Harbin: Part II

The day started off with great promise. I walked out into the shockingly cold air only to run smack into a tiny little man wearing a military army coat and yelling about the potatoes he had for sale. Now, there wouldn't really be anything unusual about this event (pretty standard for China), but I noticed that this man had a distinguishing facial feature. Well, facial feature is a stretch I guess - this man has snot frozen right on his face. It's cold out!!!

My day was one of ups and downs (note: I consider this man's frozen snot a definite up, I laughed about that for a good 15 minutes). Things started out with a trip to Harbin's New Synagogue where I learned all about the 20,000 jews who moved to Harbin around the turn of the century and basically turned it into the bustling industrial city that it is today. The museum was pretty cool and it had a definitive Chinese flavor (besides the obvious misspellings and the like). The main focus of the museum seemed to be three-fold:
(1) Chinese people are awesome for welcoming the Jews into China
(2) The Jews who moved to Harbin are amazing for building industry
(3) Jews are very smart and are particularly good at playing musical instruments. Another interesting point of note, I had the museum all to myself (apparently the old synagogue/museum is not a huge tourist destination). Oh, I was also able to pass off my Dwight School teacher's ID card as a student ID and got into the museum for free :)

After the synagogue/museum I decided to check out the famous church and square in the area. Tour of the religions so far... Anyways, the square was pretty sweet and the church looked cool (made for some good photo ops). Everything in the area was aritecturely VERY Russian - beautiful stone building, onion domes galore, etc... The other amusing thing about the church is that it was blasting bad pop music at high volume from big amps throughout the whole square. There is only one explanation - Chinese associate Christianity with America and America with Britney Spears. On my trek over to the church I also learned a valuable lesson about navigating Harbin - go underground whenever possible. There are blocks and blocks of subterrean malls all over the place (probably because its too cold to walk around above ground) that make for a very convenient and down-right pleasant way to walk around town.

Ok, one negative note: Lonely Planet's entry on Harbin sucks. It is out-dated and pretty poorly done to begin with... Many of the restaurants listed are no longer in existence and directions to other places that do exist are just wrong. Bah. Usually I have nothing but praise for Lonely Planet, but not here...

I'm writing an awful lot in this entry, so I'm going to wind things up a little bit quicker. I spent the rest of the day wandering around a beautiful walking street in downtown Harbin, Stalin Park by the river, and Zhaoling Park which was also nearby. The whole area was filled with tons of beautifully carved ice sculptures. Highlights include:

(1) all of the ice-related activities in Stalin Park (picture dog-sleds pulling tourists around on the ice, sleds and luges for racing down man-made mountains, weird sleds with metal poles for people to use
(2) the "Russian goods" stores that sold only vodka, Russian dolls, chocolate, and army surplus
(3) CHUANR. I think I ate at least a dozen chuanr today. Harbin has the delicious meat chuanr and also the candied fruit chuanr. I think I'm addicted...

Here are a couple of things that I've noticed about Harbin (besides the cold):

(1) They rarely use any coin change here. I'm currently carrying around a handful of 1 yuan notes in my wallet. Pain in my butt. My theory is that people don't like the coins because their fingers are so cold that they can't use them to pick out the individual coins.
(2) There is something to the rumor that Dongbeiren are tall. I've noticed that I can't see over most of the crowds over here. Sad, but true.
(3) Girls here wear a lot more make-up than in the rest of China. Maybe because they are super-pale from never seeing the sun? Wait, being pale is good in China... No theories on this one.
(4) They share cabs with complete strangers here. One person will hire a cab and start going to his/her destination. While driving, the cabbie will be on the lookout for more passengers (by that I mean yelling "ni qu nar" out the window at any pedestrians). Anybody going in the same direction just hops in the cab. I've yet to figure out how the payment system is supposed to work, but I have a feeling that people are freeloading off me. Ah well, more power to them I guess.

As a final note, I was traveling today without toilet paper. Consequently, we must mourn the loss of two pages of my book that will never return. After this unfortunate incident I stopped in KFC and picked up enough napkins to last me through the week. The Colonel comes through in the clutch again.

Tomorrow will bring many new adventures I'm sure, but thats it for now!

- Jon