Best Western Fortune Hotel Harbin is a modern chain motel but don't expect what you'd usually find at a North American hotel. Despite the website which says there is a hairdryer and ironing board in the room, there is not. However, where can you get slippers with your robe or have a 'do not drink' the water sign plastered on the bathroom wall? The AM/FM alarm clock was nonexistent but an old-fashioned alarm worked just as well. It even lit up when tilted.
This proved useful when we awoke at 4am. We then dozed until it was time to go to breakfast. I ate Chinese, of course, while Glen tried to piece together a Western-stye breakfast. He found boiled eggs, toast, and bacon so was happy. I had a variety of cold, salad-like veggies including pickles but added boiled cabbage, noodles and a dish with proscitto-like sausage and snow peas.
Chun-Xiao met us at 10am with another young man who drove to Shu-Lin Liu’s office at Harbin Medical University. It was a very modern one and huge, twice the size of our living room. Shu-Lin introduced us to another student, Siyao (See-yow, I think), who wanted to practise her English. The girls would be our guides but neither drove so we had yet another male student ferry us to Sun Island. Shu-Lin confessed he had about twenty students but he kept losing track of how many. Most were girls, though, which mirrors the situation in North America.
Shu-Lin loves American coffee so had a stash of Starbucks which he shared with us. We talked for an hour then got ready to leave. This was when I knew I wasn’t in Canada (or Kansas, either) anymore. I went to the washroom and realized one had to squat to pee and there was no toilet paper. Fortunately, I had a tissue in my purse. All I can say, is it was good I had done back-country camping in my life and that yoga had kept me flexible.
Then it was off to do our sightseeing. Again we were amazed at the dance that was Harbin traffic. Horns become a language of ‘I’m here’ or ‘Get out of my way, I was here first’ or ‘I’m zipping across three lanes of traffic and you must make way for me’ or 'I've decided to take the off-ramp up onto the highway and make a u-turn into the lane I need so move aside'. It was amazing to watch and kind of scary, too. Our guides acknowledged there were rules but nobody obeyed them. We felt there must be unwritten guidelines that all drivers know as we never saw a crash although bumpers came within millimeters of each other. But, that's what they're for, right?
Our destination was Sun Island Park, an island in the middle of Songhua River of Harbin. It was a huge (15 sq. km.) green area much beloved by the people of the city. Being a workday and threatening rain, we had the place to ourselves. The girls had only visited it once before so were excited to see everything. The entrance fee was 30 yuan (referred to as RMBs) or about $4.50 CND.
There are many versions of why it was called Sun Island but Chun-Xiao told us it was named for Sun Rock, a piece of granite dropped by the glaciers onto the island. The story is a god threw it from the sky and it landed there so the people of Harbin now honour the space. She hadn't realize until then that it was actually an island. How often do we learn something new about our own town when someone comes to visit?
The flower of the city of Harbin, with many found on Sun Island, is the lilac and we arrived just as these trees were blooming. It was fun helping Chun-Xiao and Siyao pronounce the English word; even funnier when I tried the Chinese version of ding xiang (dee-young sh-yow).
We walked for over an hour then stopped for lunch at the Park's restaurant. We were the second customers of the day. When Glen saw them drinking a huge bottle, 750ml, of Harbin Beer, he wanted that. Turns out it cost $0.75/bottle and the girls said that was expensive because we were eating in a restaurant. Shu-Lin had told them to order local dishes and some they had never eaten themselves. Chun-Xiao is from south of Beijing so had grown up with completely different food. We had a cold celery dish with fat, slimy potato-noodles, four plates of dumplings, a dish with Harbin sausage (similar to what I had at breakfast), a dish with squid, cornmeal bread cubes, and garlic shoots and a soup made with chicken, more slimy noodles, and fantastic mushrooms. The garlic shoots were foreign to both girls so there was much discussion between them and the wait staff. In the end, they brought out cloves of garlic from the kitchen and indicated which part of the plant we ate. It was then we realized how exotic we were for the waitresses hovered around us. I guess most Caucasian visitors are Russian but even they don't come often.
We continued our adventure around the lake in the centre of the island, seeing white and black swans and wigeons and getting caught in a deluge (Chun-Xiao had brought umbrellas for us). The girls were thrilled to see Squirrel Island which was an enclosed area overrun with squirrels with tufted ears. Later, I learned from Chun-Xiao that there are no squirrels anywhere else in Harbin.
The winners during the famous International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival were showcased in stone near the lake. One was of a lumberjack and turned out to be a Canadian winner (2009, I think). We gave the girls a lesson on what a log driver was. Glen did not sing the Log Driver's Waltz but we both had it running through our heads. I later discovered that the 2007 festival was dedicated to Canada, a memorial to Canadian doctor, Norman Bethune whom the Chinese revere.
As the afternoon waned, Chun-Xiao suggested we take the ferry to downtown and catch a cab from there to the university where we were to have supper. The fare was cheap, $0.30 each but we waited 30 minutes for the boat to fill up enough to make the trip worthwhile. It was cold on the river and some young men were shivering in their T-shirts. Siyao was cold so I put her between Glen and myself and she warmed up.
I had thought smoking would be an issue for me in China but it wasn't. On the ferry was the first time we experienced it. Siyao did not like the smoke and kept waving it away. I think she would have said something to the man with the cigarette in front of us had she been alone.
We had problems flagging a cab but finally got into a rickety one. We thought the student drivers were skillful but the cab driver was incredible. Glen felt it was a ride more exciting than the most thrilling roller coaster he’d ever been on. We took a side road that had been cut up for re-paving and it was like being in a road race with the cab swerving around the holes, dodging pass cars, bikes, people, and buses with millimeters to spare. When Glen realized I hadn’t put on my seat belt, he got upset as he felt my door wasn’t shut properly as he thought I'd fly out. Siyao and Chun-Xiao argued with the driver when he took the 'wrong' route into the university. We didn’t know what they said but the body language was obvious. The half hour ride cost 30 RMBs ($4.50) so was much cheaper than any taxi we've ever taken.
We may have been late for dinner so we were hurried along to a private room in the university's Faculty Club. The other guest was the Associate Dean of Research, a purely administrative post in China. He spoke very little English so we had a great time enjoying the translations or just listening to the sound of the Chinese language as the others chatted together.
We drank more Harbin beer and learned that a meal involves many toasts and if you can’t clink glasses, you hit the lazy susan (usually made of glass) in the middle of the table. The food was again special to Harbin. We enjoyed a dish made of what might have been celeriac, another with broccoli and garlic, then came plates of bok choi, deep-fried pork, pork ribs with pumpkin, noodles, and chicken. Midway through the meal, another course of onion cakes, sesame seed cakes similar to the sesame seed buns we get in dim sum, and light pancakes arrived. Glen followed the Dean’s lead and slurped his noodles but the girls weren’t doing that so I felt I didn’t need to.
We had a great laugh when the Dean called his beer ‘dry’ beer as it was low alcohol so Shu-Lin started calling the regular beer ‘wet’ or ‘green’ beer as it came in a green bottle.
Dinner was over around eight and we were driven back to the hotel with Chun-Xiao and Siyao. They took us right to our room to make sure we got there. It was pretty funny as we hadn't had that much to drink. We later learned that Shu-Lin's 'wet' beer had the same alcoholic content as low alcohol beer here in Canada.
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