Shanghai Bob

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”:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 10:10 am and is filed under china, travel.