Good times in Harbin

"It's not very nice to throw poop at people, Felix. Perhaps you shouldn't do that."

We told her already five times that we didn't want to cross the river on her horse sleigh. That it was too expensive and tacky. She said that we are not allowed to cross the river on foot. We said that there are people doing it at this very moment. She said it would take an hour at least. We laughed and said it would take at most 15 minutes, judging by the distance separating us from the north shore. She pointed at a different price on her sheet, then bargained down despite the fact that we just wanted to walk. She first blocked Brendan's way with her body, then as he was going past her, she grabbed him by the forearm. Three times. Don't tell me she wasn't going after it!

There was also the fat bitch who reached to take my money out of my wallet as I was bargaining to buy a badass russian fur hat, then struggled as I was taking my money back out of her hands. I finally had to push her so hard that she almost fell on the ice, so she replied with an insult in dongbeihua (northeastern dialect). This game can go both ways, so I shouted my best insults in kueibeikehua. I still bought the hat, she should be glad.

Or the girl who was pointing at a different price for our (already massively overpriced) hot cocoa. "Hey, I can read Chinese, and THIS is the price we owe you!" said Brendan, before giving her the exact change. She was then trying to take the rest of his money from his wallet, while her ripoffmate was blocking the door. A 103-pound Chinese girl is not the hardest thing to move out of the way, but still, that shit is frustrating. If we add to that the taxi drivers giving you false directions, the incompetent train station ticket clerks and the human scumbags found in tourist areas, it's not hard to feel that sometimes China sucks. Bad.

BUT of course, you also meet some super nice people, much more than the vermin listed above. These people make the overall experience enjoyable, while the bad ones make good anecdotes to start a blog entry with a punch sentence. Hihihihi.

One of those nice people is Mr. Ji Chun An, that we met on the long ass train ride Zhengzhou-Harbin. 25 hours on a Chinese train may seem totally unenjoyable to some people and I fully understand why, but for a guy whose primary goal is to interact with the local populace, you can't really get better than being locked in a train car with nothing else to do but talk to them! Brendan and I were ready for the ride, with our 24-pack of beer and our 2 kg of peanuts (we only left empty shells and empty cans behind). We had assigned seats, but past Tianjin ultramodern space station-like central train hub, as the train progressed through Chinese Siberia and its desolate plains, some seats got empty and therefore people invited us with "Hello! Hello! Laowai! Sit!". Brendan was of course basking in attention more than me, with his fluent Chinese, but I still managed to hold some semi-decent conversations. I'm cool. So yeah, Mr. Ji, he was quite a cool man, and he had actually been to Canada (he showed me his visa) to do "business"... when Brendan asked, he just said an evasive answer and didn't want to disclose what business it was. As soon as we got to Harbin, he got his boss to pick all three of us up in his Jeep to go have dinner, and then again he didn't say why he didn't want us to tell his boss we met on the train (we had to pretend I had met him when he came to Canada). The dinner took place in a semi-fancy place, with four large middle-aged Chinese men smoking cigarettes and hardly eating, and two foreigners forced to gorge themselves with the dumplings, the fish, the beef and the beer brought endlessly in front of them. The "boss" was a particularly mean-looking man with hands as thick as car doors and eyebrows permanently expressing anger, and he wasn't very talkative either. But hey, he treated us to a gargantuan feast of free food and found us a super cheap but nice, clean and heated hotel where we slipped in a coma from 9 PM till 9 AM, full of food, slightly drunk and exhausted from the long ass train ride.

This time we had more time to see Harbin. This city is quite off the tourist path of China, due to its distant northern location, but still there were many people in town for the snow and ice festival. The whole city center was full of nice ice sculptures, such as a Maneken Pis, a Beethoven, a Venus de Milo, a functional piano, and countless others. Impressive. The city itself is a bit like other Chinese cities, but with tons of Russian influences. Russian signs, Russian people walking around, and even a huge Russian cathedral. We went to a Russian restaurant (we were wondering what the hell is PECTOPAH before figuring out is it "restaurant" in cyrillic script) and had an AWESOME meal. Soup, brown bread with butter, breaded beef cutlets, salmon, grilled mutton (they call it shashlik), pickles, and half a liter of Водка. It was so good! Most of the patrons were Russian, and it was pretty cool to see the Chinese waiters speaking fluent Russian.
We then hung out a bit with an old Australian man we met there. His name is Bill and he works in the potato business, he has lived in China for 4 years but knows about 3 mandarin words... you meet people like that sometimes. We just chatted, had a few beers at a local bar then called it a day. We kept walking in the streets of Harbin, got lost in unlit streets, but finally made our way to the hotel. Neither of us had thought about memorizing the street the hotel was on...
The next day we went to the snow sculpture festival with two Belgian (Flemish side) dudes. It was pretty cool. Nothing much to say there. At night, we didn't go back to our small hotel but went to one of the "bath houses" instead. I had read on the internet that there are tons of shower houses like that in town, where you can shower and stay for the night, and sometimes even have food or massages. Well, most of these places have a side business that starts with a P and ends in Rostitution, but for those not interested in that kind of stuff, they also provide a nice bed (in a dorm with snoring Chinese men) and a hot shower for 18 kuai. Unbeatable price if you ask me.
The following day we walked across the river again, until we reached a military zone and had to come back. We also went to a place eloquiently called Big Pizza, where you can get an all-you-can-eat pizza (and other unhealthy things) for a decent price. We then wandered around until finally came the time to hop on the overnight train to Beijing.

We spent two wonderful days in Beijing, mostly thanks to our couchsurfing host Nan. The full story will come later, because right now, I have been back in Gongyi for less than twelve hours and already I'm back on the road! I'll let you know!