Harbin, Take One

Welcome to Harbin, pronounced (Har-bean). This city will probably be the furthest northern city we will play in China. It took us 3 hours to fly from Shanghai to Harbin. This city is the 10th largest city in China. And for the record, i stand corrected when i was talking about Chongqing being the largest city in China, sorry bout that. Beijing and Shanghai are the largest. This city we are staying in a huge complex that has our hotel(40 plus stories), a mall, a Carrefour, Pizza Hut, KFC, McDonald's, our theatre, and a sports arena. It is huge!!! The sad part about it, is that we will probably just stay around the hotel complex cause everything is right here. Here is an interior picture of the Carrefour. And for those that havn't heard of Carrefour, it is a french supermarket chain in Asia, Europe, and South America.

And outside the Carrefour is a large ampitheatre where they were having some Karaoke contest. The steps in the pictures were soon filled out by alot of people. We slowly moved further and further from the steps, cause it sounded pretty bad. I don't really understand all the Karaoke over here in China or KTV as they call it. It is HUGE. It seems in every bar and hotel we have been in they have had KTV. And i have to be honest. When i first came to China i kept reading all these signs for KTV. KTV-modern or KTV-80's. Whatever. And i really thought it was a television station. I kept saying to myself "man this is a popular tv station." Nope, just Karaoke!!!

Here we are in the cab headed to dinner for our first night in Harbin. As you can see the cab is a little snug. For some reason our cab driver didn't really know where he was going. We spent a good 20 mins driving around the city tring to get to the restaurant. The best part when this happens is that you have NO input on the matter, because literally you are just along for the ride. You just hope that the hotel cared enough to explain where to take you and that the taxi driver actually understood. As always after driving around for 20 mins, we started circleing back from where we had come, and ended up in front of the restaurant. Cab charge= 10 yuan- about a $1.40.

We went to a dumpling shop in Harbin. I was really craving some Chinesse since i hadn't had it in the 2 months i was back in the states. I didn't want to eat it for 1 and didn't bother eating Chinesse in the states either cause it is so different. Maybe this means i am starting to grow a small liking to real Chinese food. In this photo is a traditional Harbin speciality of sliced potatao pickled and served raw.

And as requested, more pictures of our meal. We came to understand why dumplings are so popular, because it doesn't matter what they put inside of them (you can't really see what you are eating). We got to the restaurant and noticed there was only a Chinese menu. Lucky for us there was one waiter that spoke english and he was able to help us order.

We ordered a beef dumpling and a pork dumpling, but i have to be honest that i never was able to determine which was which. Oh well, for the most part it was great.

Another awesome thing in China is all the fresh juice served. Here you can see us drinking watermelon and mango juice. Good stuff!

After eating everything we ordered through the english speaking waiter, we started looking around the restaurant at everything else that people were ordering. Below is the final entree we saw on another table, that we had to try. It was deep fried potatoe cakes with sugar on the outside and a cream custard to dip in. These things were incredible, good thing we know how to point!

Having driven for 20 mins in a circle in the cab, we realized we were only a few blocks from the hotel, so we decided to walk home. Random photo's along the way...

Orient Home is the Chinese version of Home Depot. We spent about 30 mins walking around the store to see how it compared to the US version.