I am filled with admiration for whichever citizen of Harbin, China said, "hey fellas, it's freezing around here in the winter and we have a lot of ice -- why don't why carve the ice into blocks, make large structures, and light them up with bright colors?." Harbin should erect an ice statute to that person every year. Using just ice, imagination and a lot of labor, Harbin has created the world's largest tribute to ice -- the Harbin Ice Festival -- which must have transformed the city economy. Not that Harbin was a backwater. Due to various factors, this Chinese city just south of Mother Russia is both an industrial crossroads and a cultural time capsule. There is a strong Russian influence. Go here if you want to learn the history of why this is so.

Harbin is significantly colder than Shandong Province, so we prepared with long underwear, lots of layers and in my case, a Chinese Army-type great coat, which was inexpensive and very warm and just the thing for winter campaigns or ice festival viewing. Yes, it was cold, but the cold never bothered us. Anyway....

Central Street is a cobbled street lined with handsome European-style buildings. Light classical music played from speakers in the trees. And this is not because the festival organizers are catering to foreigners; there were some laowai in Harbin, but the tourists were overwhelmingly Asian. They want to stroll along a street with gingerbread architecture while listening to the Skater's Waltz. They want to go to coffee shops and, for reasons that elude me, they want to shop at stores selling babushka dolls, Russian vodka and ugly china tea cups and tchoktches. I use the word "tchoktches" advisedly because Harbin used to have a large Jewish population. 

We also came across a big, glamorous mall full of high fashion and exuding prosperity and sophistication. There were lots of alternatives to Russian kitsch. Ross especially enjoyed a Badpanda t-shirt he spotted that said, "I was young. I needed the money."

We were told that Harbin has four famous foods -- beer, bread, sausage and ice cream (again, all due to the Russian heritage). This is why hundreds of tourists were walking the sub-zero streets eating ice cream bars. We thought the bread and the ice cream were nothing special, but the sausages were okay and so was the beer. Of greater interest to us was the fact that hot Coca Cola is the winter-time beverage treat here.  Yes, it's heated and sold in Mayor-Bloomberg's-head-would-explode size cups. We didn't try it. That's sausage on a stick below right and behind me is a variety of bite-size pieces of fruit covered with chewy sugary syrup, also on sticks. They look pretty.

For dinner we found a small local restaurant and had to order food by pointing at pictures. We ended up with some noodles in broth, some spiced gristle and other odds and ends of animal parts, and some spicy cucumbers.  Okay, but not memorable.

We followed Central Street down to the river, but that will wait for part two. Until then, a few more pictures of Central Street. A lot more ice to come.

We've made the trip from Shandong Province, to the north of China, then down to Beijing, and now we're back in British Columbia, Canada.  I'll be making the return flight in about three weeks. So it's a good time to reflect on our hotel experiences in China.

We usually look for hotels in the 300 to 700 yuan range, depending on the city. (We splurged that first time in Beijing and paid more to stay in a beautiful courtyard hotel.) It's important to know that some hotels do not and cannot take foreigners as guests. I gather you must have some kind of special license. So if you're traipsing around China and decide to pick a hotel at random and the hotel won't admit you, don't get huffy. It's just the rules. 

You'll always need your passport to check in to a hotel and you'll need to pay a refundable deposit on your room.

As for rooms, we've never been really dissatisfied, but then we are not picky people and we don't have vast experience of five star hotels. We stayed at Motel 6's for our honeymoon, after all. When I first arrived in Zibo, I was put up at a hotel near the campus. Wallpaper was peeling off the walls, I couldn't adjust the shower head to get a hot shower, and I had to provide my own morning coffee, but so what. No-one on the staff spoke English, but why should I expect them to? And they were all very friendly and charming people.

I've stayed at some glamorous hotels -- and away from the higher prices of Beijing, hotels are very reasonable.  Below left is the hotel gate in Boshan, a part of Zibo, and below right is the entrance to the very atmospheric Beijing hotel we stayed in.

While we've always seen a kettle in the hotel room, there aren't always coffee mugs, or coffee. Usually there is tea and at least some glasses. So from now on we are going to pack our own mugs and coffee and spoon.

It's also a waste of money to pay for Western breakfast. In one hotel we were provided with unbuttered, untoasted white bread, and fresh fruit swimming in milky yogurt. And a glass of warm milk.  We should have just eaten whatever the locals were eating. In Beijing recently, we could have eaten Western breakfast at the hotel for 100 yuan apiece, and probably have gotten some rubber eggs and cold toast, but we walked out to a little restaurant nearby and had delicious fresh dumplings for just 16 yuan instead.

Another point to be aware of is that Chinese mattresses are much firmer than Western ones. So far we've been lucky -- perhaps hotels keep some rooms with softer mattresses for foreigners, or perhaps the softer mattresses are catching on with the middle class. But if you get a Chinese mattress, you'll feel like you're sleeping on an ironing board -- at least in terms of the firmness. As for the size, we've usually had generous king- or queen-sized beds.

The hotels provide slippers and toiletries, including a toothbrush with a mini tube of toothpaste, and a comb. There is often a condom provided by the bed. The condom and the toothbrush make me wonder if booking a hotel room is something of a spontaneous event in China, but that could be cultural ignorance on my part. 

Below is our hotel room in Harbin, China. On the other side of the glass wall is another TV facing the seating area.

What I find truly interesting and different about Chinese hotel rooms is something I haven't encountered in the West. The shower room often has a large window. Yoo-hoo! Ross is posing on the other side of the shower in this hotel room, so you can get the idea.

You can let down the blind if you'd prefer. I should also mention that every hotel room we've stayed at had a private bathroom with western toilet. 

Skip this last paragraph if you are a guy. This is girl talk. It was only months after staying at that first hotel at the campus that I realized the female staff were trying to tell me that I should put used toilet paper, (used for Number One, that is) into the wastebasket and not into the toilet. That's why the toilet kept clogging. I have debated whether to mention this tip in the blog, but in my part of China, in every public toilet and at the school toilets, you do not throw the paper down the toilet. You leave it in the wastepaper basket. Much more useful detail at the link.

A sunny day, after three weeks of fighting a virus of some kind and shambling in to work under grey, polluted skies, feeling tired mentally and physically.  As you can see in this view from one of the classrooms, the pollution was horrid this week. But today was both clear and mild, and we finally got out for a walk to the street market described in my previous post. On a sunny day, everything looks psychedelically bright to me, accustomed as I am to grey polluted haze, but sorry, I didn't take the camera with me this time.  

Last night I turned the alarm clock off because I'm done -- last day of school was Friday. Then I woke up at 5:00 in the morning and couldn't go back to sleep!  Yes, I'm glad that exams are over and the school semester has ended, but I wish I had brought more energy to the last classes with my students. They of course are excited about going home and probably didn't even notice that their usually daffy teacher was more subdued than usual. I'll miss the students during winter break. The mass exodus from campus has begun, as thousands of students head out. Some of my students tell me they are taking factory jobs near Shanghai; I'll be sure to ask them about that experience when they return.

Ross and I will be back in Canada in just a few days. We'll visit with friends and family, then return to China to start my second year as an ESL teacher. Has it been a year already?  Well, it's almost eleven months since I flew here, so yes, it has. The trees on campus are all bare, just as they were when I first arrived.

This blog will probably be pretty quiet while we're in Canada -- in a week or so I'll put up a post about our trip to the Ice Festival in Harbin -- but please check back in March for a new semester of Laowai at Large. Thanks for the appreciative comments about the blog, everyone.

Downtown Zhangdian district is really a city of malls. I've never tried to count the malls but three new ones just opened up. So I'll get you some more pictures of the malls, if you like, but they look like shopping malls anywhere. The thing is that the old and the new lives side-by-side here -- we can go to a glitzy mall selling designer duds, or we can go to the farmer's market down the street for fruits, veggies, meat, fried chicken, pet fish, clothes, spices, snacks, housewares, key cutting....

Every five days the vendors take over West Street on each side for blocks with their wares. We can get fresh veggies and fruit for just a few yuan. 

This little girl's mom is selling pet goldfish. The street food vendors set up the big umbrellas behind their stands just to cut down on the cold winds and conserve their heat. They are out all winter, selling to the students. This is a fried wrap with egg, bacon, tofu, lettuce and hot sauce. Four yuan.

Most of the food for sale is recognizable to us, but not everything is. The lady above is slicing into a big soft block of tofu.