Today is my first day back at work for some considerable time.
I did a couple of days at the turn of the year, but otherwise it's around 2 months since I did anything substantial.
In that time we've been to Oman and I went back to the UK and to Lanzarote.
I've done some Chinese study and some preparation for the coming term.
We've also done some things around the apartment and more preparation for the wedding.
I've added a webcam and a slideshow of our flickr photographs to this blog.
Regarding the webcam, if you're lucky enough to take a look at this page while I'm on-line you might see something exciting like me scratching my nose or having a snack. I suspect it'll be something that runs out of novelty quite quickly and will then be removed. If it's slowing down the site significantly, let me know and I'll dump it.
I don't know whether it's some kind of Protestant work ethic, but I'll be quite happy to be back at work. Not having a specific focus can be a bit dull, especially when Caroline is working so hard. I've had a couple of interesting meetings recently, so perhaps there's some more part-time work for me to come - you'll be the first to know.
Right now I'm working in the office (until recently, Rob's bedroom) while our new ayi pootles round cleaning the house. I confess that having a housekeeper is going to take some getting used to, but we simply don't have the time to keep this place as clean as we'd like. Ironed clothes again will also be nice and it contributes to the local economy, so that works for me.
So that's a basic update for you all. Now onto our weekend in Harbin.
Harbin is 1,285KM from Beijing.
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We bought soft sleeper train tickets. Four bunks to a berth, closable door, control over the lights and no music. There were five of us originally travelling, me and Caroline, Rob (Caroline's former uni mate now here doing an internship), Marijn Booman (Dutchman, also an intern, his complaints at people's pronunciation of his name has led to him being called Boo) and Daphne (French intern).
So we had one whole berth to ourselves and then one bunk in another berth.
The tickets cost around 800RMB (£80) each for a return.
Considering you spend two nights sleeping comfortably on the train and travel 2,500KM, it's really not expensive.
Hard sleeper would be about half the price, but now that we're working here, the soft sleeper makes the Monday back at work a lot easier.
We left at 21:20 on Friday night, arriving in Harbin the next morning at 07:30.
On the train, one of Boo's friend managed to come and find us. He'd decided to come along to Harbin at the last minute. Ryan was the solitary American (and half French) for a change with a group of Europeans. Normally it's the other way around for me and Caroline.
So the six of us arrived in Harbin after varying levels of sleep. However, getting off the train, the extreme cold hit us like a spade in the face and very quickly dispelled any sleepiness. To give you an idea of the necessary clothing, I was wearing:
Normal underwear
Long underwear lined with velour
5 pairs of socks
2 white T shirts
2 merino ice breaker tops from New Zealand
1 Pair of Jeans
A sweater
A fleece
A thick coat
2 pairs of gloves
A scarf
A hat
Everyone was wearing some variation of this outfit.
It has been difficult to get the exact temperature, but for the sake of argument, let's settle on minus 20.
Colder than I have ever come close to experiencing.
And with this kind of outfit on, even though most of it was technologically designed for exactly this temperature. It still took an age to prepare each time you enter or leave a restaurant, bar or hotel room.
Using some great advice from one of my students, we stayed in a hotel near the Songhua river.
I could spend a long time describing our whole weekend as it was generally excellent. We ate some delicious Russian food, crossed the frozen river in a horse-drawn carriage, saw snow and ice sculptures that defied belief,skied with temples churches and mosques as a backdrop, drank vodka to warm up, saw a Russian church with 'onion' domes and visited a park with 300 tigers including a Siberian tiger and a pair of ligers.
Here are a few of the best photographs:
Ice Festival
Snow Festival
Snow dogs
Russian Cafe
Togging up
Russian Church
Liger
Siberian Tiger
Group of tigers
The rest of the photographs are on flickr.
Check them out.
It was a brilliant weekend and we arrived back in Beijing at about 07:00 on Monday morning full of memories about the great things we'd seen. It was another reminder that there are some fantastic things here in China to see. And if we can keep up the travelling pace we've managed so far, then we should get to see a lot of them over the next two and a half years.
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