November 6th in Harbin
Nov 6th
Today is a lot colder than yesterday. The weather office was predicting a cold front would be moving in this weekend from Mongolia. But yesterday was really warm, perhaps even unseasonably warm. I noticed that it was really very foggy all day and I thought, "This looks like a temperature inversion. I bet tomorrow it'll turn really cold." Well, I was right. Last night I saw the first real rain since I've been here. It was coming down pretty good, with lightning flashing too. Then early this morning, as I was walking to my office, I realized that it's below freezing. I saw the first ice on the ground… frozen puddles from last night's rain.
I wanted to put a few words down on paper because I had such an interesting experience yesterday - interesting for me personally anyway. It was one of those "aha" experiences we each have periodically. I remember years ago, when I was living in Munich, trying to learn German. The language seemed to be just an auditory blur… sounds coming at me that I couldn't distinguish. Then, one day, as I was listening to the morning radio, a song came on the radio. It was a very famous song, "Seeman". And, I suddenly realized that I could understand every word of the song. I started to cry out of joy, and I can still recall that day as though it were last week.
Well, yesterday wasn't quite as moving as that, but in its own small way was just as meaningful. I had taken a bus down town, as I often do, and was in a part of town I'd never been in before. I'd decided to visit a temple complex I'd read about but had no experience of. According to my map, it was in the North East part of Harbin, so I jumped on a bus that I thought would get me close. Having found a seat (an unusual feat on a Harbin city bus) I settled in to enjoy the ride. I was following my progress on a map until the bus drove off the edge of the map, so I put it away and just enjoyed the scenery from the window.
We passed a pretty interesting looking building which looked like a kind of mosque, all blue and with a Muslim symbol on the top. So I decided to get off the bus and take a picture. I figured I was pretty close to the temple area anyway, so I figured I could walk the rest of the way.
I pulled out my tourist map, which has the street names written in English, and tried to orient myself by looking around. There was a large branch of a local bank across the street, and after staring at the writing over the door for a couple of seconds, realized that I could read the Pinyin script of the Chinese name of the bank. It read, "South Fourteenth Street Branch". It surprised me that I was able to understand the Chinese words, and pleased me at the same time. I recognized that I was on a street that was on the edge of my map, and that the temple complex must be down the street a way, on the right. So I set off in that direction.
When I got to the corner, I casually looked up at the street sign, hoping to see some English words, which are often written at the bottom of the street signs, and saw that all that was written there were Chinese symbols, so I looked away again, toward the end of the street, looking for some sign of the temple.
Then something clicked in my head, and I looked up at the street sign again. Studying the Chinese characters, I realized that they said, "Fourteenth Street" in Chinese! Not a great realization perhaps, given my location just down the street from the bank. But, for me it was a kind of mini "Munich moment", as I realized that I could actually recognize the street name in Chinese characters. The moment was so meaningful that I stepped back and took a picture of the street sign, thinking I'd keep it as a souvenir of the moment.
Looking at the map again, I saw there were some train tracks I'd need to cross before I got to the temple, and looking up, I saw them in the distance. So I headed that way.
As I approached the tracks, I got my first glimpse of the roof of the temple on the hill above the train tracks. I took a couple of photos of the train and the complex of tracks, with the temple roof in the distance. "This will make a nice shot.", I thought.
Continuing up the hill toward the temple, I was walking on the sidewalk. The usual collection of odd vehicles made their way down the hill and over the railroad bridge, heading back into town from where I'd just come. One of them, a beat up old motor scooter, had some sort of hand-made flatbed contraption built onto the back of it, which was piled high with bits of used construction materials apparently scrounged from a building site. As it got even with me, it hit a bump in the road, and a piece of what looked like pvc tubing went bouncing across the road toward the sidewalk on which I was walking. The next car ran over this piece of tubing, sending it squirting out from under the tire right towards me. I jumped to avoid being hit with this flying plastic missile, and it ricosheed off the curb and back onto the roadway, landing in the middle of the lane.
Looking up the hill again, I noticed coming down the sidewalk toward me, a little old woman, hunched over from the strain of carrying the biggest sack I'd ever seen anyone carry in my life. It was a massive canvas bag, absolutely stuffed full. It was bigger than she was and looked like it weighed a hundred pounds. She scooted off the sidewalk into the middle of the road, dodging the traffic as she went, to retrieve the bit of plastic pipe that now lay there. I said to myself, "What a way to have to make a living, scrounging the streets for odd bits of garbage that you can hopefully turn into a few pennies." I thought of taking a picture of her as she bent over to pick up the pipe, but it seemed a rather perverse invasion of her privacy, so I kept my camera in my pocket and continued up the hill.
After a short walk up the hill, I came upon the temple site itself. It was larger than I expected, with a long pedestrian mall, paved with stones, the length of the entire complex, a distance of perhaps three hundred yards. Along the opposite side of the mall was a row of about thirty shops, obviously catering to temple visitors, selling souvenir statues and carvings of one kind or another. They also sold incense, for people to burn as offerings once they got inside the temples themselves.
After scanning the row of shops, I decided to go into one near the end. While I was preparing to take a photo of the front of the shop, I noticed my camera said, "disk full". This was a shock, since I can normally take about 200 pictures on my flash memory card. But upon opening the back of the camera, I saw that the memory card wasn't there. I'd left it in my office the last time I downloaded my pictures to my hard drive. This was disappointing. I could see the temples were quite impressive. I realized I'd either have to visit the place without taking any pictures, or have to sacrifice the photos I'd already taken that day, including the one of the Fourteenth Street sign. I decided to wait 'till I actually entered the temple complex itself, to decide what to do.
As I was mulling this over, I became aware of someone trying to get my attention. Taking my eyes from the viewfinder, I saw a little old lady, hunched over and reaching out to me. In her scrawny old hand, she held a small tin can containing a few coins, which made a tinkling sound as she shook the can in my direction.
Thinking of the woman I'd seen picking up the pvc pipe, I reached into my pocket to see what money I had. I had a half dozen one yuan notes, worth about fifteen cents each, so I decided to give them to her.
As I began to hand her the notes, I realized someone else was behind me and looking down, saw a fellow sitting awkwardly on some sort of home-made skateboard device, pushing himself along with what looked like a couple of steam irons made of wood. Looking up at me, having left one of his wooden blocks on the ground, he stretched out his hand for some money too.
So, I decided to give the old lady two bills and give another couple to this fellow on the skateboard. No sooner had I made this decision, than appearing from out of thin air, another fellow appeared in from of me showing me his hands, or what were supposed to be hands.
They were nothing more than scrambled bits of bone, skin and knuckles, arranged in some odd dumbbell shaped mass that I only knew were hands, because I could see the odd bit of finger or thumb, sticking out from this mass of scrambled tissue. Both his hands were the same. So I handed him one of the bills and turned away only to find myself face to face with another wrinkled up old gentleman, who thrust his arm into my field of view to show me his wrist, which ended abruptly in a flat, dull stump, with no hand at all.
I said to him, "Sorry… no more money." and turned to finally go into the shop, to escape the growing throng around me. As I turned toward the door of the shop, I noticed another old man sitting near the entrance, who looked like his face had been scalded away with acid, or fire, or disease, or god knows what. His eyes were sealed shut and his hands and face looked like one giant mass of deformed tissue. Having nothing to give him, and unable to look at him any longer, I escaped into the relative sanctuary of the souvenir shop. As the door closed behind me, I turned to notice the old lady with the tin can, and the guy with the scrambled hands arguing loudly over something. Perhaps even beggars and cripples have turf wars.
Today is a lot colder than yesterday. The weather office was predicting a cold front would be moving in this weekend from Mongolia. But yesterday was really warm, perhaps even unseasonably warm. I noticed that it was really very foggy all day and I thought, "This looks like a temperature inversion. I bet tomorrow it'll turn really cold." Well, I was right. Last night I saw the first real rain since I've been here. It was coming down pretty good, with lightning flashing too. Then early this morning, as I was walking to my office, I realized that it's below freezing. I saw the first ice on the ground… frozen puddles from last night's rain.
I wanted to put a few words down on paper because I had such an interesting experience yesterday - interesting for me personally anyway. It was one of those "aha" experiences we each have periodically. I remember years ago, when I was living in Munich, trying to learn German. The language seemed to be just an auditory blur… sounds coming at me that I couldn't distinguish. Then, one day, as I was listening to the morning radio, a song came on the radio. It was a very famous song, "Seeman". And, I suddenly realized that I could understand every word of the song. I started to cry out of joy, and I can still recall that day as though it were last week.
Well, yesterday wasn't quite as moving as that, but in its own small way was just as meaningful. I had taken a bus down town, as I often do, and was in a part of town I'd never been in before. I'd decided to visit a temple complex I'd read about but had no experience of. According to my map, it was in the North East part of Harbin, so I jumped on a bus that I thought would get me close. Having found a seat (an unusual feat on a Harbin city bus) I settled in to enjoy the ride. I was following my progress on a map until the bus drove off the edge of the map, so I put it away and just enjoyed the scenery from the window.
We passed a pretty interesting looking building which looked like a kind of mosque, all blue and with a Muslim symbol on the top. So I decided to get off the bus and take a picture. I figured I was pretty close to the temple area anyway, so I figured I could walk the rest of the way.
I pulled out my tourist map, which has the street names written in English, and tried to orient myself by looking around. There was a large branch of a local bank across the street, and after staring at the writing over the door for a couple of seconds, realized that I could read the Pinyin script of the Chinese name of the bank. It read, "South Fourteenth Street Branch". It surprised me that I was able to understand the Chinese words, and pleased me at the same time. I recognized that I was on a street that was on the edge of my map, and that the temple complex must be down the street a way, on the right. So I set off in that direction.
When I got to the corner, I casually looked up at the street sign, hoping to see some English words, which are often written at the bottom of the street signs, and saw that all that was written there were Chinese symbols, so I looked away again, toward the end of the street, looking for some sign of the temple.
Then something clicked in my head, and I looked up at the street sign again. Studying the Chinese characters, I realized that they said, "Fourteenth Street" in Chinese! Not a great realization perhaps, given my location just down the street from the bank. But, for me it was a kind of mini "Munich moment", as I realized that I could actually recognize the street name in Chinese characters. The moment was so meaningful that I stepped back and took a picture of the street sign, thinking I'd keep it as a souvenir of the moment.
Looking at the map again, I saw there were some train tracks I'd need to cross before I got to the temple, and looking up, I saw them in the distance. So I headed that way.
As I approached the tracks, I got my first glimpse of the roof of the temple on the hill above the train tracks. I took a couple of photos of the train and the complex of tracks, with the temple roof in the distance. "This will make a nice shot.", I thought.
Continuing up the hill toward the temple, I was walking on the sidewalk. The usual collection of odd vehicles made their way down the hill and over the railroad bridge, heading back into town from where I'd just come. One of them, a beat up old motor scooter, had some sort of hand-made flatbed contraption built onto the back of it, which was piled high with bits of used construction materials apparently scrounged from a building site. As it got even with me, it hit a bump in the road, and a piece of what looked like pvc tubing went bouncing across the road toward the sidewalk on which I was walking. The next car ran over this piece of tubing, sending it squirting out from under the tire right towards me. I jumped to avoid being hit with this flying plastic missile, and it ricosheed off the curb and back onto the roadway, landing in the middle of the lane.
Looking up the hill again, I noticed coming down the sidewalk toward me, a little old woman, hunched over from the strain of carrying the biggest sack I'd ever seen anyone carry in my life. It was a massive canvas bag, absolutely stuffed full. It was bigger than she was and looked like it weighed a hundred pounds. She scooted off the sidewalk into the middle of the road, dodging the traffic as she went, to retrieve the bit of plastic pipe that now lay there. I said to myself, "What a way to have to make a living, scrounging the streets for odd bits of garbage that you can hopefully turn into a few pennies." I thought of taking a picture of her as she bent over to pick up the pipe, but it seemed a rather perverse invasion of her privacy, so I kept my camera in my pocket and continued up the hill.
After a short walk up the hill, I came upon the temple site itself. It was larger than I expected, with a long pedestrian mall, paved with stones, the length of the entire complex, a distance of perhaps three hundred yards. Along the opposite side of the mall was a row of about thirty shops, obviously catering to temple visitors, selling souvenir statues and carvings of one kind or another. They also sold incense, for people to burn as offerings once they got inside the temples themselves.
After scanning the row of shops, I decided to go into one near the end. While I was preparing to take a photo of the front of the shop, I noticed my camera said, "disk full". This was a shock, since I can normally take about 200 pictures on my flash memory card. But upon opening the back of the camera, I saw that the memory card wasn't there. I'd left it in my office the last time I downloaded my pictures to my hard drive. This was disappointing. I could see the temples were quite impressive. I realized I'd either have to visit the place without taking any pictures, or have to sacrifice the photos I'd already taken that day, including the one of the Fourteenth Street sign. I decided to wait 'till I actually entered the temple complex itself, to decide what to do.
As I was mulling this over, I became aware of someone trying to get my attention. Taking my eyes from the viewfinder, I saw a little old lady, hunched over and reaching out to me. In her scrawny old hand, she held a small tin can containing a few coins, which made a tinkling sound as she shook the can in my direction.
Thinking of the woman I'd seen picking up the pvc pipe, I reached into my pocket to see what money I had. I had a half dozen one yuan notes, worth about fifteen cents each, so I decided to give them to her.
As I began to hand her the notes, I realized someone else was behind me and looking down, saw a fellow sitting awkwardly on some sort of home-made skateboard device, pushing himself along with what looked like a couple of steam irons made of wood. Looking up at me, having left one of his wooden blocks on the ground, he stretched out his hand for some money too.
So, I decided to give the old lady two bills and give another couple to this fellow on the skateboard. No sooner had I made this decision, than appearing from out of thin air, another fellow appeared in from of me showing me his hands, or what were supposed to be hands.
They were nothing more than scrambled bits of bone, skin and knuckles, arranged in some odd dumbbell shaped mass that I only knew were hands, because I could see the odd bit of finger or thumb, sticking out from this mass of scrambled tissue. Both his hands were the same. So I handed him one of the bills and turned away only to find myself face to face with another wrinkled up old gentleman, who thrust his arm into my field of view to show me his wrist, which ended abruptly in a flat, dull stump, with no hand at all.
I said to him, "Sorry… no more money." and turned to finally go into the shop, to escape the growing throng around me. As I turned toward the door of the shop, I noticed another old man sitting near the entrance, who looked like his face had been scalded away with acid, or fire, or disease, or god knows what. His eyes were sealed shut and his hands and face looked like one giant mass of deformed tissue. Having nothing to give him, and unable to look at him any longer, I escaped into the relative sanctuary of the souvenir shop. As the door closed behind me, I turned to notice the old lady with the tin can, and the guy with the scrambled hands arguing loudly over something. Perhaps even beggars and cripples have turf wars.
posted by Anthony Hamilton at 5:34 PM
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