Monday, July 12

We flew to Harbin on Friday night. It was like flying from Los Angeles to Bismarck, North Dakota, which, I understand, can also be hot in the summer. We were the only westerners in the airport -- but managed to get a bus into town. The taxi drivers were very upset with us -- we were their only hope at 8:00 at night, they even came on the bus to argue we should go in a car. They wanted 100 yuan ($12.50). I said that was the Beijing price, surely it was too much for a Harbin price. They said but this was further. I said, but the bus was fine, and only cost 10 yuan. They said they could not take us for that price, I said, fine we were not asking them to, the bus is good, and they left. Others on the bus seemed to enjoy our determination and when we got into town all were very helpful telling us where to get off and handing down the luggage.

The Modern Hotel has an historic plaque outside and seems determined to try to keep itself alive, but it is a hard job. It is on the central street (now a pedestrian street) -- indeed the fist pedestrian shopping street I have seen so far. It doesn't have many rooms, and half of them face onto a plaza where there is loud music every night -- I don't think they can rent those out. In any case, our room was fine. They had told me on the phone it would be 338 yuan, but when we got there they said 660. I told them I had written down the price, he then said he recommended we take the superior room, indeed he would give us the better room for 480. We insisted 338 was fine, it also included breakfast, so we were set, and indeed our room was fine, although there was construction going on in the building next door and it continued through the night. I wanted to stay in this hotel because it would have been a prominent landmark in the 1920s, when Elene's mother was living here.

Elene's great uncle was the first to come to Harbin, to work on the railroad to Dalian (at times called Port Arthur). Her family came after the Russian Revolution, in 1921, when she was about seven. She doesn't remember a lot from those days, but Elene remembers her saying how the best watermelons were the small round ones she had there as a girl, so we had to check out the watermelons. There is also a picture of her standing by the river with a summer parasol, so we took a similar picture of Elene -- sans parasol.

Elene's aunt had told her there was no point in going to Dalian because all the churches had been torn down. Indeed the pretty wooden one named for St. Nicholas is gone, but another with classic onion shaped towers is now a museum. There we found pictures from the old days -- one that could have been her great uncle -- a Russian foreman working on the railroad with a group of Chinese laborers. Probably not, but it is likely he might have known the man in the picture with his dashing Russian mustache. We also saw pictures of the shopping street (and of course the modern hotel). I bought Elene a book on the architecture as a present -- that should help reawaken her mother's memory.

Our best good fortune in Harbin happened at the Holiday Inn when I was writing my last message. A young man walked in to use the Internet, but seemed so happy to see Americans, he didn't care that I was using it. His name is Eric. He is 25 and came to China (Hong Kong) 6 years ago as a Mormon missionary. After two years there, he went back to Utah to college, giving up his church which he feels is too aggressive in its proselytizing, but keeping his love for China. He spent his junior year in Beijing, returned to Utah for his senior year and is spending this summer after graduation on an internship with Weyerhauser, the lumber company.

Eric had just arrived back from Siberia checking out lumber camps, so having tea with us at the Holiday Inn was a real change. He offered to take us to the train station to get our tickets to Dalian -- we were quite determined that we should ride that train that her great uncle had worked on.

For reasons we couldn't figure out, there were no seats for Monday, but plenty for Sunday and Tuesday. Our schedule was tight, so we decided to head south on Monday, taking a train as far as we could go -- a city called Shenyang, and then find a train from there headed to Dalian. Eric assured us there were many more trains from Shenyang to Dalian because the Beijing trains stopped there, so we were fairly confident we could handle that ourselves.

The rest of Sunday we walked around town (and the church/museum) with Eric, taking pictures and imagining what it was like in the 1920s. Eric left on the train that night and the next morning we did some shopping, bought a picnic, and boarded our train with little problem. There are no "classes" in China, rather it is the seats that define the trip: Soft seat or hard seat, soft berth or hard berth. Our train was from 12:20 until 8:00 at night, so soft seats were in order. However, this train had only soft berths, so we ambled our way down the Liaotung peninsula in solitary splendor -- a private room with a bed on each side, lots of pillows, and comforters which we did not need.

Arriving in Shenyang was a different matter. Without Eric, I had to negotiate our next tickets. With forethought I had a note in Chinese that said "We would like two soft seat tickets to Dalian. Please help us. Thank you." That was fine until I presented it at the ticket window where the woman then began a long discourse which lost me entirely. Giving up, I simply said, "How much, please?" and suddenly the computer spewed out two little tickets. I should have guessed that for $7 for the two of us, this was not going to be first class, but I was oblivious to that and headed for the first class waiting room, where they let us in without objection, I guess because we were foreigners.

I will describe the train ride which lasted from 11:00 PM to 6:30 am by saying we felt fortunate that no one in our car had live chickens with them. Every seat was taken, and as we reached more stops there were people standing in the aisles. The hardness of the seat was bearable, but the lack of leg room was a real stress. We sat across from a grumpy, sleepy couple who seemed upset if I moved my feet at all. At one point I stood up to stretch and the man immediately jumped over into my seat by the window. I made him get up -- that didn't help the foot wars. Did I mention the train wasn't air conditioned? That didn't matter as the night got cooler, but it made for a pretty sooty trip.

Elene was a trooper through it all, neither of us daring to drink water lest we should have to deal with the WC on board -- and possibly lose a seat in the process.

Well we'll have great stories to tell about that ride, and this is China after all. We checked in to the Holiday Inn (the chain has a very big presence here in China) feeling the kind of grimy where you want to burn your clothes. We won't do that, but after showers and a bit of sleep, we are ready to set out and explore this pretty, breezy city that was so fought after for so long.