The essays have been written, the exams taken, 结业证/diplomas received, the sun finally set in Harbin.
People have been asking me if I’ll come back to Harbin in the future, and I respond with我当然会啦: 哈尔滨的冰雪节还没看，哈尔滨那么有名的啤酒还没喝，我肯定会再回来。Of course I’ll be back; I still haven’t seen Harbin’s most famous Ice-and-Snow Festival, haven’t had the privilege (?) of tasting Harbin’s renowned beer, how can I not come back? And if I’m feeling playful, I’ll tack on a “我想…大约会是在冬季.”
(for those of you getting my blog updates in real time, I’ve been typing them up offline and uploading them all to the Interwebz in one massive file dump. Just, uh, a heads-up)
Part two of the series “Yvonne does Harbin life advice” although my name in the same sentence with the word ‘advice’ and no negative ought to be ringing alarm bells in some heads.
ANYWAYS
I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day on WeChat, in which both of us noted that cities in China just didn’t feel as dangerous as cities in the U.S., or Canada. I’m not quite sure why, but I’ve done my fair share of wandering around Shanghai late at night, and never felt as uneasy as I do walking quickly through New York in the dusk. Why this might be is probably worth its own academic research paper, but what it means for this blog post is that, relatively speaking, Harbin is a pretty safe city to live in.
So this post and the next will just about boring daily life in Harbin, the differences between staying at a dorm in HIT and staying at a dorm in Yale, and some tips for getting through daily life things without much hassle so you can concentrate on schoolwork (or, ah, other things. It’s a big city out there). These posts are centered more on the mundane details of day-to-day 吭哧吭哧， so aren’t really that interesting except for people who are planning on attending CET Harbin.
This post will be concentrated on the dorms/dorm life in HIT, as well as some side notes about staying healthy while abroad.
thanks, Baidu Music. Thanks loads.
Well, I got it all done in one day at least, so I think I’m entitled to a victory sCREEEEEECH
IT’S STARTING
“it” being my final paper, as required by CET Harbin academics: 2000+ words, hand-written (we elected to type it for ease of revision, ‘we’ being my 一对一/one-on-one tutorial teacher and I), about any topic of your choice related to your 一对一话题/one-on-one tutorial. I somehow mushed 《关雎》/”On Ospreys” (from《诗经》/the Classic of Odes), 白居易的《卖炭翁》/Bai Juyi’s “The Old Coal-Seller,” 屈原的《离骚》/Qu Yuan’s “Sorrow at Parting,” and 李白《将进酒》/Li Bai’s “Drink With Me” into one essay broadly linked by the theme of ‘poetry and politics.’
“starting” being me nodding off while transcribing my essay. Whoops.
Fresh, sweet watermelon from the 水果店 by 黑店，a blissfully 秋高气爽 cool breeze and a relief from the heat wave that’s seized Harbin in its jaws all week, plus random passerbys dropping in for a thoroughly unexpected conversation about the merits of the education systems of different countries, the benefits of learning ancient Chinese philosophy, how to learn a language and the motivations behind it, and contemporary problems with unemployment… just another day in Harbin.
For our last CET outing of the program, we headed over to 极乐寺/Jile Temple, the largest Buddhist temple in all of northeastern China. The bus dropped us off at a plaza that Celine and I recognized: turns out, 极乐寺 is embarrassingly close to the 文庙/Confucian Temple we visited last week.
Well, there goes the last week of classes…
A lot of ‘lasts’ have happened, but a lot of ‘lasts’ have yet to occur:
So what’s left? Review for our upcoming exams, and my woefully incomplete final paper. I’ll get back to you on that once I actually have a thesis.
In the meantime, to celebrate the end of the week and our continued existence (人生苦短，须尽欢), 淑婉, 笑英, 笑英的同屋, and I took a walk, with the vague idea of 逛果戈里大街/wandering through Gogol Street (known for – you guessed it – Chinese Baroque architecture that really puts the 莫斯科 in the 东方莫斯科/the Moscow in the Moscow-of-the-East). It ended up being a four-hour odyssey of a walk, though, since we got distracted by things ranging from puppies to 哈夏音乐节/the Harbin Summer Music Festival to Nixon’s face plastered on a yoghurt store to 广场舞/…uh, plaza dancing?
Heyo, I'm Yvonne Ye in the place to be 