Blogs from Heilongjiang, China, Asia - page 8

On Wednesday, January 23rd, we got up and headed out to see other parts of Harbin - another sightseeing street and the temple area. First we walked down a street near our hotel to see the provincial musuem. We weren't interested in going in the museum, but it was on our way to another street with more western-style churches and then, at the far end, were the temples. We walked along the avenue and noticed another Russian Orthodox church. It appeared to be in limited use as a church, but was not open on that day. Across the street, we saw another church, some kind of Christian church, which had a white exterior. Again, I don't know that it is used much as a church, but it has been preserved and was a curiosity in this ... read more

Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province, near to Russia, there are a lot of Russian influence, there some Russian construction and so many Russian speaking the Mandarin. Harbin is also famous by Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, normally there have the Winter Olympics Games. Harbin's dialect is very close to Mandarin, so you don't need to worry about, and the people from north of China have a simple and straight behavior, it is easier to deal with, and women there are quite beautiful in my opinion. The main food there are pasta and dumpling, the temperature there in the winter can reach 30 degree under the zero, so outside of the house is better than any freezer in the world, and it is normal the people make the dumplings and put outside to freeze and then ... read more

Harbin was the 2nd to the last stop before my year as a student ended in China. This was one of the places I would highly recommend for people to visit when going to china as long as you can the cold. Harbin is best visited on January since it's when the ice & snow festival is celebrated. From Beijing, we traveled overnight via train and it took about 8 hours and we arrived about 5am in the morning. The temperature in Beijing during my time was about -18C but when we got to Harbin it dropped to a whopping -36C. I had four layers of clothing on, a thermal wear, shirt, wool jacket and a bubble jacket at the top and thermal pants, jeans and ski pants for the lower extremities. I learned my lesson ... read more

So, I've had an eventful week. First on Thursday one of my classes took me to the fruit vendors and told us to buy some fruit (she watched us so we weren't gesturing and using hand signals :). I bought grapes that turned out to be extremely sour as they were way too young, I forgot that outside the US growing seasons mean something, haha! Saturday was the biggest day as we left at 9 AM and they promised us that by 11 we'd be off the bus and scaling the mountain. We got there at noon because of rain and getting lost. They drive a lot slower on the highways than we do, the speed limit for buses is 100 km/hr (62 mph) and I don't think that the bus ever really exceeded that as ... read more

Vrijdag 2 februari. De afgelopen nacht had ik helaas niet goed geslapen. Mijn verkoudheid was verergerd en ik had geen trek in ontbijt of koffie en voelde me nogal loom. Ik bleef tot 12u bijna de hele tijd in bed met nog een dafalgan, nu vooral tegen de hoofdpijn. Berna werkte heel die tijd verder aan het praktisch deel van het verslag dat zo goed als af is en binnenkort op de weblog zou moeten komen. Verder werkte ze ook nog wat aan de voorbereiding van het stuk van onze reis in Guizhou. Rond 12u vertrokken we naar het Zhaolin park om de ijssculpturen en gebouwen daar bij daglicht te bekijken. De sfeer was nu niet zo sprookjesachtig meer maar we hadden nu een beter overzicht van het park en vonden in een hoek een groot ... read more