From Beijing to Harbin

We just got back to the hotel room here in Harbin after dining at Pizza Hut.  Only, it wasn't anything like the American Pizza Hut.  At this Pizza Hut, you can get squid or octopus on your pizza.  And pizza is only about a third of what they offer.  You can get pig ankles, octopus fried rice, and all sorts of other scrumptious tidbits and nobody speaks english.  And there's hardly any english in the menu, even though it's in all the decorations on the walls.  We passed up eating at the local dumpling house because I forgot my cheat-sheet of mandarin and there was no english on the menu.  We were both tired from traveling the entire day, and thought Pizza Hut would be quick, familiar and easy.  Um.... not so much.  I had to fumble my way through the ordering and the paying with what little mandarin I had committed to memory (my favorite phrase so far is Ni shuo ying wen ma which means "Do you speak english") and did just fine.  We got just what I had ordered.  It was funny, and we were smiling the whole time.  Talk about being disoriented!

But I have to back up my day. 

We woke up at 4:30am this morning, ready to get up.  It is really getting ridiculous.  I want more sleep but the excitement and the anxiety takes over as soon as I open my eyes.  We packed our bags up and met our guide, Oscar, in the hotel lobby at 6:00am. 

Mr. Jiu took us all to the Beijing Train station, which was only 20 minutes from the hotel.  We passed it the other day on our way to Tien'an'men Square.  Even the traffic at 6:00am is ridiculous.  We got out of the car at the curb and worked our way through the crazy mob of people, all pushing and shoving to get somewhere and everyone was in a hurry.

 It was chaotic, but I am getting better and weaving through the crowd.  I'm getting more assertive. 

We managed to get to the right train after saying goodbye to Oscar, and get on board. 

Only the seat they had reserved for us was right next to a pillar.  No window.  I was really bummed to say the least.  After all, the whole reason we took the train versus the airplane was to see more of 'real China' out the window.  (Well, that and saving $400!)  So Matt, being my hero, moved our belongings to the seat across the aisle from us that was not yet occupied.  During the 30 minute wait for the train to fill up and leave the station, all of the other seats were taken.  As each new occupant filed in to find his or her seat, we would watch to see if they were preparing to sit in our new seats.  We thought we were home free, but the very last passenger indicated that he wanted to sit in seat 19.  With my broken mandarin I asked him if we could take pictures here and pointed at the window.  He grunted and pointed to our empty seats in 17 and 18 and we said "yes".  He sat right down and got his newspaper out.  Total score!  The train pulled out and we were on our way heading north with a nice big window to stare out of.  It took us quite a while to get out of the sprawl of Beijing.  I must have taken a million photos over the next nine hours.

Matt found a few of these apartments with pigeon cages hanging from the window.  Oscar explained to us earlier this week that pigeons, magpies and crickets are lucky pets to have.

I have to make a comment about the photo above.  We were traveling on a high speed train, going just under 90 miles an hour, so the photos I took are either slighly blurry or they are tilted to the right.  I was not able to adjust the photo speed enough to make up for this. I know a lot of these look like scenes from Willy Wonka.  Sorry.

After almost an hour, we got out to a much more rural area.

Those little white dots are ducks.

This is a photo of a donkey pulling a cart full of corn, which is being harvested at this time.  We must have passed by a million acres of corn; rows and rows and rows going on for hours and hours and hours.  But what makes China so unique is that it was all being harvested by hand.

In each field, you would see men and women, with hats on or scarves covering their head, with sickles and hoes.  Once the corn was cut down at the ground level, another group would squat down and pick each ear of corn off each stalk, and make small piles of yellow corn that would later be transferred to old feed sacks.  These sacks would either be loaded onto a three-wheeled flatbed truck (below), or onto a cart that was pulled by a donkey (above). 

Above, you can see the corn piled up, ready to be put in old burlap sacks and loaded onto that three-wheeled truck.

Below, you can see farm workers squatting down and bagging up the corn.  These were common scenes throughout most of our 9-hour train ride.  Corn is a major crop up in northeast China, just like it is in Michigan.

Once the cart was full, they would bring it back to their homes and lay it out on their rooftops or in a small dirt yard to dry.  In this picture, you can see corn ont he rooftops.

In this photo, you can see corn piled up in stacks in front of the houses.

Coming from Beijing, where everyone lives in high rise apartment buildings, seeing single-family dwellings was surprising.  Although they are small, like one or two rooms at best, most had a small courtyard in front of the home that was both an area for processing harvest as well as raising meat animals.  I did not get a good picture, but many times there would be chickens or pigs in pens within the walls of the yard.  Many had pet dogs, and it wasn't unusual to see kids hanging around playing, or working with parents in the fields.

These farming homes were planted very close to one another, forming small villages.  We would travel 20 minutes or more between villages.  We saw rows and rows and rows of produce for a very long time.  The villages had anywhere from 30 to 300 of these single-family brick and mortar homes.  A few homes had cars parked near them; most others had bicycles. Some were relatively clean and well kept, and others were piled high with garbage and junk.

This picture shows how the corn was harvested in rows.  The corn-less stalks would then be laid out all parallel to one another to dry in the sun, then wrapped in bundles and carted back to the homesites where they were stored.  I think they used them to burn for heat in the winter.  Sometimes the corn would he harvested all at once, like in this picture, and sometimes it was every-other row, or some other pattern.  But always by hand.

After a field was emptied out, you'd often see people herding sheep, goats, or cows on it.  Sheep and goats, especially, will eat the tough stalks that remain.  And the donkeys that were out working in the fields were almost always snacking on the job.  :o)

Although there was by far more farmland than city, every hour or so the farmland would end abruptly and a city would start.  Most cities seemed completely random, being so sporadically placed in the flat cropland and yet so dense.  Most cities had factories, a grain elevator, and an unbelievable number of rows of apartment buildings and tall tall office buildings.  And when the Chinese build apartment buildings, they don't just build one.  There would be dozens upon dozens of large, tall buildings built to be identical.  Rows upon rows upon rows and roads upon roads upon roads of buildings that were cookie-cutter perfect.  My guess would be that it is all centered around building up manufacturing companies that needs to house thousands of workers.

These cities were booming.  There is construction going on EVERYWHERE!  Matt and I joke that the national bird of China is the construction crane.  This was the scenario for each city we saw throughout the whole day.

These 'small' cities are still MUCH larger than my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.  There must be well over a million in each small city. 

This was Matt's first transaction without my help, using Chinese.  He went to buy a Coca Cola.  :o)

The majority of the crops were corn, but we also saw rice paddies

wheat or millet (being harvested by hand, as you see here)



apples

and some sort of seafood in man-made ponds with aertors.

We passed by 5 or 6 nuclear reactors

several large windmill operations

and throngs of factories and coal plants.

It was a very long day riding on the train.  We stopped 6 or 7 times in the different pop-up cities along the way.  It was very strange to be going 90 MPH through crop land and small villages and then all of a sudden starting to slow down, and within yards you were in a bustling city.

The landscape and topography varied between being totally flat farmland to beautiful rocky mountain peaks.

Taking the train today

helped give us a unique perspective on what it is to be a regular person living in China.  The answers to that quandry varied drastically,

but everything had this common thread:  this is northeast China and these are it's people.

We really loved taking the train, and would highly recommend it to anyone who comes to China to adopt or to travel.  You'll get a much better feel for the culture this way than flying in a plane at 30,000 feet.

So now, after a meal and an eye-opening shopping experience at Chinese WalMart that I will never forget,

 we are settling in at our Harbin hotel for the night and getting ready to meet our son in a few short hours.  I will definitely post about that tomorrow, but for now, I need to log off, unpack, and get a good night of sleep for the big day tomorrow. 

Hotel lobby.

View from the monument area looking at our hotel, the Songhua Jiang Gloria Inn Hotel.  We are in the room directly to the right of the red Chinese letters on the front of the building.

Our home for the next five days.

View from our hotel room.

 

I will leave you with one last picture.  This is my new favorite drink.  It's called Wang Lo Kat and it's an herbal tea.  I'm hooked.  I love this stuff and just bought a stash from the Chinese WalMart.  I'm already scheming how to get 50 or so of these in my suitcase to take back with me.  It's SO good!

Wan shang hao from China!