Shanghai Bob

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.

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.

The Shanghai Museum is free, and I’ve been taking advantage of it to go during the week and just see one room at a time.  Coins, pottery, bronzes, jade.  It’s much more fun to take some time to look at one batch of objects than to try to see everything in two hours (my limit before I get tired of shuffling around).

This is the jade I liked best, it looks like a little Ebisu-sama, the Japanese god of wealth who is always depicted with a fish:

If you go to the Shanghai Museum and a young couple or a group of students asks you to take their picture in front of the museum, you might want to say no.  Since I was going every day for a while, I got asked regularly and noticed the same people — who needs that many pictures of themselves?  I searched for “people’s park scam” and found many reports of students inviting foreigners to tea, then asking them to pay the inflated bill, claiming to be poor students.

It feels rude to decline to take a photo, but the last day before I read up on this, I took four photos on my way through the park.  No big deal if you’re only going once, but tedious if you’re going regularly.

Well, it’s not just Chinese people who talk about foreigners thinking they can’t understand.  I got into the elevator here in my apartment building and saw a couple already in there.  As I got on, the guy started saying to his wife, in Japanese,  ”Wow, look at him, he’s really big.  Look how big he is!”  After a few floors of this, I said, also in Japanese, “Be careful, I can understand you.”  He was surprised enough to blurt, “あれ?!”.  His wife didn’t seem surprised (there are lots of expats in my building); she poked him in the stomach as a kind of reproach.

Andrew’s friend Tats and his girlfriend were here from Tokyo, so we took a day trip to Tongli, a canal town not far from Shanghai.

The best part was the canal tour.  The guy let me steer/paddle for a while, but those photos are on Tat’s camera.

One woman on the canal had several trained fishing cormorants with strings tied around their throats.  I wish I had been able to get a picture.

Some of the Japanese students arranged a cherry blossom picnic in the Botanical Gardens.  One of the students also had a birthday, so we got him a cake.

The cherry blossoms were pretty spectacular.  You can see them here with acrobats:

There were several interesting characters hanging around to scavenge our cans and bottles (and sometimes take ones that weren’t empty):

These sculptures just appeared in the courtyard of the mall I walk through to get to the subway.  Children playing checkers, a woman on a cell phone, a boy playing with a paper airplane (I thought it was too corny, but I saw a Chinese girl lean up against this one and give it a kiss), a guy kissing a girl on a bike (you’d think that would be too risque for China), and this one of a guy pretending to play the saxophone:

How do I know he’s just pretending?  The hands are switched and the sax is on the wrong side of his body.  It’s like the sculptor was working from a mirror image.