Friday night, my friend Sandy and I were determined to eat something other than Chinese food. I like Chinese food, but after an entire week of eating it morning, noon, and night, we decided that we needed a change. Our student handbook had an Indian restaurant listed that they said was really good. So we wrote down the address, hailed a cab, and went off in search of 印度街 - "Indian Street" - where the restaurant was located.
Upon reaching "Indian Street" we discovered that although the restaurants name was still written on the building, the building itself was for rent. Not to worry - there were two other Indian restaurants nearby. Upon closer inspection, however, they too turned out to be for rent. Not only were there no Indian restaurants on Indian street, there was very little that was Indian in nature at all. There were a couple of stands selling cheap Russian knickknacks (let me know if anyone wants matroshka (sp?) dolls or Stalin ashtrays, because they're for sale everywhere here... apparently you can buy Russian everything here because we're so close to the border, including vodka, chocolate, and machine guns... but I think I'm just going to stick with the dolls, and possibly a fur hat if it doesn't get warmer soon). In any case, Indian street was a huge disappointment. I thought I'd ask someone if there was anywhere nearby that we could get Indian food - maybe the restaurant had moved? - so I asked a guy selling Russian miscellania if there was another Indian restaurant around, and he pointed me in a vague direction "up the street to the right". So Sandy and I went out in search of "up the street to the right", and after asking another street vendor, found the place they were pointing us to. Oddly enough, there was a sign that looked like a "TGI Friday's" sign out front. What was a TGI Friday's doing in Harbin? Sure enough, upon closer inspection, TGI Friday's wasn't doing anything in Harbin, but that wasn't stopping "DJ Friday's" from attempting trademark infringement. (As an aside, apparently a few years ago there was a Starbucks in Harbin near the train station that did excellent business... the only problem was, the real Starbucks knew nothing of their existence, and when they found out about it, they were forced to change their name to "USABucks". I'm not kidding. I now need to go to "USABucks...)
So, back to the story. Not only did "DJ Friday's" not have Indian food, but they didn't have anything resembling real TGI Friday's food either (TGI Friday's in the US not really being known for selling chicken feet, which were prominently on display in the buffet line). Bitterly disappointed, we hailed another cab, telling the driver to take us to the main shopping street downtown, "to a place that has Western food, and not too expensive." Taking a cab in China is always kind of a gamble, as you're never really sure if the cabbie is going to help you out or rip you off (and possibly both at the same time). But this cabbie drove us right to a restaurant advertising "Western Food" in the window, and even though it turned out to be a Chinese interpretation of Western food ( i.e. the pizza was a little strange), there were no noodles, which was the main point of the trip. "No jiaozi, baozi or mian!" was our motto, and in that respect, we succeeded!
After dinner we walked through the main shopping area, called 中央大街 - Zhongyang Dajie, or "Central Avenue" (don't know the exact translation) - lots of old Russian architecture, which was much prettier and more well preserved than I had anticipated - also very well-lit until 9:00, when they turned the spotlights off (on the dot! fortunately, the streetlights still worked). We walked down to the Songhua River, famous for the benzene spill in the fall of 2005, and the reason I don't eat fish here (or drink the water). There was remarkably little water in the river - winter is a very dry season, and apparently the rains don't start until summer, when there is so much rain that they have had very serious floods in the past, the most recent being in 1998, when the water rose all the way up to the university (we're located a couple of miles uphill and out of town). Don't worry, Mom - I will have left here before the risk of flooding starts again!
Yesterday I didn't do much - went out and bought a bunch of pirated DVDs at a (literally) underground market - Dreamgirls, a Russian movie, a German movie, "Blue Crush" (I know it's a ridiculous movie, but it cost less than a dollar, so why not?), and the best movie by far - "Infernal Affairs" (无间到), a movie from Hong Kong which "The Departed" was apparently based on. I wound up watching it last night with a bunch of my classmates and roommates - after we figured out how to change the audio track from Japanese into Chinese, it was great (pirated DVDs are kind of tweaky like that - the main menu options don't really match the actual DVD, so even though you think it's only in Japanese, if you press enough buttons, you can usually get it to do what you want. A lot of things in China are like that, actually).
ok - now off to do some grocery shopping and buckle down and study this afternoon. studying starts... now!
