chillininharbin

Tonight is my last night in China. Last night we took a sleeper train down to Beijing. Today I walked around the city, went to the Temple of Heaven, and then did some shopping at the Pearl Market.

I still can't believe that I'm actually leaving China tomorrow. It all feels so sudden. I think that it's about time I came home, though. I've started to miss New York a lot.

I'll see you all soon!

Fun fact: because of the time difference when I land in Chicago to change planes I will actually have landed before the time I will be taking off.

My time in Harbin is rapidly coming to an end. In just over a week I'll find myself back at home. There are a lot of things I wanted to write about on this blog, but I haven't figured out how to turn them into full entries. With finals coming up at the end of next week, too, I don't know how much time I'll have to write entries, since I should be spending all my time studying.

I also noticed that there are a lot of things I want to say, but keep forgetting to write down.

So I decided to create a list of things I wanted to note before I left.

1) I never understood why it is that every morning, at exactly ten minutes before 8am, in the international students' academic building, they play Brahm's Lullaby over the loudspeakers. It seems incredibly counterproductive to me.

2) It's gotten incredibly cold here in the last three weeks or so. There are some days where it's so freezing outside that any exposed skin starts to hurt after a few minutes. One day I didn't wear my gloves on the way to class, which is around a five-minute walk from my dorm, and I paid a serious price for it. My hands became bright red and numb. It took about ten minutes for my fingers to regain feeling. Last week were were getting highs in the mid-twenties (fahrenheit), and everyone was walking around without hats or gloves, our jackets were all open, and we were commenting on how warm it was.

3) They must have started to burn coal for heat. I keep blowing soot out of my nose. Despite that, though, the pollution isn't as bad as I thought it would be, since I can still see the moon most nights.

4) I was excited to think that soon I would come home and be able to eat all the salads, pizza, and cheese sandwiches I want. Suddenly, I thought hit me that although I could eat all the Western food I wanted, my time for eating jianbing was limited. This made me so depressed I had to go out and buy a jianbing to cheer myself up.

5) It snowed... again.

6) Most of the Chinese I've met have a surprisingly low cold tolerance. My roommate, a Harbin native, has been wearing long underwear since either late October or early November, despite the fact that our room is like a sauna and it only got unbearably cold in the past 2 or 3 weeks. Back when it was still warm enough that I only needed a blazer and my thin leather jacket to keep warm, my independent study teacher, a Harbin native as well, told me my jeans were too thin and I should wear long underwear.

I haven't actually worn long underwear much here. I don't have anything fancy like Under Armour or whatever that brand is called, but I brought a few pairs of cotton leggings to wear if I needed to layer my clothes. Mostly I wear them when I go to work out at the gym. I've found that generally I don't spend enough time outside to need to wear it. My dorm and my classrooms, too, are incredibly well-heated.

I realized that, despite the fact that I've been keeping this blog for around 3 months, I've neglected to write an entry about what a typical day is like. So, with two weeks left to the program (eek!), here is my post.

Everyone participating in the program is taking 4 courses this semester. Before we came here we signed up for two electives, and an independent study course. After a short oral placement test after we arrived, we also got placed in a drill class.

The four classes I'm taking are Conversation Seminar, Modern Chinese Literature, my drill class, and an independent study on Chinese pop music from 1949 to the present.

Days with CET are long. I have an 8am class four days a week, and before my literature class got moved to an earlier time slot, I was ending my day at 5pm three days a week. I also take a tai chi class twice a week in the evenings.

Classes here also meet for a longer period of time. Back at Bryn Mawr, all classes meet for three hours a week. Here our electives meet for six hours a week, and the independent study classes the drill classes meet for four.

So, basically, I'm tired a lot. I feel like I've spent most of this semester eating, sleeping, and going to class.

I had a moment of slight hilarity this morning.

I've been sick and my stomach has been a little off, so I went to the supermarket to find something to eat that would be easy on my stomach. I decided I would get a few mantou (steamed bread made from flour and water, essentially buns without the fillings - basically the simplest food aside from matza) for breakfast. When I told the woman at the counter I wanted mantou, she misheard me and thought I said manhua, which turned out to be kind of like crullers. I corrected her before she could give me the manhua, but I had already paid. Since I used my meal card to pay for the manhua she couldn't refund me, and I only wanted 4 jiao worth of mantou, but paid 4.2RMB. I asked her if she could instead give me 4.2RMB worth of mantou to make up for it. Now, however, I have 10 mantou (not including the one I just ate), and no idea what to do with them. These mantou are quite large and two are pretty filling, so I highly doubt they're going to be finished before they go stale.

I sure hope my roommate likes mantou.

Today, I went to a branch of the Agricultural Bank of China to pick up money my father wired to me through Western Union. I filled out a form with all the necessary information, brought several different forms of ID, and waited for the teller to give me the money after calling up Western Union to make sure that money was indeed wired to me. She wouldn't give me the wired money, though, because when my father filled out the information to wire the money to me, he didn't include my middle name, and she insisted that the name must exactly math the name written in my passport, which includes it. She even told me that everything else I had filled out was correct, but because the money was only filled out to Dena Kronfeld, she said I couldn't fill it out until the sender fixed the wire so the names matched exactly.

I feel like in America people are more willing to let missing middle names slide, because I have never had a problem like this before.

I don't really have any great insight into Chinese culture in this post. Mostly I'm just pissed.

I'm going to try out a different bank tomorrow.

Although it snowed all weekend long, the snow stopped some time on Sunday afternoon, and it hasn't snowed since. The warmest it's been this week has been in the low 20s (fahrenheit, of course), so the snow obviously isn't going to just melt away, and it's quickly turning into ice. What to do, then, since quite a lot fell this weekend?

The answer, according to the city of Harbin, is to scrape all the snow off the streets. As soon as snow started falling, people were out on the streets with brooms, shovels, and ice scrapers clearing the streets. After the snow stopped falling, people used their shovels to scrape the packed snow off the streets. Most of the snow was tossed aside in piles on the side of street, but a few times this weekend Elaine and I saw people shoveling snow into trucks. What's going to happen to the snow after it gets driven away in the trucks, though, we have no idea.

Because of all the scraping going on, though, the HIT campus has gotten quite loud from the sound of tens of snow shovels scraping the brick pathways. In an effort to be economical, too, most of the snow clearing is being done by students, the cheapest source of labor at any college.

I thought this method of snow-clearing was interesting. Back in the U.S. the city of New York would have thrown down a lot of the snow-melting stuff that looks like little pieces of styrofoam, and used garbage trucks with snow plows attached to clear off the roads. The Chinese method, while requiring much more manpower, is, surprisingly, much more environmentally friendly. Not something I expected.

This weekend my friend Elaine came up from Beijing to visit me. We did a lot together, and of course I took a lot of pictures.

( My Weekend in Pictures )

Today is the first snow of the year in Harbin. Here's the view from my window:


According to my literature teacher, the first snow came late this year. Usually it starts snowing at the beginning of November.

Also, my friend Elaine from Bryn Mawr came up to visit me for the weekend! She's currently studying abroad in Beijing on another CET program. We don't have much planned yet, but we'll probably do something fun tomorrow that hopefully will involve frolicking in the snow.

I learned an amusing expression in my drill class today. The phrase "to fry someone's squid" means to fire them (as in "my boss fried my squid today"). Like all Chinese expressions, it has a story behind it. My teacher told me that back in the day, when a person was fired, essentially, it meant rolling up their bedroll and moving on to find work in a different place. Apparently when squid, which is normally flat, is fried, it curls up just like a bedroll, and that's why people say "fry someone's squid." I don't know if this is true or not, but it's still an amusing expression.

Cuisine in Harbin, though it has many similarities to other places in China I've visited, definitely has its own regional dishes. Because it's in the north, root vegetables are a prominent part of the diet. One local dish that I've never had anywhere else in China is called 地三鲜 (disanxian, meaning basically three fresh things from the earth), which is made with potatoes, eggplants, and green peppers cooked in a thick brown sauce and served over rice. Aside from the fact that the dish is very good and the perfect thing to have when it's cold outside, from a historical perspective this dish is actually quite interesting because potatoes are a New World crop.

Potatoes are native to The Americas, and based on what I remember from my 7th grade Social Studies class, they were completely unknown in Europe before the time of Columbus and all the other explorers from that era. How did potatoes come to China, then? I have absolutely no idea, but I would make an educated guess that either they came to China by way of the Silk Road traders from Europe, or, in a slightly more far-flung theory, if the famous Ming Dynasty explorer Zheng He actually made it to The Americas (as far I I know there isn't much evidence to back up this claim), maybe he discovered some New World crops and brought them back to China.

Another New World crop that now is found in other types of Chinese cooking is the tomato. You can tell it's not native to China by its name alone. In Chinese the tomato is called either 番茄 (fanqie, which translates to foreign eggplant), or 西红柿 (xihongshi, which translates to western red persimmon). Nowadays in China I haven't found tomatoes used in "mainstream" Chinese cooking very much, aside from one of my favorite Chinese dishes, tomatoes cooked with scrambled eggs, which I've found in every place in China I've visited. Cuisines from the Western part of China seem to feature tomatoes much more prominently, especially food from Xinjiang, which has a much more Central Asian/ Middle Eastern flavor than Chinese. Dishes from the Hui ethnicity (Chinese Muslims), too, also use more tomatoes than I've seen in Han Chinese cooking. When I was in Hohhot, which has a significant Hui population, I ate in a small Muslim restaurant one day. I ordered a dish of fried noodles with egg (essentially lo mein) - a simple dish that can be found anywhere in the country. The dish I had in Hohhot, though, had tomatoes in it.

In China, tomatoes are considered a fruit (I mean, they are in America, too, but we wouldn't be too likely to add tomatoes to a fruit salad), which means they get treated like fruits. By that I mean that it's pretty common in China to fin people eating sugared tomato slices. I've never had this dish because I actually hate raw tomatoes. Once, when I was in Beijing, during my first trip to China, it was one of my classmate's birthdays to we got her a cake. We were all surprised to find cherry tomatoes on it, as well as cherries and other fruits topping it. We were a little grossed out by it, and removed the tomatoes immediately.

Corn, a third New World crop, is also found pretty easily in China. Its Chinese name is 玉米 (yumi, which means jade rice. I heard from somewhere that corn got its Chinese name because the kernels are translucent like jade). I haven't found corn to be quite as ubiquitous in Chinese cooking as tomatoes or potatoes, but as the weather started to get colder here in Harbin, you can find street vendors selling boiled corn on the cob. Pancakes made from cornmeal are fairly common, but not as common as products made from rice or wheat flour. In some restaurants I've been to they add cornmeal to the rice, because it's thought to be more nutritious.

When traveling through the countryside, no matter what province I find myself in, there are times when it can seem like the only thing farmers grow is corn, based on the large numbers of cornfields I always pass. The only place I haven't seen seemingly endless cornfields whizz by my train or bus window has been Inner Mongolia. Maybe Inner Mongolia is too arid to grow corn.

Because corn is sweet, just like tomatoes, it's prepared in some ways that raise eyebrows for me and my fellow Americans. In China they make corn-flavored ice cream, which I've actually never tried. I did try corn nectar once, and after having had it, I don't think I'd be too eager to try it again. One dessert I've had in China is corn kernels covered in sugar, baked, and pressed into a cake-like thing. Sometimes sprinkles are put on top.

So what can we learn from all this?

1) Despite the fact that China was closed off from the West for a long time, evidence of China's old globalized past still exists.

2) Although we mostly learn about what the Western world imported from China which, in the days of the Silk Road, was a much more developed country than most of the countries it traded with, it must have been importing products from the West, too.

Last night I went to Fox, a pub near campus where a lot of the foreign students at HIT hang out, with a whole bunch of other CET people. I went up to the bar to order, and was grabbed by a Russian student who addressed me in Russian. I told her in Chinese I didn't speak Russian. We then started talking, and she told me she recognized me from a picture one of her friends had taken at the club that a whole bunch of CET students had gone to for Halloween last weekend. Her friends were discussing the photo, and one of them apparently thought I looked Russian. Someone else said I couldn't be, but the first friend kept insisting. After she told me the story I shrugged and said, "Well my family did come to America from Russia, but that was around 100 years ago."

So now I know I look Russian enough to even fool the Russian students. Success!

When one first gets to China, it rapidly becomes apparent that China has some of the worst traffic in the world. Every day, in most major cities, there are terrible traffic jams, and crossing the street can be incredibly dangerous, because the concept of pedestrian rights, as far as I know, doesn't seem to exist.

In my personal experience, though, Harbin has the worst traffic I have ever dealt with in all the cities I have ever been in (and this includes Beijing and Shanghai). The drivers are the most reckless that I know of. I have been in countless cabs where the driver will turn at the last minute to avoid hitting a bus, or a pedestrian. Everyone also seems to drive frighteningly fast around turns. I used to laugh at people who didn't feel safe in Chinese cabs, but now, after taking cabs in Harbin, I can sympathize with them.

Seeing how the drivers here drive, being a pedestrian can be very nerve-wracking indeed. In Beijing I didn't have to deal with cars much because of the numerous footbridges in the city. The drivers in Nanjing and Hohhot were much more relaxed, and in Shanghai the traffic seemed much better controlled. Dangtu was so small that you could cross the street at almost any time without having to look out for cars.

The way most people cross the street in China is to divide their street-corssign up into sections. First you cross the bike lane (which in most cities is separated form the traffic lanes by a narrow strip of sidewalk, and the bikers can sometimes be as aggressive as the drivers), then you cross the street halfway if it's a two-way street. You then cross the second half, the other bike lane, and safely reach other side. Harbin is also the only city I've been in where it's safer to cross when the light is red, since there seem to be less cars then. I have no idea why it's this way, since crossing when the light is red in other cities means almost certain death.

On top of all this, Harbin's streets are an absolute mess due to construction. The city is working on building a subway system, using old tunnels that were built 40, 50, 60 years ago in anticipation of a Soviet attack. This means, though, that large stretches of the main streets have been torn up, making the already terrible traffic conditions even worse, since traffic has to make detours onto narrow side streets, and thus creating terrible bottlenecks. It doesn't help, either, that some of these side streets are in serious need of maintenance, so if you take a bus you will probably be thrown around quite a bit by all the potholes in the road. One of the things that makes me feel better, though, is that although I may lose my balance on the bus quite often, a lot of Chinese passengers have the same problem, too.

I've been in China for just about two months now. Usually by this point, I start having cravings for western food: kosher meat, cheese, sandwiches (and cheese sandwiches), pizza, good coffee, and similar things. These past two weeks, though, I've found myself with a serious hankering for Chinese food, which I guess is fortunate. Most of last week I was craving scrambled eggs with tomatoes over rice, and roasted sweet potatoes. This week I've been craving something even more surprising, which is mantou (steamed bread - basically buns without the filling) with preserved red tofu, which is commonly used as a spread to add flavor to the otherwise bland mantou.

I went to the supermarket today to see if I could find it, but when I looked in the jarred, canned, and preserved food section, al I could find was preserved meats, canned fruits, peanut butter, jelly, and mayonnaise. I ended up buying a jar of mandarin oranges and a can of lychees.

After dinner, I was sitting in my room, eating the mandarin oranges straight out of the jar with a pair of chopsticks, still craving the preserved tofu, and it made me wonder, When did I want to start eating like a little old Chinese man?

Today I went to the Meishi Changlang, a place on campus that's essentially a food court, as usual, to buy dinner. After I ordered my noodles, the people at the next stall, which sells a dish called 大盘鸡 (dapanji, literally translated as big plate chicken), asked me how to say the name of their dish. At first I was a little confused, then one of the guys who works there asked me how to say it in my country's language.

I asked him, "Oh, in English?"

His reply was, "No, in Russian!"

"I can't speak Russian," I told him. "I'm American."

I then went to another stall across the way that sells a mix of Chinese and pseudo-Indian food (Chinese dumplings and a flat pancake with fillings, mostly sweet, that they call parata, though it's actually more like pouri). While I was waiting for my parata, the people who worked there also asked if I was Russian.

Well, now I know I can pretend I'm Russian if I want to. I wonder if I look Russian enough to fool the Russian students? Hm...

I got back from Hohhot last Sunday. I was planning on posting earlier, but I've been ridiculously busy ever since I came back. Midterms start at the end of this week. Anyway, here's what I was up to last week, as well as lots, and lots of pictures to accompany my stories.

( I just want to warn you, if you click this link it might slow down down your computer because I have added a lot of pictures to this post. )

Today it feels like fall has finally come to Harbin. The air is cold and crisp today. It also has that fall smell.

Aside from the fall smell, today the air smelled a particular way that I have only smelled in China. It's probably from all the pollution in the air (although Harbin isn't as polluted as other cities I've been in - unlike in Beijing, Shanghai, or Nanjing, we actually get several days of blue sky in a row and I can clearly see the moon and stars at night). I can't accurately describe how the air smells, but there is a very distinctive undertone of burnt rubber in its scent. I actually love this smell, because during my summer in Beijing the air would often smell like this.

I've finally made it to Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia! The 26-hour train ride wasn't anywhere near as bad as I thought it would be, although it was annoying that our train was 20 minutes late.

The views out the train window were amazing. After the sun went down I got to see one of the most gorgeous, brightest full moons I can ever remember seeing. It was quite fitting, considering we were travelling during the Mid-Autumn Festival, which celebrates the harvest and the full moon. I slept on the train, and when I got up in the morning, I got to see the gorgeous countryside of Inner Mongolia. The train passed rolling hills covered with yellow-green grass, fast expanses of unimaginably flat plains, and sand dunes covered with scruffy shrubs. I also saw lots and lots of sheep being herded, along with a fair amount of horses and cows.

Last night I got to see the moon rise, and it was stunningly beautiful. The sun was just beginning to set, and the sky had a large band of pink near the horizon. Because the sun hadn't fully set, the moon wasn't bright yet, but I saw it rise, larger than I had ever seen it, from behind the hills in the distance.

Today Nora (my travel buddy) and I have been wandering Hohhot. It's a pretty standard modern Chinese city. The most noticable difference, though, is that all the shop signs have Mongolian on them, too. The street signs are also different. Most street signs in other Chinese cities have Chinese characters and the pinyin pronunciation underneath the Chinese. Here in Hohhot, the street signs have Mongolian above the Chinese, and sometimes underneath the Chinese, it looks like there is badly-spelled pinyin. I think that the raminization might be closer to the Mongolian pornunciation than the Chinese.

One of the other interesting things I noticed is that last night in our cab to the hotel, and at the hotel restaurant where we were eating dinner, we were asked if we were Russian. I guess Hohhot doesn't get too many American tourists.

Well, that's all for now. After I sign off Nora and I are going to continue our quest for a coffee shop, and then wander around the Old Town.

Last weekend CET took us all on an overnight trip to Dandong, in Liaoning Province. Dandong is a very small city, but its main attraction is that it's right across the Yalu River from North Korea. I not only realized that this is probably the closest I will ever be to North Korea in my entire life, but also looking across the Yalu River at North Korea, I realized that international borders, which seem so set in stone when you look at a map, actually seem quite arbitrary in real life. Although a river is a pretty good natural border, parts of the Yalu were quite narrow, and most of the sections we walked down were narrower then the Hudson separating Manhattan from New Jersey - and that's only a different state. I was constantly amazed that I could be so close to a country with a totally different language, history, and different relationship with America.

I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting when I looked across the river at North Korea, but I didn't expect it to be so pretty.

Our first day at Dandong, we walked down a half-bridge on the Yalu (it used to be a whole bridge, but I think it got bombed by the Americans during the Korean war, and no one bothered to rebuild the North Korean side), and I saw this:





At the end of the bridge, there was a sign in Chinese asking you not to cross that point, so of course I had to have a picture taken of me pretending to cross the line.



On one of our last days in Dandong, we took a boat cruise down the Yalu. If I looked straight down the river my peripheral vision felt slightly lopsided, because the Chinese side of the river was all built up, with luxury high rise apartment buildings that probably had gorgeous river views, and the North Korean side was barely developed. I could see a few factory smokestacks, a dock, and a ferris wheel. It was a huge difference.

This is the Chinese side:



This is the North Korean side:



When that North Korean tugboat passed our boat, we all yelled and waved at the people on it, and were absolutely delighted when they waved back.

Unfortunately I don't have a picture of it, but at night the entire Dandong riverfront is lit up in brilliant colors. All the riverfront apartment buildings light up blue, white, red, and green. One building has a revolving beam of green light at the top, which is strong enough to get beamed right into North Korea. It seems pretty obvious that the residents of Dandong want to show their superiority over North Korea.

I took many, many pictures of Dandong, North Korea, our hike up Hutanggou Mountain, a Manchurian performance, and the absolutely gorgeous Liaoning countryside. Unfortunately I don't think I have the space to put it all in one post, so if you want to check out more of my photos, you can look at them on my Photobucket account at http://s7.photobucket.com/albums/y277/MrsTehDepness/

On a side note, our fall break started this weekend. I'm going to be spending my break in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. My train leaves at 4:30 this afternoon. Hopefully I'll have a chance to get to an internet bar and check my email, but I can't be sure at this point.

National Day was pretty quiet in Harbin, but it was a huge deal in Beijing. There was a parade in front of Tiananmen Square that went down the main street. The parade was broadcast on several TV channels (all CCTV, of course). It lasted at least 1 1/2 hours. When I turned on the TV around 10:30, the parade had already started, and Hu Jintao was in a car driving down the main street (whose name embarrassingly escapes me right now) officially greeting everyone with, "Hello, comrades! Hello, friends! Hello, classmates!" to which everyone was responding.

I took several photos of the parade. Unfortunately they're not of the best quality because I was taking pictures of my TV screen, and there was a bit of glare from the window.

Hu opened with a speech. He gave the speech ifrom one of the balconies in the Forbidden City that overlooks Tiananmen Square, in the same place where Mao, 60 years before, declared the People's Republic of China. I couldn't understand it all, but I understood a few vocabulary words here and there, like, "economy," "development," "Reform and Opening Up." One sentence I understood, which I found to be really interesting, was when he said that the Reform and Opening Up of China was important in the development of Marx's ideas. Personally that doesn't make sense to me at all. After the Reform and Opening Up, didn't China become more capitalist and start moving away from Marx's fundamental ideas? Also, it was interesting that he said Marx and not Mao, who is usually the one whose ideas and teachings are preached.


After Hu's speech, soldiers from different devisions in the Chinese army, navy, and air force, all marched in groups, each group saluting all the officials standing at the forbidden city.

The parade was carried out on, I think, a much grander scale than the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics. Each of these squares or bands of color you see here is made up of a few thousand people, even the huge "1949."

There were also more rainbows here than in gay pride parade. I don't know what it is with the Chinese and rainbows, but they obviously carry a different significance than they do in America.


To give you a sense of the immense scale of the parade, you can see everyone in it, as well as the main street, Tiananmen Square (here completely covered with the floral pattern, which, by the way, is made only of people, each holding a colored card or piece of fabric), and the Forbidden City.


They had a whole series of floats, too, in different... I guess you would call them categories.

One of the categories was floats representing different areas of China's development. One of my favorites was the scientific development float.


They also had floats of important CCP leaders. They marched with enormous portraits of the leaders, and followed them with gigantic slogans.

Of course they had Mao.


They also had Deng Xiaoping.


The slogan following his portrait was the only one I understood. It says, "Persist in Deng Xiaoping's theory."


After the leaders the the development floats, they had dancers marching, dressed in the costumes of the 56 ethnic groups of China.



One of the last bits of the parade was a series of floats, each representing one of the provinces in China. I took photos of some of my favorite provinces, like:

Inner Mongolia, which I thought was fabulously over the top


Heilongjiang, where I am now


Shanghai, which, judging by its float, can't wait for the 2010 World Expo


Jiangsu, where I was this summer


Tibet


Xinjiang, which was not what I expected. After everything that happened there this summer, though, I wasn't sure what to expect with the Xinjiang float at all. It was happy and peaceful.


They also had a float for Taiwan, which struck me as a little odd. I know that there has been a long tension with Taiwan, mostly because China sees Taiwan as a province, and Taiwan sees itself as a separate country. It made me wonder who was on that float, then. Were those actual Taiwanese on the float? Were the Taiwanese happy as being represented as a float for another province in the National Day parade in Beijing?


To see clearer pictures of the floats, you can go here:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/01/content_12159832.htm

To find see more photos from the parade, you can go here:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/01/content_12158374.htm

Happy National Day!


Once my camera is finished charging I'll write up a post about watching the televised parade in Beijing.

And of you're feeling patriotic enough to hear the Chinese national anthem, click on the link below:

http://dt.jxwmw.cn/Home/jxsjaxwmb8442326/UpFile/2009-8/31/20098311372938.mp3