The End of the World

If you have been paying attention to the news out of China, you might have heard the country is crippled by a major snowstorm. I want to assure everyone who is deeply concerned for my well being that I am alive and well. The .75" of snow in Shanghai may have been enough to delay my flight home from Harbin for 6 hours, but it is not enough to crush the spirit and resolve of the ex-pat community of Shanghai. We will perservere, and with just enough snow to make 1 snowball each, we might just have some fun.

In all seriousness, this is a classic case of snow in a place where nobody knows how to deal with it. To make matters worse, its the start of Chinese New Years next week, which is the biggest and longest holiday of the year so everyone goes home. To compare it to home, imagine if Dallas and Atlanta got hit by snowstorms right before Christmas, and you'll have an image of what this is like. The problem is nobody is prepared to deal with it or knows how. Most people travel by train, but many of the trains run on electricity; when the powerlines were cut by freezing rain the trains went dead on the tracks and nobody could move. How bad is it this communication problem? Ford and Toyota shut down production this week, and about 200,000 people are stuck in a train station in southern China. I'm doing fine - China has been better.

I've posted some pictures from my second day in Harbin: the day of winter sports. I had a distinct advantage over my Chinese counterparts given that they're from Shanghai (where an inch of snow shuts down half the country) and I'm from New England where six inches of snow might not even buy you a day off.

The morning was spent skiing, which I was perhaps the only person on the mountain with any experience with. By mountain, I of course mean hill, as in bunny hill. As you can see in the picture above, this ski resort there was only the one slope 150 yards long with a rope tow to the top. Most of my fellow skiiers struggled enough going up, that to expect them to remain upright going downhill was beyond ambitious. I waited in the crowd of people to get on the lift (no lines, just bunches of people jockying for position), and would take a nice 30-40 second run down the hill and repeat, often stopping to talk with my fellow travelers as they struggled to master thier new craft. Because there were limited options with skis, they fitted your ski size to your foot size. This resulted in my skiis being too big for me because in China the only people with size 10 feet are giants, which I am not.

After lunch, a small little northern Chinese style meal with an odd stickybun dipped in sugar for desert, the afternoon was spent sampeling other winter games. We took a horsedrawn sleigh ride and spent an hour sledding down hill. The sledding was most peoples favorite activity, as it was easier than skiing but still provided the rush of plummeting down a mountain on small sheets of plastic. The final activity was a rousing game of ice hockey where I looked like Wayne Gretsky and everyone else did thier best to not fall down. We played with sneakers on, but upon real ice with a real puck, making it closer to ice hockey than anything else I've every played. I had a blast, and I believe most of my teammates and opponents did too.

Dinner was a special and rare glimps into a world my parents could never have imagined as kids. I ate a delicious dinner while watching a performance of 1960's patriotic Chinese songs sung by performers dressed in full Red Army gear. The food itself was enjoyable because the meat used was familiar to me, not the random cuts of unidentifiable meet often used for Chinese food. The performance was terrific because I was there watching people sing passionatly in the grey uniform of the revolutionary army, the blue uniforms of the youth army and the green uniforms of the Red Army, all saluting and praising a picture of Mao. I loved it, honestly, it was so far from what anyone in America ever sees I couldn't keep a smile from my face.