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.