11.08.09
My first full day in a major Chinese City and it is a full on Chinese city experience. Harbin has about 5 million people, busy shopping streets, a train station that is the size of an oil tanker and a Wal Mart right in the middle.
On the main shopping street there are the usual sports sh
ops of Nike and Puma, along with the up market designers like Armani, it's all glitz and glamour and come evening everything lights up in a sea of neon and super large LED screens playing advertisements.
It's like a Chinese version of Times Square or Picadilly Circus. However, if you take a walk a 100m or so behind the main main shops you hit another side to the city. Narrow alleyways and small, dark, unglitzy shops. The disparity between the two sides of the Chinese economy coin is amazing, on one side you have high class fashion boutiques,
massive displays of wealth and wide imposing streets; while on the other there are small basic shack shops, people living well below the poverty line, narrow alleyways and battered roads.
Today I also get my bus ticket to take me to Shenyang. I was going to take the train as it would be cheaper, but when I got to the station I couldn't face the queues and mayhem. Imagine a city only slightly smaller than London, but with one train station serving all destinations in the country. It was ridiculous, the station staff on megaphones herding the thousands of people around and shouting at people if they stood still for too long. On a bad note I find out that my room wasn't £20 for two nights, but was actually one night and so they take more money off me.
Apparently the lady who sold it to me got it wrong in communicating it to me, although I think she just got it wrong as they need to take a different deposit and change my receipts to what they should be. I get a discount of £7 for their mistake, but absolutely annihilate the internet connection in my room in retaliation, downloading about 3.5GB worth of audio for my MP3 player.
I feel smug.
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