Day 4- Dog Eat Dog World

Lynn is another CIEE person who had at one point come down to Changzhou and gone to Dinosaur Park with Dave and me. She was finishing up her job so she met us a day late in Harbin, having flown in. Immediately she pretty much wanted to do exactly what we had already done. Dave and Ken wanted to get up early and go to the Germ Warfare Museum, about some horrible things the Japanese had done in the area during WWII. I don't like getting up early, and Dave and Ken are annoyingly slow at museums so I decided to go to the ice festival again with Lynn. She had to run some errands in the morning so I slept in. I got up and dressed around 10 but Lynn was running late so I watched some Chinese TV. The Chinese love their historical TV programs. Ever other channel I turned to had some people dressed up in historical costumes arguing about something. They also subtitle a lot of their program in Chinese. At first I couldn't figure out why they did this but it occurred to me that on TV everyone speaks Putonghua, the official version of Chinese, but most people also have their own dialects, and many, especially the elderly, can't even understand Putonghua. So by having it subtitled in Chinese, written Chinese is always the same, everyone can understand it.

Lynn came and we went back over to the ice festival. I got the student discount again, this time without all the arguing. The ice festival was almost deserted during the day, at first when we came up I thought it might be closed. But it was open and it was actually pretty cool to see it again during the day. Even though it was a lot less glamorous without all the neon, seeing everything just as ice gave me a sense of just how big it all really was. The uniform look actually added to the sense of size. It didn't hurt either that it was a lot warmer during the day. After that we went back to the hotel to checkout and collect everyone's bags. We were looking for a dumpling place mentioned in the guide book but the receptionist just pointed us to a place down the street. I thought that was the place from the book at first but later, after checking the book, I'm pretty sure her attitude was just, "close enough." After lunch we needed a taxi to the train station but we must have waited 15 minutes as one taxi after another didn't want to take us there. After we finally got a taxi we saw why, it was a pretty short ride but the traffic by the train station was really bad. The meters tend to work almost only on distance so a short slow ride still has a low fair.

We already had tickets, but it took Ken and Dave a while to find us and we had to go to the farthest gate so we almost missed our train. We were on a five hour train to Jilin, which was supposed to be a good stopping over point for skiing. Hard seats are pretty similar to soft seats except they are a little bit harder and they are in groups of four or six facing each other. Ken had bought a new cell phone, he had broken the old one going down one of the ice slides, from a man with a stand under the street, which meant the odds it fell of a truck are high. He was playing with the ring tones for it and blasting each Chinese song. There's nothing to unusual about this as Chinese people will sit on buses blasting music out of their cell phones oblivious to those around them. If two people in close proximity are playing music they will both just turn theirs up and up without ever acknowledging one another. What made this odd is that it was a bunch of Americans making all the racket. Except for Shanghai everywhere we go people pay a huge amount of attention to us. If we're laughing and talking and carrying on people will turn around and stair at us. We were on a fairly long train ride so the people sitting besides us would come and go. Dave told the people sitting beside us a joke he had learned in Chinese about a Panda who, like almost everyone who heard the joke, smiled at first but seemed completely disinterested by the end:



We arrived in Jilin and looked in the book to find a cheap hotel. There was one pretty close to the train station so we went there. Oddly enough despite the bitter cold the rooms were way too hot. The rooms actually had a double window, but the outer one in my room couldn't be opened since it was frozen solid by about three inches of ice around the base. The guide book recommended a restaurant for its stew. We went over there, the menu being entirely in characters was a little hard to read, but we eventually figured out where the stew was. Dave noticed that dog also featured prominently on the menu. In fact outside the restaurant they had a loud speaker blasting some of the things they had including dog. Dave and Ken decided to try dog, known as something of a delicacy in that region. Dave tried to order what he translated as "assorted dog," but the owner indicated they were out. Dave then just pointed to another thing on the dog section of the menu. What he got was, what it later turned out translated to, "dog hoof," i.e. the legs and paws. The whole thing came on the bone, indeed the main problem with dog seems to be that there is so little meat on the bone.

The dog came in some sort of brown sauce that had the unfortunate look of dog food. The most disgusting part though was that the paws, maybe six in all, were clearly recognizable stripped bare. Eating the feet of any animal is not terribly appetizing. If the feet were the worst part the smell was a close second. While not having an overpowering smell the dog meat did smell distinctly of dog, least you forget what you are eating. All that being said though dog, it turns out, tastes very much like turkey. In fact it's the closest thing to turkey I've had in China. I tried a bite while Dave and Ken gnawed on the bones for a while. In the end they stopped mostly because there was so little meat on the bone. Ken posted about this on his blog and his Aunt, who is a big fan of animals, was really peeved. She wrote him an e-mail bemoaning his eating of "man's best friend" and nothing that "dog is God spelled backwards." It didn't really bother me to eat it, the anthropomorphizing of animals has always struck me as a little silly. The final irony came when Dave asked, in Chinese, for a doggy bag for the rest of the dog. I believe doggy bag is an American term but it translates literally to Chinese as "dog bag." No one ate the leftover dog and we left it in the room.