Day 2 - Journey to the North

If you ask any of the Chinese about famous Chinese books there are four they'll always name, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Outlaws of the Marsh, Dreams of the Red Chamber, and Journey to the West. Journey to the West is maybe the most famous of them. Dave's read some of it and he confirms that like most ancient literature it's basically just boring. I thought a little about it as I was going North. By then end I'll have taken trains, planes, and buses from the bottom of Vietnam to the top of China a journey of some 5,000km about the distance of traveling across the continental United States twice. As I've gotten older I've become more of a life is a journey sort of person. When I started college I had a really strong idea of where I wanted my life to go. As I went on that failed and melted away and I was left for a long time with this sense of trepidation about the future and what I was going to do. But after a while I started to worry a lot less about what I was going to do in five years and focus a lot more about what I was doing at the moment. The trip is mush more about going then where I go. Which was especially helpful since I had essentially no idea where I was going for most of the trip.

Sleeping on the train wasn't easy even though the beds were OK. The train rocked and rolled constantly and every once in a while it would stop either at a station or just randomly in the middle of the night. On the first day the train stopped at what was definitly not a station for around half an hour at about 12:30. I began to wonder if it was just nap time and the conductor was asleep. In China people love to take a nap around noon. My students will rush through lunch so that they can go back to their rooms and take a nap. The train thought actually had a ton of people on it who were constantly coming and going. They would act as porters, or ticket takers, or cleaners, or just general handymen. I haven't taken an Amtrak train for very long but I rarely seen anyone but the person who checks my ticket, but on this train I saw maybe a dozen people running around checking on everything. Trying to sleep with all the starting and stopping was hard. At maybe seven or eight am the family got up and had some breakfast though they tried to be quite. I feel back to sleep a few times but it was pretty uneven. Ken on the other hand slept like the dead and didn't stir until around 11:30 which sort of trapped me on the bunk above him.

This is not to say that the soft sleeper was uncomfortable. Actually spending time there and just relaxing and having fun was a trip onto itself. On a plane or bus you're sort of trapped, squished in sitting up. But on a sleeper you have space to move around and do different stuff. Besides reading and the hours me and Ken spent playing cards sometimes I would just look out the window for a while and watch the countryside roll by. Ken pointed out that besides the fact that they were probably growing rice what we could see of the countryside looked sort of like Kansas or Iowa. I saw endless fields marked with little rows and a few scattered houses. The further north we got the more snow I saw on the ground but at most there was little more then a sprinkling. I knew I was in China though since every time we pulled into a station it would be some enormous but small and unknown Chinese city. Chin just doesn't seem to do small cities, they either do 10 people or 10 million.

We had to take the train for most of the day only arriving in Harbin after nightfall. The nice family in the beds across form us departed about an hour or two before we finally reached Harbin. I put on my sweatshirt and really heavy coast getting ready for the extreme cold of the far north. About 15 minutes before we actually arrived all the Chinese people on the train were suited up, packed up, and standing in line ready to get off the train. We waited for them to leave passing up the entirely culturally appropriate choice of shoving our way through so we could be off 20 seconds earlier. Once off the train even with my heavy jacket, hat, and gloves the cold cut right through me. My legs were so cold it almost felt like I wasn't wearing pants at all. Me and Ken met up with Dave and found our way out of the train station. In China you have to have your ticket to exit the train station and for a moment I thought that I had lost mine but I eventually found it in an extra pocket right next to a lost Washington DC Metro pass. Outside it was even colder and very loud with the class of a hundred taxi people looking for a fare. They must have had to stand some distance back since there was a line on the ground they weren't crossing. In China to keep a person from his money they must have had some really stiff penalty to keep them back.

The first thing you have to do on a trip anywhere in China is to buy the ticket to the next place you are going. It took a while to find what section of the train station is supposed to be for selling tickets. We eventually found it and got some tickets for Jilin, the next city we were going to. The Chinese usually line up but some people love to cut to the front of the line and shove their money in to the ticket seller. But the Harbin train station had one way rotating gates so you couldn't cut right up to the front. It provided a lot of entertainment to watch the line cutter try to get around the device, fail, and just stand there confused. After we got the tickets we found a taxi to the hotel. The hotel, which we had found on the internet, was pretty nice with soft beds and nice showers. The problem was that the shower and toilet area was separated from the room by a panel of tinted glass, which would have been OK except that the name of the hotel was written in clear glass so that in Ken's room you could see right into the shower and in my room you could see someone on the toilet.

After we got settled in the room we went out to a place that was recommended by Lonely Planet. They usually have pretty good food recommendations and this was no exception, the place had some sort of big pancake thing which you put various meats and vegetables you ordered in. The food was really good and we stayed until about nine so we basically close the restaurant. After dinner we went walking along one of the main tourists streets in Harbin. I brought my long underwear which was a good choice since my legs were quite cold even with it on. In the US long underwear always annoyed me enough that I never wore them but in Harbin it was cold enough to make me really appreciate the extra warmth. Harbin is famous for its ice festival which takes several forms throughout the city. On almost every corner the lights are encased in big blocks of ice and there are ice and snow sculptures everywhere. The ones on the street we walked down were ice carving about seven or eight feet high of various things. There was an angel, a bull, a little boy peeing a la the Mannequin Pis in Brussels, and my favorite a piano that actually played. We walked down this road until we came to what the guide book described as the "Flood Control Monument." Beyond that were some various big ice rides. We came up to a big construct made of ice with steps up and a long slide down onto a frozen lake with sides made of ice so you didn't slow down or fall off. They wanted 10 RMB a person but Ken and Dave were able to negotiate two runs a person for the price. On top they gave me a little sled like device. It looked pretty steep but at first I wasn't going that fast. After a few seconds it started to pick up and actually went quite fast by the end. After one run I challenged Dave and Ken to race back to the slide. I thought I would win since they would run too recklessly and fall, but I was the only one to fall. One Chinese person yelled "jai you" or "add gas" as I ran by.