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