I forgot about Harbin

In the last post I mentioned that "nothing memorable happened" between Oct 2013 and Jan 2014. I lied a little bit. I left out one of my favorite trips in China this far! So, now I will tell you about Harbin.

The Harbin Ice Festival happens each year between December and February. We went the weekend before we were departing to Cambodia for Chinese New Year holiday. If you "google" this festival you will likely get to see better photos than I took, but I won't be in them... So I know you all prefer my pictures to Google's. Many of them I am hardly recognizable as I am wearing so many layers and face coverings, it could be anyone in there, but I promise it was me. Anyway, Harbin is located way up North in China, directly above North Korea, about 200 miles south of the Russian border. There is not much in China above this city. Here is how we began our trip.

It was a three hour flight from Shanghai to Harbin that we took on a Friday evening. When we got ff the airplane in Harbin, there were locker rooms to change in. By change, I mean add layers. The only problem there, is we had to take all of our top layers off and add layers underneath. The rest of the evening was uneventful. We got a cab to our hotel and had some dinner at a restaurant next door. It was cold.

The next morning we woke up and had plans to go to the Snow Sculpture Garden for the day time. We also planned to stay out all day and go to the Ice Sculpture "city" at night, as it is lit up with neon and supposed to be super cool. After we had the worst free Chinese "continental" breakfast ever -- the only edible thing was hard boiled eggs-- everything else was unidentifiable, we began to get dressed. This process was nothing short of a process. It took us close to 30 minutes to layer-up. I recall having 3 layers of pants under my snow pants. I had only one pair of wool socks under my boots, but had foot warmers in there to keep my piggies from falling off. The top of me had several long sleeved layers starting with a thermal layer. Finally I got to a fleece jacket and a wind-proof shell on top. I had double gloves with hand warmers for that variety of piggies well-being. My face was covered by a ski-mask that left only my eyes and the bridge of my nose exposed. I had a scarf around my neck, then a beanie-like hat, and a fleece hood and the wind proof hood over that. I was sweating before I even stepped out the door.

 However, all of this layering was NECESSARY. In the daylight, the temperature got up to a whopping -15 degrees Celsius. I said NEGATIVE. Lets convert that to Fahrenheit. 5 degrees Fahrenheit. That doesn't sound as bad. Just because it is not negative. After we were all ready and had the courage to step outside, we found the correct bus route and walked along the river for a bit. We stopped to get a roasted sweet potato from a street vendor (mostly because it was something warm to eat) and decided to make a quick stop at a convenience store for some liquids. We decided on a few 8 RMB ($1.50) 16 oz bottles of rice liquor to" keep us warm" throughout the day and night. We boarded the bus and continued to get lost, but eventually got to our snow sculpture park destination. We walked the park for several hours seeing lots of sculptures done by artists of varying skill levels. The one in the picture here was several stories tall and quite amazing to see in person. Throughout these several hours of hiking around in the snow we stopped at several "warm-up huts" that were placed all throughout the parks. At each hut we bought a warm food or beverage alternating cup-o-noodles with coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. 

As the sun began to sink, we made our way to get a cab and head over to the ice city. It was about 4pm when we arrived, and it was dark. Very dark. Which was good for seeing the ice city, but also meant that the temperature dropped as the sun went away. They had strategically placed a giant thermometer in the ice city to broadcast the torture we were inflicting upon ourselves. It was in Celsius as it is in China, but Ill convert it to Fahrenheit for you. The thermometer read -35 degrees Celsius. That translates to about -31 degrees Fahrenheit. NEGATIVE. THIRTY. ONE. DEGREES. FAHRENHEIT. It was beyond cold. It was windy too, so with the wind chill I'm saying it was probably close to -40F. After we were able to handle (drink rice wine) the cold, we could stay outside for about 15-25 minutes before having to go into a warm-up hut and gain feeling back in our small appendages. Each journey back outside was a tough one, but took us to different parts of the ice city to explore. Many of the buildings we were able to go up to the top or inside and explore. It was one of the coolest, no pun intended, things I have seen. After a good hour and a half of in-and-out of warm huts and icy buildings, we decided to find a ride home. We found a taxi, and got a ride back to our hotel, where we proceeded to eat dinner at the same restaurant as the night before.  We were in bed before 10 with a soon to be rice wine hangover. 

The next day had a rough start, as you would expect with out decision to use alcohol to stay warm. We went to a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop for "breakfast", but I personally couldn't stomach the food or the smell. I sat on the step outside the restaurant with my jacket open exposing my core to the -15C daytime air. Believe it or not, my hangover resolved pretty quickly in that weather. We took a risk and went to a Siberian Tiger park, which ended up being a low budget zoo with only one kind of animal. Not worth it. After our cheap safari we made our way back to the city and got to the airport by way of being ripped of by several cab drivers. On the flight home the person next to me *wink* attempted to sleep their residual nausea off for 3 hours without success. We made it home. Back to school in the morning.

This trip was once in a lifetime, and I highly recommend attending one of the few festivals like this around the world at some point. It was the most cold I have ever been. Also the closest I have been to crying about being cold. However, looking back, it was well worth the suffering. I doubt I will ever expose myself to this kind of weather again voluntarily. For the skeptics, the pictures don't do it justice. You will only be cold walking to the next warm-up hut. The people that put these parks together are professionals, and they cater to the weak, warm-blooded species that we are. They don't want to deal with whiny, cold, or frostbitten people, and they know how to help you prevent doing that to yourself. JUST DO IT.  I think Nike should pay me too.

Ill try to pick up with spring 2014 next time. 

Wowza

Welllll I guess it is safe to say I forgot about this... since it's been over a year since my last post. I apologize. I cannot promise this will not happen again. So, apologies in advance if (when) it does. I will do a quick re-cap of the last year for you. Where do I begin?......

October 2013 - January 2014: 
No big events that I can recall. I celebrated NYE on "the Bund" which is the area of Shanghai many people recognize because of the city skyline. It was a crazy night with one memorable event. I GOT SLAPPED IN THE FACE. Some dumb girl wore a white dress and my wayyyyy to intoxicated friend was dancing with me--long story short, he fell on me. I hit her on the way down. Her red wine spilled on her dumb white dress. I stood up. I got slapped. Didn't even know what hit me. Didn't know why I was being slapped. So, naturally.... I just started to cry and went to the bathroom. When I came out of the bathroom back to the party, everyone had already forgotten it had happened. Nice friends.

January 2013: 
Every year between Jan and Feb the biggest holiday in China is celebrated. Chinese New Year is the beginning of a new lunar year, and the vacation time they get here is amazing. It is much like our "winter break" in college. As a teacher I got 3 full weeks off and of course, did some traveling. 
The first stop was Cambodia. At this time, Cambodia was the poorest country I had traveled to. The people were great though. They were just as content as could be, many of them possibly owning as little as one full outfit. We hit the big cities here (Phnom Phen and Siem Reap) and the major tourist attraction, well worth spending time at, Angkor Wat. We had little fish eat the dead skin off of our feet while drinking beer, and then read an article that this was spreading HIV and Hep C. Too late now. 

From here we made our way to Bangkok, Thailand, but went directly to the airport to fly to Chiang Mai in the North. At this time, Thailand was having pretty major protests in Bangkok and we decided it would be best to see this city a different time. Chiang Mai was beautiful. We bought souvenirs at a night market, ate local street food, went white water rafting and elephant riding. 

From here we flew and ferried to a small island off the southeast coast of Thailand called Koh Tao. You may have heard of this place in the news kind of recently--you know, for the two British tourists that were beaten to death with a garden hoe on the beach. Before that glorious incident, we spent 10 days at a diving resort there. We got our basic diving certificate, and then decided - what the heck - to get our advanced certificate. We did 9 dives in these 10 days. We also played beach volleyball and tried to get rid of our "porcelain" skin complexions.

 Many of the dives we did were similar, but equally amazing. We learned about different fish species, corals, underwater navigation, and about all of the equipment used to dive. With our advanced certifications we are allowed to dive to 30 meters, which doesn't sound that crazy--but thinking about being 100 feet under water for 40 minutes makes it sound a bit more cool. There are two diving experiences I would like to tell you about. Both left me smarter and knowing more about my body than I had known before. 
Wreck Dive: Our instructor was a crazy old guy who had lived on this tiny island for about 30 years. Every response out of his mouth had some sexual innuendo in it. You got used to it. Anyway, we were doing a wreck dive to a ship that was purposely wrecked there for divers to enjoy. Well, you are supposed to be "wreck certified" to go in ship wrecks... but I believe I told you our instructor was crazy. He took 8 newly certified divers into the wreck. There were two opportunities to go into the ship. The first one was exciting! You swim through a door and into the captains deck. There are windows letting light in (because only the instructor had a flashlight) and its a pretty clear path to get out if something were to go wrong. I DID IT. I came out of there feeling like a champ. "Whoo hoo," I though. "I went in a ship wreck!" Then we went to another door. But why? We already finished. I though I was done going in small dark places while 100 feet underwater. Nope. Apparently not. I followed the person in front of me to the door, watched her swim in, stuck my head inside the door to find I could only see small bubbles and a giant black tunnel that was a flight of stairs leading down into the dark hull of the boat. I could not see her flippers. I could not see a flash light. I could see nothing. So, I promptly shoved myself backwards out of that door back out into the light blue ocean. NO WAY. Luckily, the instructor at the back of the group did not plan to go in the ship, as she is claustrophobic, so I could stay with her and meet them on the other side. Unfortunately, Kyle was behind me, and my mini-freak-out prevented him from being able to go in the wreck. Maybe next time? Lesson learned: I am extremely claustrophobic underwater.
Night Dive: Yeah, you read that right. NIGHT DIVE. DARK DIVE. BLACK DIVE. BAD IDEA DIVE. Apparently people enjoy going into the ocean at night. I have no idea why. Didn't they watch Jaws? Anyway, I expressed my fear to all of the instructors and people that I would be diving with. Somehow, they convinced me to jump in that water. Let me tell you, I was hyperventilating before I even jumped in. It was cold. Everyone had flashlights for this one. The majority of this dive I don't really remember. I was hyperventilating--using up my air tank way faster than the other people in my group. I was shivering-- also not helping my oxygen issue. I was constantly looking at my watch seeing if we were close to 40 minutes yet so I could get the hell out of there. Apparently everyone else in the group saw a sea turtle. I think I saw it's fin--I lied and told everyone I saw it so we could keep moving (just in case something big and hungry was following us). So after about a 35 minute blur of darkness and fear, my air was finally low enough to do the "low air" signal so we could start to surface. YES! LOW AIR! I never thought I would be happy to see my oxygen low. But I was. I was ecstatic. We were deep enough during this dive that we had to do a stop at 5 meters to let our bodies get rid of some of the nitrogen we had absorbed during the dive. This was the hard part. I wanted so badly to get out. I was so close to the top. And I had to stop and wait. I did, don't worry--I didn't get the Bends. I was hovering in the water, slightly above my group, when my instructor signaled for us to swim towards the boat, as it would be easier to swim underwater than on the surface with all of that gear. Anywho, my group started to swim under me and all of their bubbles came up around me. That doesn't sound too bad, right? WELL IT WAS! I had bubbles from every direction. All I could see was bubbles. I didn't know which way was up. I was terrified. Just at my peak of fear, I started to feel the swaying of the waves close to the surface. I got to the top, but I was alone, completely separated from my group that was still 5 meters down. Another group had surfaced near where I had, so that instructor saw me and made sure that I was okay. She asked where my group was. I told her what happened. She made sure I floated safely over to the boat and I met my group there. Kyle was unhappy, to say the least. I disappeared into the dark ocean without warning. I apologized, and tried to explain, but I know that I would have also been angry because I would have been scared that I lost my buddy. I now know what vertigo feels like. And I never want to feel it again.

I probably just made you want to go night diving really bad, didn't I? Yeah, I should work for them promoting it, I think. 

I'm going to end on that note. Seems I'm not too brief in my recall. I'll pick up the next time I think about it. Happy Travels!

All Hallows Eve in Shanghai

Halloween is not traditionally celebrated in China. That must answer your first question. However, (1) I live with a large group of people from the western world who love to dress up foolishly, and (2) I teach 1st graders who love any day that lets them pretend to be anything that they are not. However, again, as Halloween is not actually celebrated here by the general public, our school moved Halloween to Nov. 1 so we got to look even more silly dressing up in a town of non-halloweeners by dressing up a day late. Ah China. Since we dressed up at school prior for dressing up for our adult Halloween festivities, I will cover that first. Tiny girls love to be princesses. Tiny boys love to be superheros. I had 2 Spidermans, 2 Zoros, a Batman, a pirate with a cape, and several other half-and-half costumes from the boys in my class. I had 3 Snow Whites, 2 Sleeping Beauties, 2 miscelaneous pink/purple princesses, a blue princess, a bat (in a purple tutu outfit), and my favorite....... a seahorse.

Who couldn't love the seahorse in the sea of princesses and superheors. Her costume topped all other costumes at school. This day was particularly nonproductive at school, as you can imagine. I was missing about 2/3 of the homework and couldn't get them to pay attention for more than 2 minutes in English or ESL. My co-teacher said the same things about her math Chinese classes. The kids got to Trick-or-Treat out on the track and all of the administrative people handed out candy while we led them in a giant circle. Then they had a class. Then they got to Trick-or-Treat again going to the other teachers on the hallway their classrooms are on. For some reason that class in the middle of Trick-or-Treat sessions was extra nonproductive. I wonder why. It is kind of an unwritten rule that homeroom teachers have to dress up for Elementary school, so we had a good set of costumes by the foreign and Chinese teachers.

I went as Miss Frizzle (from Magic School Bus), there was a pirate, a Phantom of the Opera, Picasso and a witch on my floor. The floor above me housed an Egyptian Pharoh(ess), a grandma (Kyle), a Geisha, a Tooth Fairy, and a Skeleton. The floor below me had a cartoon woman, a bumble bee, a zombie zebra, a jester, and another witch. This was a crazy day at school, and we accomplished nothing as teachers, but it was worth it to see a giant amount of tiny people dressed up as miniature versions of their favorite things. The campus I live on has about 120 foreign teachers living in various bulidings. One of the buildings has a vacant half room that the teachers have turned into a bar area. So for Halloween each of the 6 floors in the building had a different activity or game and drink. It started at 6:30pm. I don't know what person was that enthused about dressing up but the party remained pretty low-key around 8:30 when most people, including myself, made an apperance. This was an awesome crowd to get dressed up with. Everyone was dressed up. Even if they didnt have a full blown costume on, they did some pretty good zombie makeup. Out in Shanghai you can prety much expect to see all of the expats dressed up and all of the Chinese, well, not. That didn't make any difference to us though. Miss Frizzle had an excellent time.

Government Mandated Holiday #2

As I said in my last post, the government here in P.R.C. mandates all of the holidays.The previous holiday in Sept that I wrote about was celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival. The 1st of October marks National Day in China. For this holiday we got a week off of school. Now let me explain something to you. National Day is when the citizens of China are given time to go back to their homes and villages to spend time with their families. This is not what happens. All of the tourist spots in China become swarmmed with Chinese tourists. The normal population of cities like Beijing and Shanghai doubles to tripples. And in case you didnt know, Shanghai's current population is upwards of 23 million people. So... a group of friends and I decided we should act like the citizens of the country we were in an travel like mad men. Our week started out great. The first night off we partied in Shanghai. I found a bar kitty and it loved me :)

. The first whole day off is apparently hell to travel on, so we just hung out in Shanghai on the 1st. We had tickets to visit Nanjing the next day. We were up decently early and at the train station to depart on the 200ish km/hr train by noon. Here is a random fun fact about China: you cant do anything as a foreigner without your passport. Not a copy. Not a passport card. Your actual passport. Anywho, we boarded the train and played cards for an hour and a half or so before we arrived in Nanjing. Nanjing was the capital of China prior to Beijing. There are lots of things we wanted to see there and were planning to only stay one night. Once we got off the train we started a walk around a large lake in the city towards the only mountain close enought to walk to, which was supposedly a National Park. One of the people with us on the trip spoke Mandarin well and attempted to communicate with some people on the street to get directions to the park. The first day was pretty much a disaster. We walked for blocks and could not find what the first person's directions were talking about. Then the next person instructed us to get on the public bus and it would take us there. It did not. It took us to a place downtown near a Starbucks. So being the irritable, tired, Americans we are... we got a coffee. So now we are a group of 7 white people in the city of millions of Chinese, and what do we have in our hands. Starbucks. If we didn't scream America already... we did now. Anywho, with our Starbucks in hand, we walked what seemed like miles trying to find a place to eat dinner that wasn't KFC. There was a KFC every block, but no mom-and-pop dinner shop we could score some authentic Nanjing grub at. Oh well. We ended up eating some Chinese chain that was quite good. From there, another set of directions instructed us to get on the Metro and change lines to go to a river walk that was supposed to have great lights at night. Maybe we could get one thing done correctly this day. We did. We made it. It was a little canal that had lots of boats going up and down that were packed with what I am assuming were tourists. It was very pretty, but the crowd was overwhelming. After having walked a million miles that day, we decided to make this a quick visit as we were all getting irritable and still had a metro ride back to the train station and a 45 minute cab ride to the hotel. We got checked in at the hotel, with of course nothing less than our passports. A few of us decided to walk around the area and get a beer. These were the places we wanted to eat. Great little restaurants with locals playing card games out front on couches and fold up tables. We used our little Mandarin to get some beer and make small talk with some of the locals. We drank our beers on the rooftop of the hotel and hit the sack pretty early for a big day in the AM. We were all down in the lobby to check out at 0845 the next morning in hopes of getting back into the city by 10. This did not happen. The taxi drivers refused to take us all the way to the train station in Nanjing. So we got a taxi ride to the local bus stop where we would ride and hour long bus to the train station. The taxi ride was okay. At the bus stop we watched 3 busses we needed go by filled to the brim before deciding to get some breakfast and wait "rush hour" out. Breakfast was amazing. Egg fried rice, cooked in a 4x4 kitchen by a local family. This is what I wanted out of this trip. The real Nanjing. But alas, still a full day of tourism to persue.

This day we hit the National Park right off the bat. The Metro was packed. The park was packed. There was no part of this trip that was not packed. At one of the Ming tombs all we could see was heads. No bodies. It was uncomfortably packed. We managed to get what we wanted to see that day done in the park and decided to take the 9pm train back to Shanghai. We all slept on the way back. A second wind came upon Kyle as we arived in Shanghai, and we went out for wings and a beer with our backpacks and pillows. We had thoughts of going to Beijing later in the week, but after the crowds in Nanjing, we were a bit discouraged and decided another time would be better. We stayed in Shanghai the rest of the time off and did tourist-y things like go the the pearl market and the fake merchandise market. We ate expensive Western food and drank a fair amount of beer and enjoyed ourselves before we had to go back to the kid corall we work at. It was an excelent time off, and I enjoyed every minute of it. It was hard to get up at 6am today.

Government Mandated Holiday #1

So here in the PRC the government mandates all of the national holidays. They can change each year... it all depends on the people in charge at the time (and maybe a little $$). This year we had a 3 day break in mid-September for Autumn festival. For the festival two friends of mine, Kyle, and I went to Tantou Island with a local excursion group. We weren't quite ready to be booking our own traveling in Chinese yet... The trip started with an 8am pick up in downtown Shanghai. From Shanghai we had a 4 hour bus ride south and to the coast where we boarded a barge boat that took us to the island. We arrived at the island and then took a golf cart ride to the area of the island we would be staying on. There was an option to stay in a hostel on the island or you could camp on the beach. Kyle brought his tent to China with him, so we camped. After we got our tent set up, the island locals were nice enought to inform us that the tide would come up almost to the ledge where the beach ended. All of the "high land" spots had alreay been taken, so we did a lot of digging and made an 8x8 square we could put the tent on. We pulled rocks out of the sand for probably 45 minutes until we could cover the amount of rocks left with sand so it would be suitable to sleep on. For dinner we had seafood that had likely been caught that morning. It was a spread of several types of fish, calamari, several shellfish, rice patties, and even jelly fish. I tried everything. the jellyfish wasnt my favorite... but I can't say I hated it. Our tent situation worked out well. The tide came within 15 feet of us, but we were sleeping. Since I had been in China, I can say that I hadn't seen stars. Well the sky these two nights might have been the best sky I have ever seen. It was a full moon, and they had a festival one of the nights where they shot off fireworks right next to the moon. It was incredible. I thought it was going to be stupid, but it looked amazing next to the huge bright moon. It rained the next morning, so we played cards under a pavilion on the island. That afternoon we hiked to the top of the "mountain" that was on the island. There were close to 20 wind machines on the peaks of these mountains. I NEEDED to touch one.

It was good hike; about 3 hours total. It was mostly on gravel roads, but we went through 2 deserted town areas that the workers and their families lived in when they were installing the wind machines, but when they were finished, they just left. I mean they left in a hurry. There were still shoes on the mats outside peoples doors and in staircases. Kyle thinks something else happened on this island that made people leave in a hurry. I guess we will never know. The rest of the trip included eating tons of seafood, a bit of beach time, and enjoying the company of other expats we met on the trip as well as some local chinese people. The second night was supposed to be a barbeque. "BURGERS! YES!" I thought. Well, the Chinese tour guides tried very hard to make the Americans happy and full of delicions hamburger meat, but that just didn't happen. The meat was more than rare, it still fell apart in between the bun. Somehow a few people choked a full burger down. I couldn't even bring myself to eat a bite. They also had a fire and some marshmallows to cook over the fire. GREAT! Another let down. Fruit flavored marshmallows. Apple and strawberry. I did eat those... and they weren't half bad. Regular is better, but a flame broiled strawberry marshmallow is nothing to complain about. We stayed up late this night around the campfire and learned some Chinese games. We hit the sack one more time and in the AM got up to have breakfast and then sit on a barge/bus/taxi for 5 hours back. When we got back, it was universally decided between Kyle, Cameron, Emily, and I that we needed some good western food after 3 days of seafood. That s exactly what we did. I had a glass of white wine and a big pile of chicken mushroom alfredo linguini. Mmm. Then I went home and slept in a bed. Glorius bed sleep.

The Big Move

On August 25th Eastern Mountain Time I got on a plane with an exceptional companion I refer to as Kyle. It was 6:20 am. This plane took me to Chicago. There,

I got on another plane. That plane took me to San Francisco. Now we are talking. From SF I boarded a Boeing 747 and settled in for a long 12 and a half hour flight to Shanghai, China. My drug companion of choice for this flight was cyclobenzaprine, or Flexeril. I am not sure how I would have done without this companion on board. I observed many things on this flight in my foggy state. About half of the crew and passengers were of Asian descent. They would say things over the intercom in English and then repeat them in Chinese. One of my two meals provided was a rice dish. All of this said, do you think I was ready for exiting the plane in Shanghai? OF COURSE you think I was ready because you all know how confident, good with directions, and go-with-the-flow I am back in the US. I hate to tell you this, but you are wrong. As much as I had thought I had prepared myself to make this adventure easy, nothing short of a prior trip to China could have made me prepared for this journey. Kyle and I made our way through the airport to immigration where we got in the line labeled "Foreigners." The funny thing is, we were still surrounded by Asians. They were just Asians from countries other than China. Our trip through customs was a joke. We walked right through. Maybe we were supposed to do something else, but we couldn't read the Chinese signs, so we just walked with the crowd. Our greeter was the lovely Music Teacher at the school we would be teaching at. She brought us to the money exchange counter and hailed a taxi for us. There was only one problem. Her English was minimal. Our Chinese was non-existent. Ah yes, and the taxi driver spoke a dialect of Chinese called "Shanghainese" that no one could understand. We eventually made it to our dorm and brought our suitcases to our rooms. It was now almost 7pm on the 25th. We had been traveling for over 24 hours and just needed to sleep. That is exactly what we did. Crashed. Needless to say the next full week I was waking up bright-eyed and bushy tailed before 5am... but that is because I was going to bed around 8 pm. A 12 hour time difference is hard to adjust to. My fellow day/night rotating RN's can feel my pain here. And for the record, I don't think that my job rotating shifts helped me with this transition at all. I never thought I would enjoy dorm living again, but my co-workers in my dorm are my connection to the Western world.