As promised, a (first?) post with a bit more depth about my time in Oliver's hometown of Sunwu, Heilongjiang Province.

I'll begin with the material. The apartment was fairly average as Chinese apartments go - two bedrooms, a small living room, one bath and a kitchen with two-burner gas stove. While I was there, Oliver and I shared one bedroom while his parents and grandmother shared the other. The running water was out of wack meaning the bathtub was in service as the main reservoir for the house, but other than that it was great. You can check out the pictures below. And as I said before, his mom made us some great food. A typical day began with a breakfast of zhou (rice porridge, better than it sounds) or soft boiled eggs alongside the abundant leftovers from the previous day. For lunch and dinner we had food that ran the gamut of Chinese cuisine - spicy doufu, small meat+veggie balls called wanzi, peanuts, doufu skin (sort of a noodle consistancy) stir-fried with vegetables, chicken dishes, dumplings and so forth. All of this eaten with a big mantou bread roll in the left hand, much better than the rice those southern Chinese like so much :) In the evening, I sat around watching Chinese TV dramas while talking with his family and munching sunflower seeds. All in all I couldn't have been happier.

The first thing you might notice upon walking out of Oliver's apartment building would be the huge pile of coal directly beside you, being shovelled towards the burner by a middle-aged Chinese guy caked in black dust. Walking between a local noodle shop and another apartment building, one emerged onto a street lined up and down with folks selling their wares - fruit, meat, doufu, mantou (bread), and a dazzling array of Spring Festival fireworks and decorations. The town of Sunwu was, like most places I've seen in China, a microcosm of the country's rapid devlopment. Here stood about eight to ten main blocks with multi-level buildings, apartments, restaurants and businesses, and then right across the street (inhabited) wooden shacks slanted sideways from the wind. Oliver told me how he had lived in one such home for most of his lifetime, only moving into their small but comfortable apartment about eight years ago. As I walked past the alleys leading between these dwellings towards the edge of town, I inhaled air thick with the taste of coal-smoke from each family's individual coal stove. Within hours wiping my nose left a black streak on the tissue.

One of the things that strikes an American suburbanite is the definition found in many cities abroad. After a ten minute walk, we literally reached an edge to the city - a last row of houses, a fence, and then fields and forest beyond. Here was no lingering infection of farmland and forests by occasional housing developments or newly minted retail strips, but rather a stark demarcation of town and country. The landscape reminded me a bit of Michigan, with low rolling hills and lines of trees breaking up the fields, but a farmer driving his herd of oxen across the snow quickly dispelled the image. We made our way up a low rise no more than a kilometer from town and I looked out upon a path in the snow that continued to the horizon. Turning back, I was faced with a simple memorial to those Chinese who died fighting Japan during the Second World War, dedicated in both Chinese and Russian to the heroes who fought "for socialism and to liberate the nation." The squat obelisk stood over a handful of weatherworn tombstones. At the foot of a second nearby marker commemorating the dead of the Chinese Civil War, a few scattered ashes of paper offerings mixed with the snow. Even with Oliver and some other Chinese students nearby, it seemed a lonely place.

That came out longer than I expected so I'll wrap up here with an intent to finally get around to viewpoints and what people were like in a future post.

Oliver models the living room.



Dinner, though sadly this picture is of the one meal we ate at his house that was takeout. Some sort of egg casserole in foreground with doufu behind.



On the streets of Sunwu.

The edge of town.



The long and winding road.

After a long absence from blogging, plenty to report.

In China the main holiday of the year is Spring Festival (or Chinese New Year), falling sometime in January or February according to the vagueries of the lunar calender. In practical terms this means that I have a month off, from January 10 to February 10. The Chinese certainly know how to take a vacation. This is also the big traditional family holiday, when hundreds of millions of people overwhelm all available transport trying to get home. It's like a three week Thanksgiving with four times the people.

I had two great opportunities during this break - the first, and subject of the post, was a trip with my Chinese friend Xu Fengming (Oliver) to his hometown of Sunwu. It's a town of about 70,000 people way up in China's northeastern Heilongjiang Province, part of the Manchuria region, and only around two hours from the Russian border. Other than being my esteemed friend's hometown, it also has the distinction of being incredibly cold and a long way away by train.

We started off with no-seat tickets (Spring Festival's influence) on an eight-hour train from Beijing to Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang and the main city of China's northeast. We took a couple "dunzi's" to sit on and blocked the doorway for the rest of the trip. Harbin is an interesting place - it was originally developed as a modern city under Russian control in the early twentieth century, and the influence still shows in architecture, especially the lovely exterior of the St. Sophia Church in the middle of town (picture below). There are also plenty of Russian goods stores around, selling various imported or purported-to-be-imported items from military binoculars to Russian chocolate. Anyway, the main draw in Harbin besides signs of Russia is the annual ice festival, with ice sculptures around various parts of the city and a huge "Ice & Snow World" set up across the river with scaled down recreations of things like cathedrals, castles, famous bridges etc. Impressive and a lot of fun if you bring enough warm clothes.

After two nights in Harbin we got on an evening train bound for Heihe on the Russian border, with a stop in Sunwu at 4:50am. Originally we had hard-seat tickets which were a recipe for disaster - people crammed six to a row on plastic bench seats, bi-level, sort of like a bad public bus but one in which everyone has luggage and the racks can only hold one third of it. Add to that all the no-seat ticketholders who are standing in the aisles or between rows of seats and it gets very uncomfortable very quickly, much less when one's schedule is 9:30pm - 4:50am under the flourescent lights. Just about the time I had started to sweat through my t-shirt a stewardess came by offering upgrades unused bunks in the sleeper cars which Oliver nabbed for us, making things a lot more comfortable. Deus ex machina.

At 5am we stumbled out onto the absolutely deserted streets of Sunwu, temperature about -10 degrees Fahrenheit, and made our way to Oliver's family's apartment. His mom and dad were waiting for us with the door open at the top of stairwell - gotta love Chinese hospitality. My stay there was a highlight of my time in China so far, a chance both to experience a side of China that I had never seen in Beijing, Tianjin or Shanghai and my first opportunity to really spend some time with a Chinese family. And besides all of that I got to eat real homecooked food for three days - I have never experienced such deliciousness in China, and let me admit that I have experienced a lot of deliciousness here. I also got to meet some local English students that Oliver tutors, play basketball with some of the locals at the town gym and walk out into the countryside to "snow-battle." Very fun. Oliver's family was great, and once I got a bit more used to the northeastern accent we were able to communicate reasonably well. My thanks though to my friend for occasionally translating (native) Chinese to (simple foreigner) Chinese!

So, there's the narrative part of the story. Enjoy the pictures below. I will post more with some of the more interesting thoughts and events from that trip soon (I swear!), along with some info about my recent trip with Mandi to Yangshuo down south in Guangxi Province.

St. Sophia Church in Harbin.



Awesome Chinese shaokao (barbecue) - wings, kebobs, grilled bread etc. And Oliver texting.



Ice festival at night.



Another nice ice sculpture.



Our awesome "seats" on the train from Beijing to Harbin.