HARBIN CITY MODERN

You will not do your souvenir shopping in Harbin anymore than a Chinese visitor would load up on tchotchkes in St Paul. Oddly enough the most difficult item to find in Harbin is postcards. It took me two days to find a rather ghoulish pack, and mailing them was another adventure.

Still, the temptation remains to enter stores every ten minutes or so, to warm up a bit and to observe, once the fog clears off one's glasses.

At the market, life is turned upside down: meat and fish are sold outside in the open air, frozen solid. Produce is sheltered behind plastic sheeting.

It was exciting and tremendously novel to discover a big modern Chinese city. But I was eager to dig and discover old Harbin, a Russian-Jewish city where once trod spies and fortune hunters.

Harbin is the Northernmost large city in China, a young metropolis of more than 5 million people, with a short but cosmopolitan history and legendary cold Winters. The first impression of Harbin is disastrous: "What was I thinking? I bought long underwear to come see THIS!" But after a while, the polar sunset lights playing over the cubist apartment buildings start growing on you. The way the old Russian architecture blends with the reckless modern highrises generates visual excitement too.


	In the modern commercial district, it is forbidden to cross the busy avenues. Instead, you must use an underground walkway. At the bottom of the muddy steps, you go through a heavy and none too clean quilted curtain which keeps the heat in. Then you find yourself in a large, crowded shopping center, and pretty soon, you have no idea which way you wished to exit in the first place. Another obstacle for pedestrians is the railroad which slices the city into distinct halves. And of course there are the fanciful Chinese maps: not every street is marked. The map of Harbin, a city the size of Berlin, looks like a map of Carlisle. You think that little Russian church is two blocks away, but it's more like ten blocks. If you take a bus, the windows are so thickly frosted over that you lose track of where you are, and the affordable taxis are stuck in immobile traffic jams.

You will not do your souvenir shopping in Harbin anymore than a Chinese visitor would load up on tchotchkes in St Paul. Oddly enough the most difficult item to find in Harbin is postcards. It took me two days to find a rather ghoulish pack, and mailing them was another adventure. Still, the temptation remains to enter stores every ten minutes or so, to warm up a bit and to observe, once the fog clears off one's glasses. At the market, life is turned upside down: meat and fish are sold outside in the open air, frozen solid. Produce is sheltered behind plastic sheeting. It was exciting and tremendously novel to discover a big modern Chinese city. But I was eager to dig and discover old Harbin, a Russian-Jewish city where once trod spies and fortune hunters.

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