An Introduction

This blog is intended to provide semi-regular updates on my trip to Harbin, so friends and family can have a look and see what I've been up to. I aspire to it being part diary, part travelogue, part saucy confessional.

Perhaps a brief introduction is in order: I leave tomorrow for Harbin, the "Ice City", the "Oriental Moscow", a "Place for Drying Fishing Nets" which is the capital of Heilongjiang (Black Dragon River) Province in the far north-eastern corner of China. It occupies a wider, fairly ill-defined region known as Manchuria, and sits a few hundred miles away (as far as I can tell) from Russia (specifically Siberia), N. Korea and Mongolia.

My reasons for going? Well, there are a few:

1) I had a fantastic time in Shanghai and I want to see a bit more of China.
2) Although I'd characterise my Mandarin as fluent compared to most non-native students, I think there's still huge room for improvement, particularly in terms of business Mandarin.
3) I have a job on a graduate scheme but it doesn't start until September 2007. This seems a much better alternative to taking a job filing or stacking shelves.
4) Shanghai was a big step for me in terms of flying the nest, but I still had the practical and emotional support of 4 or 5 friends who went out on the same program to teach. This time, I'm going to a strange city where I don't know a soul, and where there's no big ex-pat community (except the Russians), and no heaving night-life scene to distract me.
5) The food! I miss all the various meat-on-sticks, iced tea in bottles, big bowls of freshly pulled noodles topped with beef shavings, fresh soy milk, and fried things topped with smaller chopped bits of other fried things.

The whole process so far has been quick. I only signed my contract with BDO a couple of days ago, and since then I've been shopping for flights, sorting out my F visa, finding a place to stay, and buying tourist tat to hand out to locals. Partly it's been due to the British Airways industrial action being cancelled, which netted me some really cheap (but very soon) air tickets, but it's also because I'm aiming to get there at least a few days before Chinese New Year on the 18th February so I can get settled in. My own fault I suppose for not getting a job sooner!

I have had the time to do a smattering of research and here's what I've come up with:
1) Harbin is cold, averaging very sub-zero temperatures until March. Talk of Celsius and degrees is meaningless to me. All I know is that when water goes hard it's gone sub-zero. To give you an idea though, apparently 7 layers of clothing is still not enough, and the lady I spoke to at the Harbin Institute of Technology where I'll be studying said that Harbin is very warm at the moment. When I asked how warm is very warm, she said "Oooh, -10C". However, summers are meant to be "dry and quite lovely".
2) Harbin is most famous for its Ice Festival. Some of the most skilled sculptors in the world carve things out of Ice, which people look at. Then everyone has a party.
3) The city has a mixture of Russian, European and Chinese influences, reflected in its cuisine, architecture, and drinking habits. The Rough Guide even says that Harbin has the hardest-drinking Chinese in all of China!
4) Harbin is something of a rough industrial city (c.f. the aforementioned drinking habits). One anonymous internet poster said that Russians have an annoying habit of beating the tar out of foreigners for no good reason. Good job I'm Chinese. Despite this, it's apparently much safer than London, and cleaner than Beijing, despite the fumes given off by the local penicillin factory.

Anyway, I'm just about packed and ready to go now. I don't know how long it will be until I get internet access again, but next time I post I'll be shivering in Harbin!