Shanghai Bob

I flew to Singapore on the 18th, returning on the 23rd.  I stayed in Little India, across from Mustafa Center, near Nelson’s new apartment.  I was really happy to be able to eat my lunches at the vegetarian restaurants after so much meat in DongBei.

I got to see Nelson and his family.  His place has a great pool, a bowling alley and an in-house karaoke room.  I tried out the first two.

The trip was well-timed, since Cathal and Tibor were in Singapore for work.  I saw a bunch of other former colleagues, including a group of six or seven who walked in while we were sitting in the Long Bar at Raffles Hotel.  Running into people you know is a feature of Singapore, I hear.

We went to Clark and Boat Quay, to the Stamford Hotel for the view, had chili crab at a place called No Signboard, and went to the aviary, where we heard a parrot count to ten in Chinese, and then in English with a Chinese accent.

Singapore is a sweaty place, but there’s plenty of air conditioning to make it tolerable.  The thing that most impressed me is how much faith the government has in the power of economic incentives.  The complicated taxi pricing, tolls for busy roads, and threats of fines seem heavy-handed, but the result is a cleaner, more civilized city than Shanghai.

When we arrived home, we had to sit in the airplane while a crew went through pointing a gun at everyone’s head to take their temperature.

We were glad when the Quarantion Authomites finally cleared us to disembark.

Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan trips are coming up, and Li LiYan has been helping with the bookings, so most of the flights are on Air China.  Here’s the logo:

I can tell that it’s a phoenix, but what I needed Wikipedia to point out is that the curves spell VIP.  What Wikipedia didn’t mention, but what I think is nevertheless true, is that this phoenix is also a stylized version of the character fēi 飞, which means to fly.

Haerbin is famous for having a standard Chinese accent.  Between that and the fact that almost no one speaks English, I think you could learn Chinese really quickly here.  The Korean signs disappear by the time you get to Haerbin, but Russian is everywhere.  Haerbin was originally a Russian settlement, as the cathedral attests:

Dragon bollards for when you really want to discourage people from parking on the sidewalk:

One night we were just walking down the street when two guys pulled their car over to practice English with us.  One was an English teacher at the local high school, the other taught gym.  We chatted with them for about five minutes.  He wanted to know if I thought Haerbin was better than the US.  I said I thought Haerbin was great, and didn’t mention that parts of it looked a little post-apocalyptic with downed power lines blocking the streets:

Continuing our meat-eating adventures, we went to a local restaurant that served fried ham hocks and other pork parts.  I believe we were the only foreigners ever to eat in this restaurant — every single person stopped talking and stared at us as we walked to our table.  It’s a big place too, at least a hundred customers.  All of them were intensely curious.

This is one of our plates of fried pork.  They give you a straw to suck the marrow out of the bones.  I normally try everything, but I couldn’t bring myself to drink marrow that night.

We found the local club called “D+ kiss”, and a “DJ Friday’s”:

We took the train from Jilin Province to HeiLongJiang Province, destination Haerbin.

The trip was fairly comfortable even though the bunks are too short for anyone over six feet.  It was also fairly quiet, until our fellow travelers woke up in the morning and started a chorus of hacking and spitting.

I was having trouble remembering how to pronounce HeiLongJiang until I saw it written in Chinese characters:  it means “Black Dragon River”, and I know all those words.  This is the first time that Chinese characters made it easier for me to learn something.

To pass the time at the beginning of the trip, we tried to memorize the Chinese zodiac in order:  Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig.

Apparently people crossing the border from Russia or North Korea want to buy the following things as souvenirs:

• AK-47 brand vodka
• Matryoshka dolls (Russian nesting dolls)
• “Fighting” knives
• Fur-lined hats
• Playing cards with naked women on the back

Hunchun borders North Korea and Russia, and those are the main tourist attractions. Here’s me returning from my trip to Russia:

At the North Korean border, they wouldn’t let us take pictures.  At the observation point on the China side, they told us that pictures are OK if you’re not a foreigner or in a group containing foreigners.  Some of the guards seemed embarrassed to say this, but others played up the fact that we were at a “military installation”.

Here’s the view from the military installation with Russia to the left of the road, North Korea to the right of the river, and China in the triangle in between:

Hunchun has over 300,000 people, but there are no Starbucks, McDonalds’, KFC’s or any other fast-food or convenience food chains.  All the signs are in Chinese, Korean, and Russian.  Everywhere we went people spoke to us in Russian.  At the karaoke place, the first song they put in was Korobeiniki, the song I think of as “Tetris music”.

There are lots of taxis in Hunchun, and they honk at foreigners.  I walked a little over two miles to a Russian cake shop, and I don’t think ten seconds went by without a cab honking at me.

The night we arrived, Li LiYan’s family made us a feast with fish, chicken, and pork, an animal from each of the realms.  For breakfast the next morning we had meat dumplings.  For dinner we had barbecue, like DIY kushiyaki.  The only non-meat dishes were kimchi, and what I found at the cake shop.

We flew on from Qingdao to Hunchun.  I don’t know anyone else who has been there.  Although it was hot and sticky in Shanghai when we left, it was rainy and freezing in Hunchun, like winter in the middle of summer.

Li LiYan’s father picked us up in this truck, also reminiscent of Montana:

The ride into Hunchun from the airport took about about two hours, so it was dark by the time we got there.  Before we arrived but after the sun set, a man leapt in front of the car on the highway.  We narrowly avoided him — it really looked like he was trying to get run over.

The plane to Hunchun had a layover at Qingdao in Shandong Province.  You can buy Tsingtao beer there for less than a buck.  We bought two to commemorate the trip.

We didn’t leave the airport because we had less than two hours before our plane left, but the view of the mountains from the airport window was pretty spectacular.  Qingdao might be the Montana of China.

Today I am traveling to Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces, near the Russian and North Korean borders.  Chinese people say that the outline of China on a map looks like a chicken; I am going to visit the comb and the beak.