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....

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...

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...