my twelve-hour walk

(A note of forewarning - this is not Beautiful Blogwriting; this is something I wrote elsewhere and figured to post here, since I'd already written it and I wasn't going to re-write 5,000 words of Personal Life.

So! Here you have it: my twelve-hour walk!)

~:~:~:~:~

June 21st

I went for a walk.

A 12-hour-long walk

I'd been getting sick, for a long time, of just not moving. There's something nice about being able to just pick up and walk. Just get up and go, just a bag with whatever you need and just go and walk and not think about Stuff You Have To Do.

So I walked.

I set out at five past noon, and I got back at fifteen past midnight. Ten of those hours were straight-up, unadulterated walking.

Someday I'll check out how long that is. My internet's slow right now, so not right now. But it's a long, long way.

I walked on out to the Lilac Garden. That's an hour right there. I'd been there before, but I continued walking, now, down the main drag out there. The Lilac Garden is right at the beginning of the new development area, the section of the map that's few streets and long, unbroken areas of orange. It turns, very quickly, into what I like to term a Construction Wonderland. Long, long stretches of road where new trees have been planted, sure, but they're like toothbrushes; on the outside of the sidewalk are a corrugated steel fences with posters on them showing plans of What Will Be Here. they look like they've been there for ages - the colors are washed-out, the English is sparse and bad ("Chinese Coldly Region Of Rivers"). Tall, cool-looking lampposts line the roads, sure, but there are hundreds of them, the road is long, and it goes nowhere.

And outside of the roads, on either side of the roads, construction. Clumps and clusters of tall buildings swathed in green mesh, each with a tall yellow crane buttressed to the side. Some are nearly finished, white-painted and with the windows being put in, lower floors empty-eyed and the lowest floors unpainted. Some are barely started, scaffolding all around and the green mesh outside that. Buildings huge and continuous, bunches of fifty at once, and on the other side of the road a newly-created park, its trees sticks, its flowerbeds scraggly, its bushes pruned to oblivion even though the number of park-goers tops out at three, two of whom are bug-eyed toy chihuahuas.





I kept hoping to go right, and to follow the river back to the city. I came, finally to a crossroads, and saw buildings before, beside all everywhere but right. right must be the river. I went right.





More construction. Nothing to my now-left, but it was cordoned off my corrugated steel anyway, so no one, absolutely no one, could dare to go frolic in the patches of weed and construction-dirt on the other side. To my now-right, construction, construction, steel. A street cleaner came by, and here in Harbin, street-cleaners sound like ice cream trucks. A cluster of women - construction dudes' wives? - passed by me, staring at what the hell is this white girl doing all the hell way out here in nowhere? The steel broke, every now and then, to admit roads, and these times I could look in. It looked like a wasteland inside: the earth roiled up and ground flat by heavy machines; blue steel fencing and green mesh in piles and along lines. Long housing units, or maybe office units, made of bad plasterboard and blue tin roofs; huge, fifteen-story-tall Chinese characters, one on each building, telling what unit you were looking at. Scaffolding, in pieces or assembled, in piles or spidering up building-sides, swaddled over in that clinging green mesh. Yellow cranes inbetween, above, around, stuck to buildings and looming over them, over me, over the road, over the empty dirt.



Avenues of this, of massive tall buildings and cranes and empty dirt, going on so long I could see the city at the other end.

I came, finally, to the river.

Sort of.

I'd gotten turned around, and I was, yes, going to the river, but away from the city. So the park that I finally found myself in was, technically, beside the river. No matter that it was a kilometer at least from where I was standing to where the river flowed. I had hit the riverside border of the construction.



There was a main road alongside the construction, and another road following the park. I opted for the park road, even with it being unfinished as it was: more q-tip trees, no shade whatsoever, more crappily-cut brushes of bush, more weeds, more sweltering flowerbeds.



Opposite the park was a long, low area of land. Farmland. Farmland, right acrossfrom teh Construction Wonderland; long strips of crops not even a mile from the half-finished buildings.

I started walking.

The city took two hours to reach. If you factor 2 miles an hour, that's 4 miles; if you make it 3 mph it's 6 miles. That picture up there? That's one I took after I started walking.

Walked, walked, walked. It was straight-up sun for miles and miles, with only asphalt and dry-dirt and concrete around me, and I decided, fine. Fine, I would do the Chinese thing. And I pulled out my umbrella and walked under it. An improvement, certainly - I had sunburn for the next week, but at least not as bad as I thought it'd be.

Miles and miles and hours of walking, and long though it may sound, it was exactly what I was looking for. I wanted to walk without thinking of Stuff I Had To Do. So this was it. I was thinking about the construction, I was thinking about the trees. I was thinking about the park and the farmland. I was thinking about the weird-shaped building coming up and what it was. I was thinking about the spread-out flat land either side of me. And I was thinking about the heat of the sun and how it was long out here, and how I had a couple sips left in my bottle, and how long those would last and that I'd wait til I was within a half-hour to drink the last, just to make sure, and how I was glad I brought my umbrella, not just my fan, and how I should tell Marcy about this road, it would be great to rollerblade on, and what this area would look like ten years down the road, those toothbrush trees all grown up and those bushes grown body to and those buildings finished and renting, and how long it would take til people actually lived, not just worked, out here.

Miles and miles and hours of walking and thinking and walking, and I finally got within sight of the main part of the river - the place where it curves away from the city. Small tributaries around, with people fishing; a van full of bathers and fishers slowed down to drive just beside me, all staring out the windows at me, and after a a few minutes kept driving, its occupants laughing. I kept walking, hit a bridge over one of those tributaries, kept walking.

There was corrugated steel fencing on the other side of the bridge. There was no way past. I went up to the fencing and peeked through.

On the map, this particular street was represented by a broken, dotted line. I found out why.

The street ended, right there.

There I was, another half-hour, forty-five minutes walk from the city, my water bottle with one calculated gulp left, and the street before me dropping twenty feet down and a mess of construction equipment, concrete tubes, and piles and piles of rebar.



I looked back behind me. So that's why no one else had been taking this bridge.

I looked down along the tributary. Another street, there, crossing it. Cars zooming along it. Good.

Okay, so turn back, off the bridge, and walk along the tributary's side.

This wasn't a street anymore. This was an embankment. It was nicer than the Construction Wonderland, because the native trees had been left to take over the piles of construction-dirt, and weeds grew over the rest. There was a dust road winding along the streamside, and a beehive-shaped concrete pour of embankment down to the actual water. People had planted gardens down beside the water. A mess of early waterweed and trash and dirt scummed the banks and floated downstream in chunks.

And on the other side of the embankment, a completely different story. What looked like private land, or a park, maybe - it was long, and willow and aspen trees came up to the waterside honeycomb. Apartments rose up behind that - pink-painted and crumbly, but rather nice all the same. Behind them, a few more being-constructed buildings, but not nearly so many. It was nearly the city, after all, things were Civilized here.

So I followed the stream. The actual water couldn't been more than 20 feet wide, but the silty gardenland added 50 more at least, and the embankments another 20 each. All told it was probably a hundred feet or more across to that parkland.

But that bridge was getting closer. I waited til my suspicions were confirmed about it being parkland - til I saw, just across the water, a tiny houselike structure selling drinks - and then took my final pull of tea.

Kept on walking. Gardens, stream, trash, construction souds and smells but also green smells and the smell of river water. There was a structure on long stilts reaching out into the tributary. There was, down among the gardens, a small hut with a pepsi-advertisement top, and what looked like a ferry - a dude in a small metal boat, just big enough for three people to stand in, poling people across fifteen feet of water.



I hit the bridge, finally. I crossed it. I figured out where I was.

Right next to the entrance of the Lilac Garden.



...well, okay. They had little 仓买 out here, anyway, and I dove into one and bought two cold-as-I-could-get-em drinks, a water and an apple juice, and then found a park bench and basked. In the shade, not the sun.

I basked for a good thirty minutes. I had been walking for 3 and a half hours.

Then I found a park loo and bought a honeydew popsicle and wandered the park. Lovely park - not very many lilacs, but a lot of trees and a good layout, very naturey, and I walked all the way through it, aware that I was following right back along the tributary I'd just walked down. This side was a great deal nicer.

And out of the park, I saw that unfinished road again. Closed off to everything but construction.

But, well, I was inside the city now. The very edge of the city, sure, but within the city, and I had a map. Checked it, and then wandered vaguely along the riverside til I hit Zhongyang Street, the big city-center tourist street.

And there I had delicious Korean food and basked some more. This was five hours in.


Looking out along hte river to the place I've just walked from. This is about when my camera ran out of batteries.

The rest of the trip was, well, the rest of the day. Wandered up to the end of Zhongyang, crossed the railroad bridge to watch the sunset, came back. Down Zhongyang, and back toward my school; then round a circle and up another walking street. Eight hours. Down to the end of the walking street, and by now it was dark, 10+pm, and I was leery of going down unfamiliar unlit areas, so back down to another big street (Zhongshan) and up that, then up the winding peopled streets between the flood canal and the main street til I reached the university.

And, at 12.15, entered the building again and went to my bed and fell asleep.

The Chatting Cafe

Yesterday, when I woke up, the weather was yellow. The sky was grayish-yellowish-white, it was spitting rain, and the air smelled like rust and dirty coal. It was an inside day, and so I did inside things: grading, reading, playing solitaire, cooking. It was nasty, lazy weather.

But it finally cleared up late in the afternoon. As the day progressed, the clouds went more whiteish than yellowish, then more bluegrey than white. Maybe around six I looked out the window: the sky above was thick with dull clouds, but there was sunlight reflecting off the buildings and shining off the windows at me. I went over to the window; over to the west, the clouds were finally breaking up, and the sun came through white and gold.

I had an appointment at 6.30: a "Chatting Cafe", as the organizer called it. Full-time foreign teachers are requested/required to take part in at least one (two?) extracurricular activities, and so I was contacted by this guy a couple days ago. He's a PhD student here, and told me about the Chatting Cafe, inviting me to attend/help/host. I wasn't entirely clear on which - when you're a Foreign Teacher, it's an even chance whether you'll be asked to be the Star Attraction Of Our Show or just a guest - but I figured okay, sure I'll go.

So I went.

Peter - my contact - was about my weight but a few inches taller than I. He kept his jacket on even though he was sweating, and I think he wasn't sure if I'd show up. He showed me to the room, talking about his major and about the English club. It was being held in the main classroom building, one of the smaller classrooms. I recognized the setup from my usual teaching room: long benches, long desks, a roll-up-and-down blackboard covered with a screen. There were maybe fifteen people in attendance; when I walked in, they applauded.

Peter went to the podium and I went and put my stuff down at a desk. This was apparently not kosher; people stared at me, and Peter asked me to come to the front. He'd prepared a powerpoint, but asked if I could host; this pinged my "do they want me to lecture? D:" radar, and I asked what hosting entailed. Well, talking, apparently. I hastily made clear that I could work with them, but I didn't have a lecture ready, and since Peter and the other hosts looked a bit crestfallen, I asked them to show me the powerpoint, so I knew what they'd prepared, and I could help with some things.

Well, it was kind of like an informal class. Five minutes self-introduction, watch a video clip, try to write down what you remembered from the clip, discuss a topic (from the email: "On Learning English: How do YOU `see` an English movie?"), free talk. We discussed briefly, and I pointed out places I could contribute. They still looked dubious, so I turned on my Teacher manner, all confidence and "it'll work out"-ness, and they were reassured. Then I went back into the crowd and sat back down.

Well, self-introductions, and I was politely mobbed. "Would you like to sit with us?" and a gift of coffee-from-a-packet and then six people in the benches around me, all curious to hear where I'd come from, what I was doing in Harbin, how old I was, why I'd come to China, what I thought about China. I answered most of these, then turned the questions back on them - their names? majors? how long they'd been here? (people come to HIT from all different cities.) Two people had time to answer before Peter called the room to order and had people introduce themselves up front. The prize for doing so: a half-sized, Chinese-wrapped Snickers bar, 士力架 on the back.

After that we watched a clip from Inception. For those of you who've seen it, the part where Cobb is telling Ariadne about him-and-Mal's life in Limbo. The clip was only a minute long, and subtitled both in English and in 普通话. Peter switched to a google screencap after, trying to explain Limbo. "It's a game," he said, and then pointed the mouse to the second link, "it's a Christian idea." I could see people didn't quite get it, so mentioned, "I can help explain this."

And did. Brought in Dante and got some nods - some people knew Dante, some didn't. I explained first where limbo fit in Christianity, then where it fit linguistically. One person raised his hand and asked me, "how can you prove limbo exists?" (He assumed I was Christian, and trying to prosthletyze.) I quickly explained agnosticism and how I just figured people could decide for themselves what to believe. This got a congratulatory round of applause.

I went over to the side of the room and stood/leaned. People seemed more comfortable with this than with me sitting among them, and so I stayed there as the meeting continued. I got consulted on several things, and weighed in on several other things: reduced forms (gonna, wanna, coulda, shoulda, dunno), watching movies to practice language (when alone, rewatch, when with friends, watch uninterrupted), accents and dialects of English (and how no one in the room could understand Indian English or African English), history and literature ("speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounce it to you").

I was halfway in Teacher Role and halfway in Guest Role, and I prefer that a great deal to the wholly Lecturer Role or to the Star Attraction Role. The presumption that I could come in and take over was not appealing to me: I didn't want to act like this was a class, and I didn't want to be seen as some Authority On Western Things, even though, as a Westerner and thus a representative not only of your own country but of all Western countries, that is the role that you are often put into. I made sure they knew that there's regional differences not only in speech but in culture and thought and history, and that I could ony talk for someone from the DC area.

And I think it worked: by the time Free Talk rolled around, people were comfortable with me. I told them, "I'll go around to different groups and try to talk a little with all of you," and this got applause too. So that I did - go from group to group and talk. Same questions, each time: how long have you been in Harbin? where are you from? are you a student? a teacher? what do you teach? how old are you? why did you come to China? what do you think about China? I spent a good ten minutes with that group, telling places I'd been and what I taught and all, and then told them I've move to the next group, and then did. And then got asked again: how long have you been in Harbin? what do you teach? how old are you? What do you think about China?

I'd originally intended to leave at eight - indeed, I think the meeting was intended to end around eight - but at fifteen after we were all still talking. I got a call from a friend to meet her for noodles at 8.30, and when 8.30 rolled around I told people, "I've gotta meet a friend, but it was great talking to you, and I hope to see you again." Applause everywhere, exchange of phone numbers, congratulations on having come. Peter followed me out, discussing the logistics of future meetings, and I saw that behind us, people were grabbing their bags and leaving the room. The main attraction was gone.

Just as Peter and I were about to leave the hall, a girl caught up with us. Woman, actually - she was older than I, and a teacher at another college, and in the meeting she'd talked a lot, gotten my phone number, discussed history and poetry with me, testing the waters to see if I knew this poet, that poet, this general, that book. I apparently passed with flying colors, because people around me grinned and nodded that I knew Li Qingzhao and Xu Zhimo, and that I had read Three Kingdoms.

Peter and I stopped. People from the classroom passed by us, looking back curiously. "I want to give you something," the girl told me, and I turned around. She handed me a Snickers bar.

Original sent on May 8th.

Harbin Hotpot Happenings

Tuesday evening, I went to a hotpot restaurant. It was very different from the one I'd frequented in Beijing. The one in Beijing was a biggish, fancy place, with Western toilets and hand soap, with a picture-menu, and with a hundred or more choices of soups, meats, veggies, tofus, and noodles.

This one, on the other hand, was a little 12-by-15-foot room into which about 20 could be seated - 25 with a squeeze. Its back wall was mirrored, to make it look bigger. It did not cook on hotplates but on little, individual gas stoves set into the tables - water was poured into the bottom, to keep it cool, and then the gas was lit with a lighter and kept on with a little dial on the side.

But it was tasty. The menu was short - one single page of blue paper, thin as airmail paper, upon which you marked your choices of food. There were about 7-10 choices of meat and veggies, 5 each of noodles and tofu, a few mushrooms, a few starches. My friend and I ordered, and, within a few minutes, were served. We ate, sharing a liter of Harbin beer.

The food was good, and apparently the place was popular. It was talkative inside, and around the middle of our meal a table of partiers stood and escorted a very drunk member of their group outside; he had to be puppeted, since he couldn't stand. My friend looked at the table and said "baijiu", and then I saw it too: a small, clear bottle with the familiar red label and the familiar red box. No wonder he was drunk: every country has its super-strong, paint-stripping, one-sip-and-you're-floored alcohol, and China's is baijiu. This bottle was empty.

But the food was good, so we kept eating. Filled up, finished our veg and our meat and much of our soup. We were just finishing up when a girl came up and leaned on our table.

Leaned on our table with a cup full of beer. Uh-oh.

"Essacuse me," she said to me, and then switched to Mandarin, "you're an English teacher? and you know English and you teach English?"

"Uh, yeah..."

Back to English: "Oh my goooddddd! Woulda you teachme English! You speak -" Chinese again, "you speak Chinese? Do you speak Chinese?" English again, "you teache me English! Okay?"

I stared at her.

She switched back to Chinese. "You are a teacher, you teach English, I heard your English is very good, you speak Chinese? You speak Chinese, I teach you Chinese, you teach me English, okay? I want to learn English." The effort of standing became too much and she pushed my coat aside and slid into the booth next to me. English: "you teache me English, okay?"

I didn't want to harsh her buzz, so I said, "well, my schedule's a bit full-"

Chinese: "But you're an English teacher right?" English: "oh my god! Oh my GOD you teache English right?" Chinese: "you speak Chinese? So I can teach you English, I mean I you teach me English because you're an English teacher," and she leaned close to me, five inches from my face, and, thankfully, put her full beer down on the table.

I tried my schedule excuse again. She would have none of it. I said I spoke Chinese, yes. She was delighted. I said maybe, we'll see, I needed to check - and "OOOHHH THANK YOU! OH MY GOOOODDDDD THANK YOU" and she took my hand and shook it and then kissed it and became quite incoherent and entered my cell phone number on her phone and got my name wrong five times and thanked me again and kissed my cheek and got up and drank her entire beer down in one gulp and wove her way back to her own table.

"We're leaving," I told my friend.

"Quickly," she agreed. "I think the guy behind you's getting up."

arrival in Beijing

So! I am in Beijing.



That feels so weird to say. it feels so weird to think about it: I'm back here. I may not recognize the neighborhood, but I'm in Beijing. The city air proves it.

I feel like such a noob, though: like I've regressed in my China-knowledge. I remember, sure, how bad the air was. But I marveled, during last night's drive, how no, that wasn't fog. (It looks, outside, like the haze of a bar an hour after the party's over. You can't get rid of all the smoke and it just kind of fills up the air lightly. But you can smell it.) I felt the need to comment on the driving - the driving! As though I were a first-time tourist, newly shocked by the "whatever works" style of driving they have here. I was !!! when our driver, at an intersection under two concrete bridges, opened his door - the car still running - and hawked a loogie out onto the street. Then proceeded to drink some tea and nearly run into two trucks, but he didn't run into them, right? so that was okay, right?

...right?

The scary part is, I know his driving was moderate. He was, for Beijing, an okay driver. He used his turn signal, if not his seat belt.

But man, Beijing. I am all over about being here. I'm surprised, I'm pleased, I'm amazed that I'm back, I am unsurprised that despite construction, it hasn't changed.


The plane trips were good. There were huge piles of setbacks, hang-ups, surprises, unforeseen delays, unexpected et ceteras. There is nothing to complain about, which rather shocks my Eastern European sensibilities.

I think that, did I feel the need to condense my 14-hour trip from DC to Seoul with Korean Airlines into 2 main points, they would be these:

1) Food.
2) Mountains.

I was seriously delighted by Korean Air's airplane food. They had bibimbap! Bibimbap! I couldn't take a picture, as my camera was way under my luggage under my feet and my tray on top and my knitting on my lap and untangling this would have been rather like untangling this, but:

Bibimbap on an airplane!

They served it so: there was a bowl with ground meat, sliced cukes, sprouts, pickles, and shroomies in it, and there was a little sealed packet of heated-up rice . You put the rice into the bowl, poured on the sachet of oil, squeezed on the tiny tube of Korean hot sauce, and then mixed everything all up with the spoon and ate it. Much like on-the-ground bibimbap, just with reversed proceedure and fewer ingrediants.

and SO GOOD.

The mountains, on the other hand? Well, I'll let the mountains speak for themselves.



The lights came on briefly around 8 hours into the flight. People woke up, pulled their windows open, and marveled: we were over the Kamkatcha Peninsula, and everywhere under us was just white-snow mountains and frozen water. The ice extended a few miles off-shore, and there were few clouds, so you could see perfectly.

(Dork that I am, I immediately thought of Caradhras.)

In short, though, those mountains were amazing. That geography was amazing. I zipped from one emergency-slide-window to the other, taking pictures. Only when the stewardesses shut the curtains for a Secret Important Stewardess Meeting did I stop and reluctantly sit back down.

Other than mountains and food, the 14-hour trip was pretty uneventful. Read, watched movies, slept. Knat about two shaftments of a scarf I'm making to go with my Big Harbin Coat. (God, that wool! 30% silk, 70% merino, softer than anything and with gorgeous colors! ♥!) Spoke sometimes to a friendly Philipino couple next to me. Watched the rest of the pasengers.

(On Korean Air, it seems that any time that is not turbulent and seatbelt-worthy is automatically Airplane Cocktail Party Time. That is, whenever we were not strictly required to be sitting and belted in, people were just standing about, among their seats, in the aisles, or in the bathroom-areas, just talking to each other. Like the plane was a great big mingle-party. Interesting for me to see, since on European flights people stay seated to talk, and don't get social with various people around the plane, just for the chance to talk. Interesting!)


We had 50-mph headwinds, and so despite having left on time, we got into Seoul a little late - two hours. Transit was fine: I'd had some sort of difficulty with my ticket back in DC, but the young man at Transfer Counter B just took my explanation note and passport, printed me up a ticket, and smiled me away. I got back to my gate just in time to board, and after that? After that it was a 2-hour flight with me sitting next to a particularly talkative vascular surgeon. Nice guy who told me all about Chinese schooling, what to expect from students, what they like doing, how they view Westerners. An absolute gold mine for a new teacher like me, and also a good person to talk two hours to.

(I got reacquainted with a tendency I noticed in China: people like to talk to Westerners. They are curious and interested, and when they find out you speak their language they become more curious and interested still. Sure, not everyone's exactly the best conversationalist, but people want to know about you, and how you see things. I know I'll be seeing a lot of that attitude again here.)

Note also that the vascular surgeon gave me a whole bunch of useful Chinese phrases, one set being "委婉" (wei wan - a complimentary word for talking indirectly), "话中有话" (hua zhong you hua, lit "speech in the middle of speech" - that is, nuanced speech) and one more I can't remember, which was the perjorative of nuanced speech. He talked a lot about how Chinese tend to be 委婉 - indirect speech - and how it Westerners are more zhishuan - (直拴? (maybe a different "shuan")), which he said meant "direct" and he noted was seen as a good thing. I have heard the opposite viewpoint expressed in the West (how "inscrutable" them Orientals are, etc), and so I found this very interesting. I shall make Chinese friends and try to understand the matter further.


So, this is an enormous entry. I can wrap up soon.

I'm in Beijing. I still haven't gotten over that. I'm still completely amazed. I mean, Beijing! Beijing.

I want to visit some places I remember. Maybe see my old school, look at Xidan, eat at an old favorite jiaozi place, maybe go by 798, the art district. We'll see!

So, here I am. Jet lagged but with six hours of sleep, in a friend's Beijing apartment, with a day of reacquaintance ahead of me.

Oh man, China. :)

this is my Hello

Hello, and welcome to The Ekscursionist!

Those of you who know my name will know why I have picked this particular moniker. Those of you who don't know my name might miss out a bit, but only a very little bit, and I can make up for your disappointment by offering you a pile of kittens. Disappointment assuaged? Very good, then let's move on.

This is a blog about me going to China and teaching there. Specifically, going to Harbin Institute of Technology and teaching English to its students. Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) is a fairly well-known tech school, part of the C9 League. Harbin the city is the 10th-largest city in China, clocking in (censusing in?) at ~10 million people. I will have company.

Many places internationally are characterized by their weather. London: fog, Washington state: rain, South Africa: vuvuzelas, etc. Harbin, thus, is also known for its temperature, which is, as any meteorologist worth their salt can tell you, Cold. It sponsers an annual Snow and Ice Festival (from Jan. 5 to whenever the sculptures melt), and is nicknamed the Ice City. (Harbin's other claims to fame are its beer, its annual furniture festival, and the fact that it is north of Vladivostok (everybody I talk to seems to know where Vladivostok is, and so it has become my official meter of how far north Harbin is. ("It's up in Manchuria." "Oh?" "North of North Korea." "Um." "North of Vladivostok." "Oh, yeah!")).)

So! the purpose of this lovely, interesting, well-designed, and particularly humble blog is simple: talk about how it is to live and teach in Harbin. I've been to China before and have lived in Beijing; been learning putonghua for going on seven years, so I should be fine with getting around. I'm excited in advance to see how Harbin will be. (No, really, you have no idea. I test my Big Harbin Coat every chance I get. I am knitting preparatory scarves. I have been dreaming in Chinese.)

I think that's pretty much all the information you need. I'll be making posts, oh, once a week? Perhaps more often if I can manage, but I'm not sure of my schedule just yet, and figure once-a-week to be a good number to aim for. There will also be pictures! Everybody likes pictures. I like pictures, anyway.

One last note, for the curious: The banner picture is not, in fact, a picture of anywhere in Harbin. It is actually one I took in Wu Zhen, a canalled, historical city in which a lot of the old crafts and skills have been preserved. Indigo-dying, baijiu-making, etc. It fit the winter theme nicely, though. It will be switched out once I take a suitably-cold picture of Harbin.


So there you have it! Welcome to The Ekscursionist, and I hope you enjoy my posts!

Testing Testing 1 2 3

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute

irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Let's see if this works.