Day 3 - Cities of Ice

Dave's a morning person, his bed time was 8:30 until he was 14, but me and Ken both enjoy sleeping in more so the next day we didn't really get up until 11:30 or so. We looked in the guide book and saw that Harbin had some sort of Siberian Tiger park on the outskirts of town. Dave saw that there was some way of getting there there by taking a taxi to a bus then to some final shuttle so we flagged down a taxi. Out taxi driver was just delighted to have us there. He kept looking over at Dave's guide book as we drove along. After a while he took it from Dace and was flipping through pages at stop lights. He started asking how to pronounce different English words. He wrote a lot of them down with phonetic pronunciations in Chinese characters. We noticed after a while that he driving really slow but had also just stopped the meter. I suggested to Dave that we ask if he would just bring us to the Tiger Park since we seemed to be getting a free ride.

He said he had a "brother," the Chinese use brother to indicate any friend or relative of about the same age, who would drive us to the Tiger Park, wait for us, and drive us back for 100 RMB. We weren't really sure how to get there or how much it was going to cost us so we agreed. Our taxi driver then drove us over to the side of the road same where while we waited for his "brother" to get there. As we waited he asked about a bunch more English words until we were basically having a mini English lesson. After about 15 minutes of siting there and teaching English on the side of some random road in Harbin the other taxi finally arrived. He said we didn't have to pay the 12 RMB on his meter and even gave Dave a Chinese friendship knot, which is this little red knotted rope that people hang from walls and on things like rear view mirrors. The next cab driver was not nearly so talkative but did faithfully wait for us as we went to the Tiger Park. I just don't know how I'm going to get sued to being back in America where people aren't just so interested in me or where speaking English is not only a job skill but a highly in demand skill.

The Siberian Tiger Park didn't look like much from the outside. It was just a booth charging about 65 RMB but with a list of animals you could but to presumably feed to a tiger. A chicken was 20, a duck 40, and a cow was 2000 RMB. I wanted to see it eat something but wasn't sure if I should buy it there or wait. They gave us tickets but no clear directions as to where to go. We followed the crowd, always a winning strategy in China, and proceeded onto a little but. We go on last since we were not nearly as good at pushing and shoving as the Chinese. I'm not exactly a slouch at these things either. I was in St. Peter's square, at the Vatican in Rome, on Easter and was able to push and finesse my way close enough to get communion. But the Chinese take pushing and jostling to a new level. They push and shove on and off trains even though they all have assigned seats. We went to the back if the bus, which for some reason is always the last place to fill up. We went rumbling into the park along these dirt roads that went everywhere. The park was made up of a number of enclosures each big enough for a bus to drive around in for a while with some trees and piles of rocks above a snow covered ground. At the first few enclosures we just drove around, which was still pretty interesting though.

There were a lot of Tigers. Judging from the number we saw plus the huge amount of cages there must have been more than 100. The tigers were huge and it was amazing to see the massive animals just wandering around everywhere. I thought the first few we saw must have been especially big but all the dozens we saw were just as big. We never saw any smaller ones or cubs which suggests that they must have had them inside the cages. I've seen tigers before at the Zoo, but never this many or this close. They would wander right up to the bus and take a look. They kept some distance though since the bus didn't exactly slow down when they wandered past. We were just sitting by a little half window in the back which Ken opened eliciting a lot of nervious cries from the Chinese people on the bus. It was very cool to see these huge tigers and I started regretting not getting a chicken to throw at them. At one gate the bus followed a tiger around for a bit just honking at it and driving up to it. Not exactly the sort of behavior that would be accepted at a US Zoo but fun never the less. The US has a lot of hang ups about treating animals like people. China likes animals too, I think it's a pretty serious crime to hurt a panda, but they don't treat them like people.

We drove around for a little while until suddenly these cars appeared covered in thick metal grating all over their entire body. As soon as they showed up the pretty docile tigers sprang into action following them around. A few other buses showed up and we sort of made a semi circle around the cars. Suddenly one of the cars stopped so that all the tigers were on one side of the car. Then a door on the other side was flung open a chicken was thrown out and the door slammed again. The Chicken was out for maybe two seconds when a tiger came leaping over the car and grabbed the chicken in its teeth. They would drive around a little more then stop and throw out another animal, usually a chicken but sometimes a flightless duck. I got one good series of pictures of a chicken coming to rest of the top of a car only to have a tiger leap up, eat it, then sit onto he top of the car refusing to get off even as the car drove around for a while. They feed animals at the Zoos in America but not quite as spectacularly. I got this video of the tiger on top of the car being driven around:



We drove around for a little while longer until we stopped again by the car. This time they drove around faster so that they were sure all the tigers were well on one side of the car and then popped open the door and push a goat out. The goat looked around confused for about six seconds until about eight tigers plunged their teeth and claws into him some literally leaping over the car to get after their prey. They pulled on the goat sort of fighting over it for a while. After a period one tiger would become dominant and hold most of the goat but the bus would then beep and drive up to it forcing the tigers to start over. After a while they retired well away from the road with what was left of the goat. Seeing a tiger eat a goat could be a cool metaphor for the power of nature or something but mostly it was just really cool. Traveling can have a lot of fun parts, there are nice museums and temples and what not, but the most fun tends to come from the unique stuff, the things one place has that no where else has, and I have to tell you, seeing a tiger eat a goat is pretty damn unique.

After a while we got off the bus and there was a part you could walk through that looked down on some more tigers. There was a woman selling meat you could feed to the tigers who as an example put some down through the bars to them with a pair of tongs. One big tiger jumped up and grabbed it through the grating. Ken noticed there was some meat left on the grating and tried to poke it down to them putting him fingers at pretty grave risk. The Chinese woman jumped over to him waving him away. With the amount of crazy shit they do in China if a Chinese person is so sure you're putting your life in unacceptable risk you must really be doing something crazy. We walked out of the rest of the park. There were supposed to be some white tigers somewhere but we never saw them. We asked the driver to take us back to the hotel, and from there we went to a really close hot pot place. At a hot pot place they bring over a big pan with a circle of boiling water with sauce and some vegetables in it. You then order other meats and vegetables which you cook by putting in the pot for a while then eating them out of the pot. It's not that hard if you just remember to put in one sort of meat at a time so you can remember how long everything's been cooking.

This place wasn't so great and we didn't really order enough meat. I was pretty chilled but it was warm enough that I took off mt coat and put it on the back of the chair. This horrified the waiter who pointed out that it was touching the floor, the floor in China can be pretty gross, but they really go to great lengths to avoid having any clothing touch the floor or, God forbid, sitting on the floor. I flummoxed them even more when I refused to have a red thing put over my coat to keep it clean or maybe just because they like red. But the oddest moment of my time at the restaurant came when I went to the bathroom. The bathroom had a squat toilet, like all public toilets, but I only had to pee so I just walked in and closed the door not bothering with the tricky lock. After one second someone walked in, mumbled something in Chinese, and walked out, which was fine, but as I was finishing someone walked in said something in Chinese then walked up besides me like he wanted to take a piss at the same time. There wasn't exactly a lot of room in there either so he had to squeeze past me. I just gave him a weird look then left pretty quickly. I don't know exactly what was going on in there, but even as little as the Chinese value personal space two people shouldn't be peeing in time same toilet at the same time. Also if that was some weird way of making a pass even that was pretty odd.

It was already dark by then and we wanted to go to this huge ice display we had seen near the tiger park. It was so big you could see the tops of all the ice buildings clearly from the highway. This wasn't the main festival the book talked about but it seemed a lot bigger so we decided to go. Dave wanted to take a bus part of the way there to save some money so we waited at a bus stop for quite a while next to some Harbin person who wasn't even wearing a hat as the temperature dipped. It was about -25 degrees Celsius, which is pretty close to -25 Fahrenheit. It was so cold even the temperatures were getting screwy. We got a bus eventually and rode it for about 30 minutes. The windows were so iced and fogged up that we had no real idea where we were going. After we got off the bus we flagged down a cab driven by the toughest looking person I've seen in China. He had a scared and pot marked face, a mean stare, and for most of the ride didn't say a single word. He had his window half opened to the cold but everyone was too afraid of him to say much. Eventually we came to what looked like the entrance to the parking lot for the festival. There were a few cars who seemed to be lined up to pay some toll on one side and an exit on the other side. All of a sudden our driver simply gunned it and drove through the exit. We all started laughing and he turned back and said something in Chinese to the effect of, "They were going to make me pay."

The tickets for the festival were 150 RMB but there was a 75 RMB discount for students. Ken and Dave were able to get the discount with some grumbling with their international student cards they had to get through STA, their travel agent. There was a lady behind me who was clearly trying to squeeze past me but I had here pretty well boxed out. I gave her my University of Wisconsin ID, which conveniently doesn't have an expiration date. She looked mad and yelled something at me in Chinese. I protested pointed to it and said student again in Chinese. The woman behind me growing more impatient by the second was now shoving all of her money over my shoulder to the ticket counter. The woman there, probably sick of me saying student, took her money and sold her about 10 tickets. Finally I gave in and pushed 200 RMB through the window to which the woman pushed one back. Some how despite all the anger I was getting the student discount. sometimes I just have no idea what is going on.

The ice festival itself was amazing, there were probably 20 huge structures made from big two foot by one foot blocks of clear ice. The buildings were as much as 30 or 40 feet high in the shapes of churches and other famous buildings. They were all lit by neon lights embedded in the ice. Each huge building was lit a different color, some even changed color. There were a number of ice slides down these building, which were mostly made for children, but which Ken and Dave enjoyed immensely. There were also other things made of ice, like a huge Pagoda and a big beer bottle with the label of a local Harbin beer. There were also huge sculptures made of snow including a big Hindu symbol that people burned incense to and a even version of the Bird's Nest, the Beijing Olympic Stadium. They had all sorts of other things there you could pay more money for also. It was bitterly cold out and they had a few indoor parts where you could pay outrageous prices for things like milk tea, a drink sort of like hot chocolate, which I bought to spend some time out of the cold. They had other odder things too, like a camel ride which lasted about eight seconds and just went around in a small loop. Mostly though the sheer size and scope of that many buildings made of ice was hard to take in.



We left eventually as most people were starting to leave. We were pretty far from out hotel so we needed a taxi. We thought about 30-40 RMB would be a good price to pay. The first few people quoted a number way higher and said they had to pay a toll to get in. We turned down so many people some one got to 40 RMB eventually but we turned him down for a metered cab. In the end the meter came to 44. The cab may have take the long way as that number still seemed high but still it was impressive that we negotiated down to near the actual price.