December 24th

Myself and some onf the other teachers had a great Christmas dinner last night in a fairly nice restaurant on the campus of the university just next to ours. It's got waiter service and is quite upscale from the usual university eateries.

There were seventeen people all told, and a karaoke machine, so we had a hoot singing Carols and eating our fill. Ordering food here is a bit of a crap shoot, because we're never quite sure what we are ordering, and when it arrives, we're never quite sure what it is or who's ordered it. But each of us is slowly learning to ask for one or two favorites, and there is some pretty good food here if you can navigate the language. Seems like each of us has learned to order one favorite thing. So depending who shows up for the various meals we organize, we sometimes get some pretty good stuff. However there are glitches. One guy thought he was ordering some fancy prawn dish, and when it arrived it was some sort of pickled fish.... I didn't eat any of it myself. The look was a bit of a turn off.

The other teachers are a great bunch, and they make the experience worthwhile. Friday evening one of the guys, invited us all up to his place for a pretty sumptuous meal that he'd prepared. He even had gifts for us all under his tree. I brought up some dvd's so we'd have some music and something to watch on the tv if the energy started to lag a bit. (I learned from my friend Warren the value of having a dvd to watch as well as listen to) I bought a couple of Eagles dvd's last week, 90 cents each). There were snacks and drinks and lots of laughs. We had a great time.

Things here are a strange on-going mixture of frustratingly crazy and quite fascinating. If it weren't for the other Canadian teachers here, who knows how my atttitude would be, or even how many of us would still be here. But we each help each other through the wierdness.

As an example: our apartments are very nice, for China. Much better than the regular students get, by far, and even the other teachers (We are, after all, the cream of the crop... the foreign experts... I even have a special, government issued passport type book to prove it.) But in spite of the apartments looking nice, the lack of fine workmanship here is hard to believe. They don't seem to have any concept of finishing work, so things are often covered with splatters of paint, layers of caulking, etc. Things don't fit. Shelves fall down, walls move when they aren't supposed to, and the doors and windows as often as not don't close. So there are drafts everywhere.

Most of us have had leaks in our apartments of one sort or another. Several of us have had to abandon our apartments altogether, because they were unlivable. I've recently had a leak develop in my bathroom, with water coming in through the ceiling light and shorting out the electrical system.

They have a truly bizarre and distorted sense of energy conservation here. For example, they keep the hallways in the school dark, to save energy. Half the time you can't see where you're going, and navigating the stairwells is a real hazard.

They also turn the heat down or off altogether, at certain times of day, to conserve energy. This is a real joke. Because of the poor finishing work, literally half the doors and windows don't close properly, so they swing open, meaning that any heat in the buildings is lost, and they don't seem to have a clue about fixing them or display any desire to. It's truly bizarre. By the way, The couple in the photo are selling ice cream on the sidewalk.

The apartments don't have clothes dryers here. Too energy inefficient, they say. So every apartment has a 'sun room' which is all glass, in which to dry the clothes. In principle, this is a fine idea, but again, it turns into a joke, because the glass windows are not insulated and they don't close properly, so the rooms are literally freezing. I leave my beer in the "solarium" to keep it cold.

This morning I discovered that it was so cold last night that one of the bottles exploded, lreaving frozen beer foam and broken glass all over the place. I took a bucket of hot water to clean it up and as I was mopping it up, the water on the floor froze as fast as I could mop, so I now have a room that is below freezing, with a thin layer of ice over the entire floor. Not only is it hazardous, but energy wasting, because of course, any heat that might be generated in the kitchen next to it is sucked away through the glass walls of the 'sun room'. Crazy.

On the other hand, some of the cultural stuff is really interesting and beautiful. The famous Harbin ice lantern festival is happening next month. It is a big thing here and very popular in China. Apparently people come from all over to see the sculptures. I went downtown yesterday to check out what was happening and there are some sculptures scattered around some of the main squares. But the really big shew...(as Ed Sullivan would say) happens across the river in a big park where there will apparently be acres of amazing sculptures. They carve them out of blocks of clear ice and put lights inside them. I can't wait to see the festival when it opens on January 5th.

The weather here is biting cold, but with warm clothes it's bearable. We just don't go outside much. I've taken to wearing long johns all the time, even in the apartment!

Much to my surprise, I'm actually learning to get along in chinese, which blows my mind. I hadn't really intended to try to learn it. But a group of us (twelve, in all) hired a teacher from the neighbouring university to teach us some Chinese twice a week for eight weeks, and amazingly, I actually learned something. Enough, at least to 'crack the code' on this language, so that I can actually make myself understood some of the time.

The problem of course, is the listening comprehension part. When anyone speaks to me in chinese, it just sounds like a wall of sound. But ieven that is coming slowly. I imagine that by June, I'll be doing ok. Especially if I can find the right 'chinese dictionary'. You, know, the kind with the long hair and dark eyes.

We get six weeks off from late January to early March. So I'm planning to go to Shanghai and Beijing to see some friends - former students from Vancouver - and perhaps to head to the south of China for some warmer weather.

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.

Life in Harbin

Harbin is in the North East of China, in what used to be called Manchuria.

I remember learning about Manchuria when I was a kid collecting stamps. I had a few from Manchuria and it seemed to be the most distant place I could imagine. Now, I find myself living here. So it's still a bit of a shock. Here's some info on it:

Harbin (här'bĭn) , (Rus. Kharbin), on the Songhua River, population 2,505,200, (1994) is the capital of Heilongjiang province in NE China .

It is the major trade and communications center of central Manchuria, sitting at the junction of the two most important railroads in Manchuria, and the main port on the Songhua.

Part of the great Manchurian industrial complex of metallurgical, machinery, chemical, petroleum, and coal industries, Harbin also has railroad shops, food-processing establishments (soybeans are a major commodity), and plants making tractors, turbines, boilers, precision instruments, electrical and electronic equipment, cement, and fertilizer.

Harbin was unimportant until Russia was granted a concession (1896) and built a modern section alongside the old Chinese town. (Russia surrendered its concession in 1924.) Flooded by White Russian refugees after 1917, Harbin had one of the largest European populations in East Asia. Most of the Europeans left the city following the rise to power of the Chinese Communists.


It used to be called the "Paris of the Orient" in the early 20th century and was full of Europeans wanting to enjoy the combination of European savoir faire and oriental mystique. There is still a large Russian presence, as indicated by the church of St. Sophia, (above) and the distinctively Russian architecture bordering the large pedestrian mall in the centre of town. (left)

There is a lot of interesting architecture in Harbin, both classical and modern.

A view from the top observation platform on the Dragon Tower, the tallest structure in Harbin, reveals not only apartment complexes as far as the eye can see, but also some beautiful, modern buildings.

Walking down the street, one is confronted with an amazing variety of goings-on. On the one hand, there are the broad thoroughfares, twelve lanes wide, with scores of busses competing for space with all manner of trucks, cars, motorcycles, pedestrians and people on bicycles, all trying to make their way to their destinations, no matter who or what blocks their way.

There seems to be no right of way in Harbin. An old man on a rickety bicycle will insist on being allowed to drive down or to cross the street in whatever direction he chooses, regardless of other drivers, other people on foot, or whether the light is red or green.

You'll see people driving down the street against the flow of traffic, completely oblivious to the fact that (at least, to this westerner's eyes) they are going the wrong way!

On the other hand, turning a corner from a main street, you'll suddenly find yourself in a narrow
alley where there seems to be a whole other level of society carrying on their business. There are tiny shops, rows of women trying to entice you to get your shoes shined, sidewalk vendors selling anything and everything you can imagine, people cooking and selling meat barbequed over charcoal in barrels or home-made metal troughs, and people unloading live crabs or dead fish from trucks onto the sidewalk, where they hold up a particularly unappealing specimine for you to examine as you walk by.

In Harbin, every trip outside my apartment is an adventure.

Greetings from Harbin

Well, here I am in Harbin, a city in the North of China. After a week in Beijing, I flew by China Air here to start teaching at Harbin University of Science and Technology. I will be teaching English to Chinese students who want to get their English language skills up to the point where they can take Canadian college courses in English. This is the first posting from here. My previous attempt at a blog got lost in cyberspace. So we'll see how this goes.

Feel free to write to me and ask me questions or make comments.