Harbin!

Harbin gets an exclamation mark because it was something else.  I like to call it a once in a lifetime experience, because it’s well worth a visit but I most likely will not be going back.  No one should be that cold out of choice…

Alex and I had acclimatised somewhat in Beijing but nothing could really prepare us for temperatures around -25°C on arrival.  We were ridiculously excited though (and our toes hadn’t started to freeze yet).

Fortunately the hostel was warm (if somewhat unwashed), and inside an old synagogue, which was pretty interesting.

Harbin as a city didn’t seem so exciting, but there were ice and snow sculptures everywhere.  Just everywhere.

On the first night we walked down the main pedestrian street, Zhongyang Dajie (lined with ice and snow sculptures) to Zhaolin park to look at all the pretty ice lanterns.   

And of course some ice and snow sculptures.

Here we are at an ice table.

The next day we went to a Siberian tiger park.  We were driven around in a van safari-style looking at many tigers, lions and even a couple of ligers.  We were also treated to a bunch of tigers being fed a live goat.  

We then walked around the enclosures observing the sweet tigers and feeding them strips of beef (didn’t have the money to splurge on a chicken).

There were even a couple of white tigers, which were beautiful but not terribly happy.

In the afternoon we went to the main ice and snow festival.  There were a lot of ice and snow sculptures.

We went at the perfect time, about 3.30 pm, so we saw ice and snow sculptures in the light…

And we saw ice and snow sculptures lit up at night…

We also avoided the hoards of Chinese tourists who descended after nightfall.

And rode in a horse-drawn carriage, possibly the most exciting thing ever.   

Apart from all the ice and snow sculptures.

To keep warm we went on ice slides…

Cuddled snow foxes…

And jumped around a lot.

Also, we looked at the ice and snow sculptures.  All the looking at the ice and snow sculptures was exhausting.  I think we went to bed around 8.

On our final day we went to the Harbin snow world.  There were a lot of impressive snow sculptures.   

No surprises there.  Sadly no ice sculptures...but a pretty cool snowman army.

After lunch we visited St. Sofia’s church, a beautiful building in the city centre that is unfortunately a museum now.

And that was that.  We were only in Harbin 2 days and 2 nights but it was enough.  Undeniably beautiful and spectacularly unique.  But absolutely freezing.

Did I mention we saw ice and snow sculptures?

We then flew back to Xiamen, a temperature difference of close to 40°C, and I remembered why I chose this magical winterless city.  But my building was empty and the campus was full of tourists so after a day of drying laundry with a hairdryer I jumped on a plane to Kunming…

Beijing with Brett...and the year of the Dragon!

So about a month ago I set off to Beijing with a recently traumatised-from-the-Xiamen-night-clubs Brett.  We headed to the Happy Dragon Hostel, which now comes highly recommended by Tan tours.  There we met Liz, Pete and Will who are studying down in Hong Kong, and spent many a happy hour in the bar/Beijing haze with them.  Here we are in the hostel with Betty, the sweetest manager in the world.

Unfortunately the weather wasn’t fantastic but that didn’t stop us climbing (*cough* taking a ski lift) up the Great Wall…

Visiting the Lama Temple…

Seeing the Temple of Heaven…

And pointing at Mao.

We also visited the Pearl Market (where I bargained for some arguably real-ish Ugg boots and Brett got some jade), went to an acrobatics show (featuring cage biking) and had Beijing roast duck (amidst such classic puns as 'duck in', 'ducked out' and something involving the bill).

Later in the week some very lovely, mostly Dutch, people from Xiamen came up.  Here we are in their hostel.

And in a cat-filled reggae bar.

Now you might be fearing that with all the bars and white people Brett’s Chinese experience lacked sufficient culture, but here’s a tiny dragon riding a camel to prove otherwise.

And he made dumplings.

At least 2 of them.

All in all, it was a jolly good week.  By the end of it Brett could even take the subway on his own.  China will make a man out of you.

I was still in Beijing for Chinese New Year, when the city went crazy...

The fireworks/firecrackers started going off around 2pm and walking through the streets was like picking your way through a war zone.  For midnight, a few of us climbed up onto a hostel roof overlooking the Bell and Drum towers, Hou Hai and the whole city.  At 12 the city erupted.  The fireworks were everywhere and they continued for hours, literally.  It was incredible.  And, of course, impossible to capture on camera, so I took about a hundred photos.

So that was Beijing.  A rather more in-depth experience to my whistle-stop tour last April and it was good to properly familiarise myself with the city.  And practice the Beijing dialect that they force us to learn down south, where nobody can understand it.  Happy New Year of the Dragon to all!

Into 2012

Happy Belated New Year everyone!  In 2 days I’m off travelling for the best part of a month, so I thought it would be nice to leave a little update of what’s been going on in Xiamen.  Not a lot of time for detail but a picture says a thousand words.  And the camera adds 10 pounds.

Towards the end of the year it got a little colder but nothing spectacular.  So we went ice skating.

Xiamen knows what we need.  Though, as it is with every aspect of Chinese life, we were swiftly shown up by 4-year old skating prodigies whizzing around on the ice dressed like Robin Hood.

The same weekend there was a Taiwanese (I think) food market out on Zhongshan Lu.   

We went along for such delightful delicacies as fried scorpion…

Chou doufu, the worst smelling food in the world…

And a sort of centipede bug thing.   

Paul had previously agreed to eat it in some kind of chou doufu deal but despite his “I’m going to be sick” protestations we knew he was loving it.

Here I am with some perfectly normal guys selling chicken kebab sticks dressed as a monkey and a half-naked person.

Another weekend we had a class trip to the Korean BBQ.  Here I am cooking far too much meat with 3 of my multicultural classmates - Thai, Swedish and Japanese.  I'll let you guess who's who...

And here's everyone else at KTV.

Most memorable was the bus ride home, where we hit a taxi, took some photos, got off and went to the bus stop to wait for the next bus.  As luck would have it, we got on the same one again.

 

Christmas this year, in comparison to last, was a little too normal to constitute extensive description.  There were many parties…

Men precariously set concrete…

And Santa crashed church.

New Year’s was a dumpling party…

A dinner party at my Russian classmate’s place and a job promoting Apple through the medium of Heineken.  Mostly we just drank a lot of tea and Alex played Plants vs. Zombies on iPads.

Most recently it has been my birthday which has involved several nights of birthday parties (both intended and unintended), some fantastic Chinese gifts and the arrival of my good friend Brett.  Here I am with poor jetlagged Brett, wearing a few of said gifts.

And here we are in Helen’s, where everybody knows your name.

Oh, and I was in the newspaper!

Somewhere in the midst of all this I also ‘ran’ a half-marathon (there were so many people it was difficult to get beyond a brisk walk at times) and took a few exams.  But there aren’t any photos of these events so they’re not interesting.

It’s taken me so long to upload this blog that it is now 2 hours until I leave for Beijing, not 2 days.  So it’s probably time to pack.  Stand by for Beijing with Brett, Harbin with hypothermia and hopefully a little trek round Yunnan…

Jobs in (and around) Xiamen

Christmas is 2 days away and Xiamen is doing a pretty good decorating job.  On the main shopping street they’ve juxtaposed this big tacky Christmas tree with some kind of rabbit-mobile.   

Festive.

But there’s no holiday, no family and the apple-giving craze has started up again.  So to take my mind off missing home and to take a break from listening to Mud’s ‘Lonely this Christmas’ on repeat, here’s a blog about the weird and wonderful jobs I’ve sourced in Xiamen so far.

To keep a tentative grasp on my dignity and professional pride I have a very respectable weekend job teaching children English/piano/English via the medium of piano in a little house school.  It is inexplicably called Banana Club and the ‘school’ is in a lady’s apartment on the rich side of town.  I am the feature attraction; here’s the entrance hall…

Xin Laoshi, said owner of apartment and ‘school’, is a little nuts.  Her poodle is her baby.   

She schedules meetings for me with prospective parents and then tells me after they’ve been waiting half an hour.  She is obsessed with the songs ‘Do-Re-Mi’ and ‘Edelweiss’ and seems to think I will teach the children English like Maria taught the von Trapp children how to laugh, and we will all perform in grand music festivals before we escape over the mountains into Switzerland.  She also timetables lessons poorly; when I don’t have a classroom I have to teach outside a coffee shop downstairs, which is mildly irritating but we do get snacks.

I was poached from the Banana Club by a man called Alex who hired me to hang out with his 8-year-old piano prodigy daughter and pretend to teach her piano and English while she plays impeccable Mozart and rolls around the room pretending to be a cow.  The family are lovely though and always give me a great lunch – last week I had home-grown salad and home-made yoghurt.  How the other half live.

Apart from teaching, China offers the very lucrative job of being white.  As Westerners we are pretty much constantly offered jobs modelling this, selling that, promoting the other.  Of course, you never quite know what you’re getting into...

Exhibit A.  We are informed about a job sitting at the back of a televised economics debate, trying to look interested.  We are told to dress smart, like businessmen/women. 

Reality: we are extras in a fake hairstyling competition on a soap opera.

Here I am with a guy who might have been a TV star.  We really weren't sure, but all took pictures with him just in case.

Exhibit B.  I am asked to pour wine at a fancy wedding in a hotel in a town an hour north of Xiamen. 

Reality: my friend Alex and I end up in a rural village where it is evident that nobody has ever seen foreigners, dressed as Heineken girls, opening beer bottles in a building that looks like it hasn’t been finished yet.

This worked out ok though, because we told them we weren’t happy, sat down with a beer and people just took pictures of us.

Exhibit C.  Alex and I are asked to go to Nanning, capital city of Guangxi province to pour wine at an event.  We are told it is French wine, so can we please take a guy who speaks French.  We take my classmate Antoine.

Reality: we are promoting the Spanish wine Tio Pepe and our only job is to drink wine with the guests.  Also, we are all Spanish.  There was a lot of confusion over this, mainly because none of us were speaking Spanish and we kept accidentally telling people we were English/German/French.  On the second day we were driven 2 hours away into the countryside where we drank tea all afternoon and then did another wine-drinking event.

Here are Alex and I employed to do nothing.

Here’s Antoine pretending to be the Spanish ambassador of Tio Pepe.

We stayed in 5-star hotels.  It was not the worst job in the world.

China may be trying at times, but there are certainly ways to make the system work in your favour.  Just make sure you're getting a fair price for your soul.