Harbin

Harbin

Harbin Tiger Reserve


So I am overdue for a blog. So basically, I am going to combine all of Harbin into one blog post. Bear with me, here. I wrote this at all different times.

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I didn’t attend the opening night “party” I planned, but I hear that was an experience. I had found a place in my China book called Arbucks. If you do research on harbin, this restaurant is commonly mistaken to be a Starbucks, because Arbucks, or USA Bucks, uses pretty much the same sign. It’s described as a kitschy western place, complete with saloon doors, cowboy hats, western style food and all. Eh, well, there was no phone number for this place, so we didn’t call ahead. So something like 40-50 people from our group headed over in cabs, to find this small hole in the wall with a very limited menu and barely any room. I know a few people stayed and ordered food, but the place was so overwhelmed that they began telling our guests that they had no food!

So I think people spread out, luckily I picked it because its on the main drag of the city, so there were definitely other options for them. Some went to a place called Café Russia, but there, someone ordered an expensive cheese plate only to have it come out and be a plate of American Cheese singles, like individually wrapped (tho the wrappers had been taken off and left an imprint), like Kraft.

Yesterday, I organized a day trip, that actually went pretty well. I was able to rent a bus from a non-English speaking travel agent here in the hotel (how good am I?) and get the times right and ticket prices and all kinds of things. I was able to turn down lunch and a tour guide, and to tell her the itinerary for the day. I speak no Chinese, mind you, I’m just that good.

But I had to pay her by a certain time in order to get the bus for the next day, and I had to go right to the show, so I asked one of the moms to pay for it and we would pay her back the next day. I guess the lady was trying to scam the mom, because mom was quoted 1400Y, when I was quoted 1200, and I don’t know what happened, but somehow we ended up with a tour guide, which pissed some people off. But oh well. And he talked the ENTIRE time, and kept trying to screw with our schedule, but we were on limited time, so we had to keep forcing him and the driver to just go.

We ended up taking off late that morning because people cancelled on us, so we didn’t know who to wait for, so we took off about a half an hour late.

The plan began with a trip to the Siberian Tiger Park. It was this big gated park with security similar to your average prison, complete with double gates, one door opens, the car drives in, that door closes, then the next door opens to let the car through.

It was a very lush reserve with lots of trees, and the tigers were doing a lot of resting in the shade of these trees, so it was hard to spot them sometimes. But there were a lot! We were in a windowed bus, but apparently you could pay more for a caged bus, which we didn’t know. So us being stupid americans in a hot unconditioned bus opened all the windows. Great for letting air in, not so great because if they wanted, the tigers could just jump right up into the bus! But we were sooo close!

Our driver was crazy. Which you can tell in my video.

Then we did the walking part. These tigers were in a smaller area, though they still had plenty of room. It was here that you could buy poultry to feed to the animals. And you could feed them yourself. You can see this in the video too.

We saw no cows being devoured alive.

Then we found the area where you could hold a baby tiger! Aw… so cute! But the tiger was going crazy right as it was my turn, so I got a bit scared to hold him, but when I did, omg, was he sooo cute.

So, between taking off late, the feeding of various fowl, and every one of us holding a baby tiger, we left much later than anticipated.

Our next stop was Sun Island Park, home of the world famous ice sculptures. Some folks went into the park, but most of us stayed outside, not seeing how we could possibly cover this huge park in 45 minutes.

But we made it home in time for the show, in plenty of time.

In other news, Greg is out sick today, so Chris is in for Rolf and has done a fabulous job for the two performances.

In sad news, we got the news about our beloved cast member Tracy that we didn’t want. Tracy, you are loved and missed. Take care of yourself, please!

Otherwise, I am still trying to recover from jet lag, and it certainly doesn’t help that the sun is in full force by like, 6am. So I go to bed early like, 10pm, and wake up around 7am. Which is actually a lot of sleep, but it doesn’t feel like enough.

Tonight, we pack for our ventures to Nanning. We have to pack one suitcase to take with us on the plane and one to put on the luggage truck. The fun thing about the luggage truck is that is has to travel 3,000+ miles from the far north to the way south - and we won’t get it until the day before we leave Nanning, a week later. Fun times. AND we can’t pack anything valuable in the suitcases going on the truck. So…

After the show, three of the interpreters came to hang out in our room, because we are just cool like that, and they are SOOOO much fun! We talked a lot, and they are so giddy it was funny! But they have excellent English, and it was cool teaching them new conversational phrases.

But two minutes before they got to our room, I made a phone call. See, our first day here, Sarah and I were experimenting with our hairdryers and converters… I should get my money back, because immediately after turning the hairdryer on, we blew a circuit in the room. We blew the socket by my bed, two lamps, the hall light, a bathroom light, the tv socket, and one of the sockets near the tv socket.

So yea, it’s been fun times here. When it happened, we called housekeeping and they sent someone up to investigate, but she didn’t understand and kept trying to take the lamps out of the room, and we kept stopping her. The lamps were fine, there’s just no power! We called Kit, who is the Asst Stage Manager and is from Hong Kong, so she speaks Chinese, and we tried to get her to explain it to the lady. But she still didn’t understand, and she left, and never came back.

So we spent most of the week with half a room of power.

But I got sick of it, and called the front desk again, and a VERY nice man came up and we pointed to everything that didn’t work. He made a phone call, then said one minute. He left, and a few minutes later, an electrician came in and we pointed to everything that didn’t work again. He reached behind our nightstand, and one item at a time, turned everything on. We must have looked like bumbling idiots because we were clapping and cheering and jumping up and down!

So we are looking into buying a made in china, bought in china hairdryer. They usually have dryers in the hotels, but the wattage is usually 1000W or under, which sucks, if you’ve ever tried to use that low a wattage. I found some 1600 watts for about $30US, so we may split that and hope that doesn’t take our a room’s worth of electricity.

We are also looking into buying a wireless router. We bought a cheap wired router, but despite my infinite tech knowledge and also being able to find the instructions in English, we still can’t get it set up properly. So I emailed my friend Ryan about bringing a router back from the states, where he is currently visiting this week.

I have been going to the gym here at the hotel. It’s kind of small, but still impressive for a hotel gym. There’s a tv and dvd player, full length wall mirror and space to do floor work, several cardio machines, free weights, and one of those round pieces of equipment where there are about 8 different excersizes and smaller weight machines attached. But I tried some of them, and they are just not working properly, so I am a bit scared to use them. If I was much more muscular and had better and safer control, maybe, but as I am still a novice use, I didn’t feel safe using them. The treadmill was precarious enough. SO I used the free weights. It’s hot as heck in there, and it comes complete with a random lady who sits there and watches you the whole time.

Now it is Monday, and Sarah and I went out for the day. We were going to go back to Sun Island, but it was a very expensive cab ride, so we passed and went back to the main shopping street and walked all along that again, I took lots of pictures of the Russian architecture.

We stopped in Café Russia and ran into a bunch of cast members, whom we them took off with. We took a 2Y (maybe 40cents) boat ride across the river to what ended up being Sun Island! We were following Chris who went to the island for the explicit reason of taking the cable cars back! They were 50Y each (about $7) and we got some dorky red hats. I got some video.

I have a bunch of other short clips as well that I’ll put online.

Then sarah and I went back to café Russia for dinner. I wish I was hungrier, but we ordered their famous red soup (which was supposed to be vegetable and beef, but ended up being almost entirely cabbage, 3 carrot pieces, 4 potato pieces, and about half a cabbage, it was still very good), their homemade bread (which honestly, was just a thick slice of white bread, so I barely ate it), and an Indian beef curry, which was excellent! Again, not much beef, but it was still excellent.

I’m trying to remember if anything else really noteworthy happened, but nothing I can think of at this precise moment.

Tomorrow we are off to Nanning, so I’ll write about that later!