small shack/convenience store in the parking lot. All they had to eat were “just add water” buckets of noodles. But man, those were the best noodles I’d had in my life. =)

-We went in! Like I said, I cannot do this place justice with words. The place was filled with many buildings and sculptures, all of which had different colored fluorescent lights inside the ice. So the entire city glowed with color. The first station we stopped at had a set of completely accurate-looking, life-sized cars. I liked them a lot, and yet they still were probably the least interesting exhibit of all. Other buildings included a Forbidden City palace with steps going up two stories to the top, Westminster Abbey (or Notre Damne, I couldn’t tell), a Greek acropolis about five stories high with steps going up to the top, a Disney-like castle, and plenty of other buildings that were probably replicas of things I simply wasn’t familiar with. In the center was a 100-200ft high tower that flashed and changed colors in various patterns. A 10ft-wide orange and white walkway ran in a loop around the park. If you’ve ever played Mario Kart, it was basically the rainbow road. That’s right. Best of all, there was a five-story high ice luge made in the shape of the Great Wall. They sent us shooting down on a tiny plastic sled. I couldn’t believe how fast it went! They have a pile of soft snow for you to crash into at the end, and as soon as you do a big, burly Chinese man picks you up and throws you to the side, just as the person behind you comes flying in.

-Yea that’s another thing, this place could never exist in the states. It would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. They didn’t bother with any “handrails,” “regulations” or “safety.” On the luge alone, I don’t understand how somebody doesn’t get run into every five minutes. It’s really too bad that Americans have to be so paranoid and quick to sue people at the drop of a hat. This was an amazing park.

-So you may have noticed that an entire city of ice would require the place to be pretty dang cold. It was…and then some. How cold was it you ask? We never got an exact number because we never found any thermometers, but it was so cold that the batteries in my camera froze. At first I thought the batteries I used just ran out quickly, but when I put a brand-new pair in and it immediately said “low battery” and turned off, I realized what was happening. By the end of the night, I had to clasp the batteries in my hands for several minutes just to warm them up enough to take one, maybe two pictures before they froze up again. Within seconds they were unusable. I was bundled up enough that I didn’t feel all that cold, meaning I didn’t feel like my health was in danger by being outside. Some of our friends, however, were not dressed well enough to feel that confident, so we had to make sure to take a break inside every once in a while. Fortunately, they had plenty of heated cafés spread about the place, so we never had to worry.

-On our trip back we grabbed the first taxi driver we saw but made SURE to ask him how much ahead of time. He told us 80 kuai to fit all six of us in one cab, which isn’t even a good deal but at that point we didn’t care. We were cold, and that was good enough. Yet, when we finally got to the hotel the guy thought he could get away with telling us there was an extra “20 kuai fee.” No way, buddy. We threw 80 at him and got out, despite what he yelled at us. It seems like everybody tries to squeeze extra money out of us.

Frozen River Fun

2/4/2008 (cont’d)

-Our next job was to meander on over to the river, which we would cross and make it to ice world! I say meander because we didn’t really have an exact idea of how to get there. But since the river loops around the town, there’s only so far you can go before you eventually hit the river anyways. On our way, we got an idea of Harbin’s personality. First of all, it was just as crowded as Beijing, if not more so. All of the shops had people out front doing everything they could to attract customers. Some had speakers blasting rave music that you could hear several blocks away. Some had people singing with a microphone and speakers, or even just a guy yelling things into a megaphone.

-I also had never felt like such a target before in my life, but I suppose a group of six Americans is pretty hard not to spot in a place such as this. Everyone who saw us chased after us, saying “Hello!” followed by a bunch of Chinese that in some way was instructing us to buy things. The one cool thing about being hassled so much is it allowed me to bargain, something I hadn’t experienced yet in China. I remember bargaining in Guatemala, only barely knowing how to say numbers in Spanish. Now it was nice to have a quicker understanding of what I was saying and hearing, and I could even throw in a few phrases to make the bargaining more genuine. I felt a little too guilty to bargain the person down all that much, though, since I could really afford it more than any of them could.

-On our way to the river, I saw a funny-looking dog that I stopped to take a picture of. As I did, a woman came up and tried to get me to buy the dog from her. I’m pretty sure she was not the owner, as she kept on walking when I said no.

-The river itself was gorgeous! Tons of entertainment was set up along the “shore,” like snow tubing, an ice luge, skating, and of course, blaring music. People sat on horse-drawn carriages and dog sleds to take people across, and far off in the distance we could see a cable car taking people across by the sky route. We, however, decided to go the fun way and cross it by foot! The river was incredibly wide, maybe as much as half a mile. Very slippery at parts but most of it was covered in snow as well. At the areas of exposed ice, you could see it was frozen for at least a meter down.

-Once we made it across the river, we were eager to find this magical world of ice! But as we started walking, we realized the island was empty. Where were all the people coming to see the festival? This was a bit strange. The few people we could find to ask said there was no ice festival on the island and pointed us back to where we came from. No! This couldn’t be! Determined, we began walking towards the cable car line. Surely the gondolas were there to take people to the ice world. The one problem? It was getting dark, and with darkness came even more cold. I hadn’t really thought that could be possible at this point. It took us a good long walk to make it to the cable car let off point, where we saw bright green lights. Yes! This was it! No. Actually, this was snow world, an area of various snow sculptures. This was another cool attraction (no pun intended) that we were planning on visiting but not nearly as good as ice world. Plus, it was closed at night. Fortunately, there was still someone at the ticket booth who told us to travel down the road a bit further, but that we “should take a cab because it is far.” Somehow, though, there were no cabs in existence on this stretch of abandoned road. So we continued to walk, across a long bridge, and on to roads that seemed to be going further and further away from civilization. I began to get a little nervous about our situation… We were wandering blindly through Siberia in the dark with the temperature rapidly dropping, and we had no idea exactly how far we needed to go. This is the way bad things can happen. Then! Miraculously, we came upon a slew of taxis waiting in a parking lot, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. We couldn’t believe or understand it, but we didn’t care! We all piled into a taxi van that took us quickly to ice world. It turned out to not be much farther away but still was further than we would have (or should have) walked.

2/4/2008

-It appears that whenever I write a post, I get suddenly cut off before I can really finish. Maybe I just type too slowly. Anyways, I’m now back in Beijing. It is almost hilarious how warm this place feels! A week ago I could barely stand to go outside. I had to bundle up in every way just to walk down the block to the market. But now! I happily stroll down the streets at night with no gloves or earmuffs, my coat unzipped even. No exaggeration, Beijing feels like springtime compared to Harbin.

-So yes, Harbin was cold. Ohhh so cold. My daily outfit included long underwear (top and bottom), warm pants, a T-shirt, a long-sleeved warmer shirt, another long-sleeved shirt, a fleece, and my heavy down coat. Of course I also had two pairs of socks, gloves, and earmuffs. I was still cold. The high is usually around 15-17 degrees, while the coldest part of the night is probably around -10. That’s right, below zero. A wee southern lad like me couldn’t even imagine such temperatures. Our first step out into the day was probably about the same as a cold day in the North Carolina winter would be…if you were naked.

-Our goals for day 2 were to see the St. Sophia church, then wander around town to the frozen river, which we would cross to find ice world! The church was very beautiful but rather small. Apparently it was one of the few Russian Orthodox churches that survived the liberation of Harbin by the glorious People’s Republic. Actually, I think the city became Chinese way before 1949, but I’m keeping that phrase there. Anyways, the church was no longer being used for religious services and was just set up as a museum inside. Still very pretty.

-One thing made me a bit sad. I had thought Beijing was polluted. Oh no no no no. Beijing at least has mostly transparent air. Harbin, however, has a thick smoky haze to it. The day seemed very foggy, but no that was just toxic gas. I could actually feel it in my throat this time. I guess that’s what the improved environmental efforts in Beijing are doing. They’re keeping it from looking like Harbin! Fortunately, the smoke did seem to clear out in the afternoon and we were able to even see blue skies.

-The town itself is pretty trashy. Part of it may be our less than cheery introduction to the city with the taxi drivers, but everything seemed rather dark and eerie. Buildings were all covered in some sort of black soot, and the streets were spotted with slabs of ice made from questionable liquids. We ended up walking through a pretty cool street market, though, with lots of trinkets and delicious-smelling foods. Despite the calls from my stomach, I refrained from buying any of the street eats. I’m sure I’ll end up eating some street food sooner or later, but I don’t really want to risk it away from Beijing. Before too long we found a tiny little soup shop with some scrumptious noodle/soup stuff! I’m not sure how much I’ve gone into detail over the food here, but one of my favorite things now is a meat broth with noodles, vegetables and pieces of meat (which are usually just to add flavor and have too much cartilage to actually eat). This was by far the best I’ve had so far in China.