Man Man Zou

We just returned to Beijing from a 4-day trip up north to two cold cities- Dandong, a city right across the river from North Korea, and Haerbin (Harbin), a Russian city in China.

Dandong actually has a small tourism industry based on the fact that it’s right on the border with North Korea. Along the river there are people selling boat rides that’ll take you close to North Korean land, and there are telescopes set up on the banks for a closer look at the country. It’s very difficult to visit North Korea as a tourist, so we couldn’t visit. In fact, North Korea has closed its doors to visitors for the winter, making it impossible anyway. While in Dandong, we walked across a bridge that the US bombed during the Korean War. Alongside the bridge was a new bridge that is used to cross the border. Halfway across the river was the closest we got to North Korea.

The border crossing wasn’t busy at all, I saw one or two trucks go through every five minutes or so. North Korea and China are friends, so the military presence was nothing compared to what we saw in Western Sichuan, on the Tibet border.

Here is the Yalu River that is the border of China and North Korea. Guess which side is China:

We also visited the easternmost section of the Great Wall of China, which was special because a few months earlier, we visited the westernmost section of the Great Wall, thousands of kilometers away on the Silk Road. I was so happy that it snowed that day, and we were the first tourists to visit and leave our footprints in the snow. Here is a photo showing westernmost Great Wall in the desert, and, thousands of kilometers away, the easternmost Great Wall in the snow:

Dandong was a cute little town. The people were really nice and no one tried to rip us off. We hunted for Korean food, but found nothing suitable because it was all seafood, and it just looked like Chinese food anyway. We did find a small supermarket that had many Korean snacks to keep us entertained.

The last thing we did in Dandong was visit the “Museum to Commemorate U.S. Aggression” during the Korean War. I am not usually interested in museums, but I wanted to visit this one because I wanted to see what the deal was with China in the Korean War, and see what they had to say about the States. The museum was huge, and of course very patriotic. Usually I scoff and laugh at the silly things that are written to make China look like an angel, but here, since everything was written to make America look bad, I found it more amusing than anything. Some of it was even believable. The museum had a large section about POWs. It said that the Americans treated the “People’s Volunteers” (that was what the Chinese soldiers were called) very badly in the POW camp, and the People’s Volunteers treated the American POWs so well that many American soldiers surrendered so that they could go to the POW camp. Whether or not that’s true, I still found it very interesting to see all the propaganda that was littered everywhere for the Americans to find so that they would want to become a POW:

“She’s happy, because her husband is a POW- and no longer risking his life in the front lines… What about you? You may be killed or maimed any minute.” That’s convincing enough for me.

After our second day in Dandong, we caught an overnight train to Haerbin, that arrived at 3:30 in the morning. Haerbin was still up and running in the middle of the night, and after dealing with many lying hotel touts, we found ourselves a dump of a room near the train station for 40Y (under $6), bargained down from 150Y.

Haerbin was made famous worldwide by a toxic slick that came through town along the river last week. The good old Chinese government was behaving as usual and tried to hide the fact that a factory exploded and sent 100 tons of benzene down the Songhua River, by saying that water was suddenly shut down for four days due to maintenance. They weren’t successful at hiding their little secret, and soon the city found out and broke into pandemonium, buying up any form of liquid they could get their hands on- even soda. Thousands of people fled Haerbin, and this was all at the time when we were planning on going there. We postponed our visit for a week, until things died down and the benzene had all passed through town. The whole thing was ridiculous, but it seems to have taken the spotlight off the actual factory that exploded, since everyone is just concerned with the corrupt government that tried to hide it. The one thing that really concerns me is that the factory exploded in Jilin, which is far away from Haerbin. It wasn’t until Haerbin’s water was shut off, that people started to find out about it. I worry about all the towns and villages it passed through before Haerbin. No one has said anything about that.

Haerbin is a bit of a touristy city- unfortunately touristy enough to make it full of annoying people. It has quite a few Russian buildings, and a long pedestrian street with Russian shops and restaurants. The cool thing was that everyone was speaking Russian to us, as they thought we were Russian tourists. It was interesting to hear a Chinese person speaking Russian. We also ate at a Russian restaurant twice and it was very good.

It was bitter cold while we were there, and all the walkways were iced over. Thankfully, we were prepared for the cold after being in the Tibetan areas. The northern area of China also seems to be more prepared, since places were actually heated inside, unlike the Tibetan areas. It snowed on the second day in Haerbin, which helped a little. They make snowmen differently in China, like a cone instead of with balls, I never would have guessed!

After a lot of consideration, we visited the Siberian Tiger Park. Even though I love to see animals in real life, I try not to visit zoos- and China is the last place I’d ever want to visit one, especially after what I saw in Taiwan. My reasoning for visiting the Siberian Tiger Park was because at least they are in their natural environment (be it a fenced-in one), and even if they were put into the wilderness of China, they’d be poached anyway. And I just plain wanted to see the tigers. Concerning the park, of course the tigers’ space was too small, the park was uninformative, the visitors were all assholes with their yelling and throwing snow at the tigers, the stupid park sold meat and birds for tourists to throw at the tigers to help with their “wilderness training”, and I could go on and on, but that’s just too predictable. Yes the park was bad, but it was amazing to see hundreds of tigers roaming about in their field. It was unforgettable to see them chase after each other in the snow (I couldn’t help but get the National Geographic theme song in my head) and to be able to hear all the noises they made. Since the group of tourists we were stuck with only had the patience to yell at the tigers for a short time, after a few minutes we had the whole place to ourselves. It was just us on a platform and ninety tigers five meters below.

And now we’re on a soft-sleeper train back to Beijing. There were no hard-sleeper tickets available, so we had no choice but to splurge and buy soft-sleeper tickets, which are much more expensive. It even would have been cheaper to fly back to Beijing, but I hate flying and it’s so inconvenient to get to and from the airports. The soft-sleeper is amazing. Compared to the hard-sleeper, with 6 people to a section, in the soft sleeper, there are only 4 (and in our case today, 3). In soft-sleepers, the train conductors are actually a little polite, each person has their own LCD TV, there is a plug-in for my laptop, temperature control (though it’s still too hot anyway), a very nice toilet, a door to our section, wider beds, wider aisles, it goes on. We even have a nice Chinese guy in our compartment. His wife and daughter live in Calgary, but he can’t move there yet because his English is not good enough to find work. He speaks fluent Russian, but that doesn’t help him find employment in Canada. I’m glad this will be my last train ride in China, since I have some terrible memories from all the hard-sleepers I’ve taken. It’s nice to go out on a good note.

And one more thing, I haven’t posted in a while because I haven’t been motivated. The reason for this is because we’re on the east coast of China. The east coast of China is modern and boring compared to the rest of China. It’s just not my kind of place, but I think Mark likes it for historical reasons. Things are expensive, the people aren’t so interesting and they aren’t very interested in us. I actually did write a journal entry for Shanghai, but it was so boring that I haven’t bothered posting it yet. The plus side of this boringness is that life is easy and convenient. We recently saw our first 7-eleven, first English newspaper, first Starbucks, first Wal-Mart, and first Dairy Queen in our four months in China.