What’s for Breakfast, A Temple in Winter, and a Korean Dinner

Friday, February 5, 2010

Breakfast is included with our hotel plan, so off we go to a buffet of Russian, Chinese, and Western breakfast dishes.

Ever eat salad for breakfast? Dumplings? Prawns? Pickled cabbage with red pepper (wakes you up, I’m told).

Fortunately for us, fruit, yogurt and eggs and bacon are also on the buffet, as is French toast, though by another name.

Two cooks are at the egg station, and we assume that eggs are cooked to order. Nope. You get them one way-fried almost hard, and cold. The cooks pre-fry them and until one round of eggs is gone, they don’t cook again.

We try to guess what nationality our breakfast-mates are. The heavy woman with white hair is almost certainly British. She is accompanied by a younger, blond-haired woman who may be her daughter.

The couple who came in bundled up as we were yesterday on our way to the Ice Festival and began stripping off layers is a little harder to place. They’re not American.

It’s hard to say how you know this but when you travel, you just do. Of course once you hear anyone talk you can tell, but there are subtler clues-a hairdo, the cut of clothes, and almost always, shoes. Perhaps a few in every hundred thousand people in a crowd in the U.S. could be British or Australian and you’d not notice any difference. So there’s a certain overlap. But like this, isolated, and with a couple, it’s definite. The one exception is Canadians. They look like us, buy their clothes at places like The Gap and, like the same stuff we do, watch a lot of the same TV, and if they are not from a part of Canada that says Eh? at the end of some of their sentences, you’ll never know if they’re from San Antonio or Saskatchewan.

And there’s the young man with extreme bed head in black jeans with zippers on the pockets. My guess is he’s Dutch. The Dutch speak perfect English. And though I have nothing on which to base this other than personal observation, I think their young people travel extensively.

The men at the table nearest us are Chinese and Western businessmen. Everybody there is very serious. I make a wild guess that the westerners are German.
Our first outing today is the Confucian temple, which is located a few miles away. We want to make sure we’ll have plenty of time to get back to the hotel to pack and check out before going anywhere else.

It’s a busy weekday, and what’s going on in the streets makes yesterday look like a kiddy car parade. They’re driving faster and they are just as determined to make a lane change in the space of two feet with no warning except for the incessant horn blast (that goes for each of drivers on either side of you-how it’s determined who gets it is a mystery westerners cannot fathom).

They rocket out of side streets into the traffic without ever looking to see what’s coming (that one was hurling straight at the rear passenger door where I am sitting and missed by, oh, maybe a foot).

Added to this mix are: bicycles and carts, which are expressly forbidden by the signs along the street above the lane in which they are traveling, trucks built on motorcycle or motorbike bodies loaded six feet high, and motor-driven rickshaw-like vehicles . Oh, and pedestrians.

“Did you see that!?” we keep saying to each other.

Bernie asks “What was he trying to do?” after one near-incident.

“I don’t know, B. I am in this cab but not of it.”

At our destination, we see that we are on a dead-end street. Next door to the temple is a large military installation with a fence around it. We are thinking our chances of catching a cab here aren’t good so we ask our driver if he will either wait for us or come back and get us.

That sounds straightforward but of course we are dealing with one non-Chinese speaker and one non-English speaker. I stay out of these conversations.
After five minutes in which I believe not one word has been understood on either side, our driver takes out his cell phone and points. I do the same and he keys in his number on Shannon’s phone. His phone rings. We’re cool.

The monastery in winter, it turns out, is closed up. We are free to walk around and look at the buildings but we cannot go inside. The buildings are worth looking at. They are exquisitely painted with carvings on each corner.

We’d hoped to find a quiet place indoors to sit quietly for awhile. Failing that we’d just like to find a place to get warm after several minutes outside. At the end of the walkway we see a building that is different from the others. It’s plainer, and there are curtains at the windows.

My first thought is that it’s the mess hall for the monks. But we see people leaving who look as if they are visitors, so we open the door.
My first thought was right. This is the mess hall.

Ok, so have you ever been thrown out of a Confucian monastery mess hall? Thought not.

Back to the gatehouse. We ask the gatekeeper, a middle-aged woman, if we can come in and wait while we try to get our taxi.

I let Bernie talk to him since the two of them have previously conversed. No use confusing him with a woman’s voice.

At the end of the conversation Bernie thinks the driver has said no. We agree to wait a few minutes just in case.

Now that we’re inside we’re treated as insiders. The woman motions for both of us to take chairs while we wait. We smile. She smiles.

Soon a young woman comes in, puts something in a refrigerator (I think) and after a short conversation with the lady in charge, leaves.

After a few minutes another woman of approximately the same age as our hostess enters. She takes off her coat and settles in.

They look at us. The new lady smiles at me and gives me a thumbs up while she makes a remark about me to her companion. They look at me and talk about me for a few more minutes and then, having exhausted the subject, drop into gossip.

Gossip is recognizable in any language. You can tell by the little laughs, the nods of the head, the lowered voices. It happens all over the world, from women gathered around a well in Africa to men warming themselves at a stove as they guard the China/North Korean border.

After fifteen minutes we think we’ve worn out our welcome here and get up to leave. We’ll go out and hail a taxi. The visiting woman decides this is not a job for us; she’ll go out and get it. She and Bernie have a gentle go-round about this as he doesn’t want her to stand in the cold for us. The upshot is, she’ll go out with us.
And she tries, she really does. We are touched by how considerate and helping the Chinese people are. So many of them have gone the extra mile and beyond for us, a couple of total ignoramuses in their midst.

The cabs coming out of the military base are full, though. And those going in have been called to pick up passengers there, so we walk up to the main street.
The taxi ride is the usual terror trip. We’re about to break out into a couple of verses of “Nearer My God to Thee.”

We don’t have a much time left in Harbin after checking out of the hotel and storing our bags with the concierge. It’s 2:30 and we need to leave for the airport a little before 5 p.m. We don’t want to take a taxi anywhere because we might get tied up in traffic.

But we’re in the most architecturally interesting part of Harbin and on a great shopping street, so we’ll explore our surroundings.

I love the bakeries here. The cakes are works of art. So are many of those in bakeries at home. There’s just a little different twist to the decorating done in Chinese bakeries and it fascinates me. I resist going in since I ate so many cookies last night in the hotel room.

Farther down our street is occupied predominantly by optometrists and athletic shoe shops – Adidas, Converse, Nike.

Just as we’re about to turn around, we’re stopped by a young man who introduces himself as Peter. He tells us he is a freelance translator and likes to practice his English by speaking with native speakers. Philip is very friendly, very nice and he is loaded with information about Harbin. He tells us that there is a Jewish synagogue nearby, just a couple of blocks away, that he would like to show us.
We decline and tell him we really don’t want to leave Central Street because we have to prepare to leave for the airport soon. He gives us his business card. Turns out he’s a guide as well as a translator.

We believe Peter was just what he said he was. But we have also read about the schemes in which someone approaches you saying they want to practice their English and then they take you to a tea shop or art gallery and you end up paying a lot of money.

We’ve stood in the cold talking to Peter, who wore no gloves and all the time he was talking I thought he must be freezing. Now we are cold, so we’re going to duck into the inside mall.

The mall has four floors of shops and restaurants. We’re going all the way up and window shop our way back down. At least that was our intent.

But here on the third floor is something I don’t think we have in the U.S. It’s something like a Chuck E. Cheese play area, but without the pizza. It’s like an indoor rent-a-playground for little kids. The parents pay at the desk and the kids come in and take off their shoes. Most of the kids strip down to their long underwear. (As a grandmother, I’m pleased to see that parents here dress their kids warmly for the terrible cold.)

Then they bounce, slide, climb and run around doing the usual kid stuff.
We sit outside on a bench and watch them for awhile. It’s always nice to see little girls in China and there are several of them here. Children are very precious to parents here.

We cross to the other side of the mall and see a Korean restaurant, a Korean barbecue. There are hibachis in the center of the table. We’ll cook our own meat, the waitress tells us. Rather, we hear that from another restaurant employee who translates.

We order beef and scallops and soon a man brings hot coals and places them in the fire pit in the center of our table. The beef comes next, along with a pair of scissors to cut the strip into pieces. Then come the scallops, on the half-shell.
The beef is one of the best things I’ve ever tasted, slightly sweet and very flavorful.

The scallops, one of my favorite sea foods, are great, but the beef is superb.
It’s time to leave now. The hotel is just a short walk up the street. The concierge calls a taxi for us and soon we’re on our way.

Autumn is waiting for us in the Dalian airport with hugs.

We’re glad to be back “home” in Dalian. No wonder the people from Harbin flock here for the warmer climate.