The first trips in and around Harbin

The time is ripe for another update from the far East.
Ok let me start at the moment that the previous post ended.

Since then i have taken my first Taichi lesson. Reckoned it would be good to get into some chinese martial arts thinggie. However, this thinggie appears to be very very slow. Its like slowmotion karate or something. This slow motion thing makes it quite difficult actually. It was fun though. Just to do something strange chinese.

Two weekends ago i have also made my first (almost) trip around Harbin. We went to a place called sun island. It is like The park in Harbin. However, in reality its a kind of bad disney land. Think disney land without Mickey and Minnie and without any of the big rides, but with the too sweet irritating music and artificiallity of it. They even have a hill (think dutch size hills) which we kindly called Thunder mountain as it evidentally resembled the Disney thunder mountain. Everyting is too nicely groomed and organised and if you try to walk over or sit on the grass some 'grass ranger' comes and chases you away. Although it was good to be out of the city for a bit i was quite frustrated by the fake-ness of the place.

The upcoming week i will go to Shanghai. The entire week is off as the chinese celebrate their national day (1st of October). This means that 1,3 billion people simultaneously have holidays. As this is for most people one of the three weeks of holidays they have, all of them want to go home to visit their family and relatives. The result is that it is very very difficult to find train tickets to whatever destination. After queue-ing for two days at 7:30h in the morning (with of course no tickets as a result) we managed to get train tickets to shanghai via a travel agency in Beijing. This proved once again that all is about connections in china. And maybe a small extra fee!
About this trip to Shanghai: It is about 3000km and therefore a 30h train ride. Its part of the china experience i guess.

Today i moved in a new room here on campus. Its a bigger room which i share with a spanish friend. He is leaving this saturday so with some luck i might have a room of my own for some time.
I have been unhappy with my previous room here for some time. However from the chinese perspective i had no reason at all to feel like that. The chinese students namely share rooms with 6 people. And those rooms are small, and with bunk beds. Their gate closes at 10:30h and apparently around midnight their electricity is shut off so they have too sleep.Luckily i am not chinese!

Most westerns that stay here (i am excluding the russians here, cause they are a breed of their own) teach english to chinese kids. Getting a job as an english teacher is really easy here. There are lots of advertisements on notice boards and i have been approached on the street already as well. You can make around 700Euro a month here for teaching 16hours a week. Given the fact that the average salary in china is 150Euro a month you can see that these guys can live the good life here.
I could start doing this as well, but chinese is so difficult and frustrating at the moment that i dont have time for this side activity. Hanyu tai nan!!!

I have also been swimming with some chinese swimming group last week. I was logically the only foreigner. It turned out to be quite extreme. usually i go swimming for about an hour. However, these chinse gusy always go for 2,5 hour. As it turned out this is mainly resting, and not swimming time. So with the excuse of having homework i left after an hour :D It was cool to meet these guys though. In a couple of weeks its a good way to practise my chinese.

A nice little road trip! Thats what we made last weekend. We (a team of five 'jetzt geht's loss' germans, one american ('beermonster' ryan), one swiss guy ('ab ins hockli' sven), one austrian girl ('Servus' Bettina), one chinese guy ('show me your dancemoves' boafend) and of course 'international man of mysterie :D' Me! We went to a place called Wudalianchi, situated about 6hours north of Harbin. It is in fact a nature reserve with some old volcanoes. Last eruption stems from about 300 years ago so it did not get that hot under our feet!
'Its quite a nice park as long as you keep your expectations low' said a guy at school to me. So having been there with that mindset i can admit its indeed quite ok. We actually climbed one of the craters (with a dazzling hight of 165 meter, which puts it in a sever competition with the highest point of the Netherlands!! =Challenge: who of you foreigners knows how high (or low depending on your perception) our biggest hill is?!?=
At the entrance of the park we were summonded not to start a fire in the park; we assumed this was because of their fear for people lighting the volcanoe again :)
During the ascent i managed to get a hold of a megaphone belonging to the guide of a chinese tourgroup. With this i could practise all my chinese oral skills; This resulted in a dazzling 'Ni hao' and 'Jiayuo' which was kindly replied by the chinese :D
The rest of the park consisted of nice lava fields and some lakes. The best part was the colours of the trees. As autumn is coming everywhere you looked there was a nice mix of green, yellow, brown and red colours. Really 'piaoliang'.

At night we had a cool karaoke experience as well. We walked in this bar with too loud techno music. It appeared they had a karaoke room upstairs. So after they had taken us there they showed us the song book. First only chinese songs. Quite difficult, especially when one is not completely wasted yet. So then the book with english songs was offered to us. Hmm, only classical music. We democratically decided that that was not the kind of music night we wished so we all took off. However, when we arrived on the street, the owner came rushing out telling us that the real english song book had been 'locked up' because nobody used it anyway. For us he was willing to 'unlock' it from his secret vault. So our party returned inside again through the techno room, up to the first floor. Finally arrived and seated another little detail popped up: the Cd had mysteriously disappeared. So our democratic party (at that time slightly led by our chinese dancing machine boafeng) moved out again.
Finally we managed to find another karaoke bar where we enjoyed singing normal english song all nite. And i can tell you out of my own experience: its good to be an excellent singer ;D

Another chinese thing: they try to rip you off everywhere. At one place we had dinner during our wudalianchi trip where at the end they charged us 170Yuan. A close look at the menu and a fierce discussion later we managed to convince them that the real price was only 104Yuan. They just tried to overcharge us and they try it at many places. So its all about counting your change and precalculating prices otherwise they will f%$#ck you.

I am also working with a tutor these days. This means i found (actually sven found her for me) a chinese girl that helps me with my chinese two times a week for two hours. This for the staggering price of 10 Yuan an hour equalling 1Euro an hour. Its especially useful for my oral skills as i can speak a lot and she corrects me if i make yet another mistake. This resulted in a lot of correcting the first time but i can feel it makes a difference. Also its good for a change, cause writing characters all the time makes you braindead after a while.

Ok this is my story for now. Love to hear from all of you. And think about the quiz question: What is the height of Holland's highest hill?!? Answers can be posted below!
Zaijian
Ma-ke