Shanghai Bob

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.

Placeholder for photos from Manny’s niece’s camera.

I had a good time in Makati with Manny, but I’ll never schedule another trip over the Easter weekend — everything was shut down!  Things picked up after the weekend, and I got to see Manny’s family’s new house in Angeles City.

Thanks, Manny!

I left Germany on Friday the 13th and arrived in Shanghai on Valentine’s Day, February 14th.  I had a great time in Freiburg and am looking forward to spending some more time there this summer.  Thanks, Imme!

I am staying in the same windowless hotel I stayed in during my reconnaissance mission, only this time they are replacing the sidewalks:  both sides of the street at the same time so that workers, construction equipment, cement trucks, cars, scooters and pedestrians all compete for a lane!

I took the train today from Paris Est to Freiburg through Basel.

Check out these photos of riot police storming burning streets.  Did I fly to Iraq?  Gaza?  Nope, I stayed in Paris.  The one thing missing from my Museum of Old Paris was a strike leading to a riot, and the French populace kindly provided one for my Thursday evening’s entertainment.  Strikers filled the Place de l’Opéra wearing signs saying Rêve Générale (a play on the word for “strike”, grève) and shouting “Down with Sarkozy”.

A girl with a camera was making the riot police grin and blush while it was still daylight, but as soon as it got dark, the crowd started burning things, breaking things, and throwing things.  I saw several people (standing right next to me!) throw Molotov Cocktails into green rubbish bins, which exploded and burned.  I saw two guys take advantage of the disorder to have some fun trying to smash a glass telephone booth with flying kicks.  They were easily dissuaded — a bystander tutted at them and they sloped off.

I saw the police in riot gear beat the crowd back the length of the boulevard, then some of them came back to shoo me away as the crowd flung broken pieces of furniture and bottles.

I spent my first day in Paris at the Louvre, the second day walking to the Eiffel Tower and back, and the third day in the Musée d’Orsay looking at a special exhibition of masks.  On Wednesday I ate wild boar (sanglier — just like Asterix and Obelisk!) at a place called Aux Lyonnais, sitting next to two Japanese men over on business from Tokyo.  They couldn’t read the menu, so I helped.  They were afraid of the complicated a la carte items so stuck to the prix fixe menu, which required only binary decisions translated from French into Japanese (Cold cuts or soup?  Blood sausage or crayfish?).  Some of the offerings were a challenge to my Japanese vocabulary (What’s wild boar in Japanese?  I don’t know.)  I thought offering to help was a good way of letting them know their conversation was not as private as they might otherwise assume it should be with only a couple of gaijin nearby.

It was a good meal for a cold night, but not as good as the classic steak and fries I had at La Bourse ou la Vie (”Your Money or Your Life” — the French name is a pun on the restaurant’s location near the Bourse).  That was so good I went back again two days later.  I also made time for flan, lemon tarts, and “chocolate nuns”, a kind of snowman-shaped eclair.