Finally in Harbin

After approximately 60 hours of traveling, I have arrived in Harbin! It's crazy to think that this will be my home away from home for the next two semesters. We are currently staying in a hotel on campus before we move into Dorm No. 6 on Sunday because as foreigners we may be infected with swine flu. Staying in this hotel is clearly an effective way of stopping our spreading the virus. Despite the annoyance of another move, it's good to finally be on the campus that I have seen so many times on Google Maps.

My trip started at O'Hare airport when I boarded my direct flight to Beijing with Andrew and Cortne. I didn't realize at the time how uncomfortable that seat would come to be after about five hours (less than half of the 13 hour flight!). The guy sitting next to me was a student at Colgate headed to Beijing for the semester. He seemed really friendly, and we briefly introduced ourselves. As the plane pulled away from the gate, he popped a few pills from his backpack, but I didn't really think anything of it until a few minutes after we left the ground. He turned to me and said, "I feel like a huge blob in this seat right now...like my brain is a bowl of jelly." I couldn't help but laughing a little, and he went on to say, "I just took three sleeping pills, like the really strong kind." For the rest of the flight he served as a comedic relief from my cramped United Airlines seat because every time I glanced over at him, he was staring straight ahead with a wide-eyed distant look on his face. I guess those sleeping pills weren't very effective.

Clearing customs was no problem despite the heat sensors we walked past to check for swine flu, and CET representatives Connie and Li Yanqiu met us at the airport to take us to the hotel where we would stay for a total of less than 30 hours before catching the overnight train to Harbin. I was exhausted that night and after a group dinner with the other CET students, I went to bed early, which unfortunately caused me to wake up at 5:00am. I thought I would take advantage of my short time in Beijing, and I went outside for a walk, but before I got two blocks away from the hotel, I ran into Andrew on the street who offered me a breakfast sandwich that he had just bought from a street vendor. They consisted of an egg, some type of bean sauce, and some lettuce wrapped in a pancake, and they tasted surprisingly good. Perhaps even more surprisingly, I didn't get sick from eating them.

After a quick orientation meeting, most of our group walked to Tian'anmen Square, which looked a lot closer to the hotel on the little cards the front desk gave us than it actually was, but we got there eventually with many photo opps along the way. By 7:00 we were on our way to the train station and off to Harbin where we arrived at 7:05 this morning.

Connie gave us a nice tour of the campus, and we saw Dorm No. 6 for the first time along with the cafeteria, classroom building, and some other campus buildings. After the tour, a few of us found this little noodle place with absolutely no English or pictures on the menu, which was a cool change from Beijing. The 麻辣面 that I ordered was amazing, and with some dumplings and a bottle of water it added up to just $1. I can see that the only money problem I'm going to have here is breaking my 100RMB bills.

First (and Possibly Last) Post

Although I had originally planned to debut this blog from my room in Dorm No. 6, I recently discovered through my friend Cortne Edmonds' blog (Of Applesauce and Broken Mirrors) that Blog Spot has been made inaccessible in China, at least for the time being. While I may very well be able to post from Harbin, I thought I would notify my few but loyal followers of this development. The life of Dorm No. 6 may be quite a bit shorter than expected. Anyway, while I'm writing this post, I figured that I might as well elaborate on the preparations I have made so far for my trip.

After weeks of checking the mailbox for my officially stamped visa documents to come from China - the Chinese love stamps, especially red ones - I finally received them in the mail and went straight to the Chinese Consulate in Chicago the next day. Dropping off the visa application was rather uneventful, but when I returned to pick up my passport, I had a first-hand Chinese cultural experience. The line was moving slowly, and the Chinese woman at the back seemed to be in a hurry, so she walked up to the window to speed things up. She and the woman behind the counter started yelling at each other in Chinese and as the argument escalated, the woman in line angrily walked out of the room. A few minutes later, she must have realized that the next closest consulate was in New York and that if she wanted whatever documents she had applied for she would have to come back, so she walked in again and went to the end of the line. Meanwhile, no one else in the room seemed to have noticed what had gone on. I assume that that kind of scene is rather common on the streets of Harbin.

Speaking of the streets of Harbin, this summer I have spent a lot of time looking at maps of the city on Google Maps and through Google Image Search. It will take a lot of getting used to since very few of the streets seem to be straight north-south or east-west, but I hope that after two semesters I'll be able to find my way around. It seems like there is a relatively good bus system, and they are putting in a subway line that will have a stop at my university, but I'm not sure when that will be finished. Apparently, there are some tunnels under the city that were constructed during World War II and will become part of the subway. Either way, the university is in the Daoli district, which is the main commercial and shopping district of the city, so I don't think anything will be too far away. That's pretty much all I can gather from the internet. I haven't received any information on my roommates or classes yet, so I'll just have to wait and see what the real Harbin is like.