After spending the last few weeks on hiatus in Canada, where it seems everyone we met was either stoned, slow eh, an Australian working in Whistler or the entire trifecta we arrived back in China.
Not knowing if the venerable “LargeAmericanCorp†will renew my time in China for another year, we decided to forgo spending the weekend on the couch watching pirated cheap DVD’s and do a whirlwind run up to the frozen wasteland that is Harbin for the Ice Festival.
During the week Tanya went shopping and kitted us out with all of our Arctic gear, you’ll see in an upcoming post that it is cold……damn cold in Harbin.
Friday night arrives and we race off to the Beijing South Railway station and join the crush of people and their striped plastic bags full of plunder, heading back to their respective cities and towns. Think rush hour at Sydney Airport on a Friday night, except about 100 times as big and with a lot more pushing, smoking and wide eyed staring.
We fought our way through the crush and entered our opulent and luxurious 2 person cabin, and it was pretty luxurious, it was nice and clean, had lots of lace doilies, it’s own toilet (which didn’t flush) and a little man in a snappy navy blue uniform that brought us jugs of hot water. It was pretty damn comfortable. We sat up and talked as the Beijing city limits slipped away and the train rushed headlong into the frozen darkness. Afterwards, we went to sleep. I can’t say enough good things about Chinese trains. We’ve caught one from Pyongyang back to Beijing and now Beijing to Harbin and we love them.
