Sushi, Spooks & Snaps

I've had a hankering for sushi for weeks now, and Yudi - who knows a whole lot about Harbin eateries - finally had time to show me to this place: an upscale 日本料理 restaurant.

The weather was abysmal - a driving, sleety, cold slush - and the picture correspondingly bad, as I rushed from taxi to restaurant.

Inside it was all paper screen walls and sliding doors, ornate scrolls and traditional uniforms. The surly waitresses ignored us on the way in though - no traditional shout of "Irasshaimase!" which I've come to expect and demand!

We took off our shoes and sat down at a low-table, hollowed out underneath so as to avoid uncomfortable kneeling. The menu was a heavily-bound tome filled with well-photographed deliciousness. Platters of sashimi and sushi, hand-rolls, tempura, soups, noodles, dumplings, teppanyaki, beers (Asahi, Kirin AND Sapporo!), several types of sake, all the way down to a page full of bento. Less authentically, they even had foie gras and raw oysters on the shell.

We discussed theories as to why I was having so little luck with finding a flatmate. The going rate for an English teacher seems to be upwards of 100RMB (£7) an hour here, yet I was being begrudged a couple of hundred RMB/month rent for free language exchange (and of course, some great company)?

Was my advert written badly? To be sure, I have the handwriting of a developmentally-challenged three year-old but surely it's legible enough? Were Harbiners wary of living with a foreign devil? Ren Zhen and Yudi eventually came to the consensus that HIT students were both too hardworking and predominantly poor to waste time spending time with a foreigner and learning English, instead preferring to concentrate on their major.

As we ate, we exchanged ghost stories - I related the time I saw a girl standing at the foot of my bed, watching me, while staying in Tibet, only for her to vanish in the blink of an eye. Yudi responded with a story about a boy from Yunnan that could see ghosts. Her story ended with the oddly anticlimactic

"Then he went to University, found a girlfriend, and couldn't see ghosts any more."

Possibly under the influence of sake, Ren Zhen suggested at some point that I looked a bit like model and actor (New Police Story, The Banquet) Daniel Wu (吴彦祖) (pictured left). I wish!

I didn't know enough Chinese stars to make a corresponding comment in return, so I snapped this shot while she was trying to shoot me with her phone. You decide.

How was the food? Competently prepared but uninspired. After we'd eaten, a waitress came in and placed a single stick of gum in front of each of us. Oddly enough, it wasn't even a Japanese brand, but 足球王 - Football King! What does it say about confidence in your own food if you want customers to cover up the after-taste straight away? And with some cheap gum at that!