Delhi

I was really excited to come to India and see a new culture, especially because I love Indian food. I pretty much expected it to be a bit more run down than China. I knew it was a poor country but this place is crazy. I don't know how people live here. Everybody is desperate to make money. As foreigners, people look at us and see dollar signs. We are constantly hassled the second we leave the hotel room by beggars and tuk tuk drivers and pushy street sellers. It is also ridiculously filthy. Just walking around we start to feel so grimy. There is garbage and noxious smells everywhere. China seems clean and pristine by comparison.

We hired a car for most of our trip but decided to go around Delhi for two days on our own and use the metro. We traveled all over Asia but it is really overwhelming here. Since the metro is more expensive than tuk tuks mostly only wealthier people take the metro and we got hassled less inside. The thing that struck me most about the subway here is there are hardly any women. I think most women just stay at home and their husbands work. There is a special car for women only to take so you don't get groped on the subway.... how reassuring. Delhi is apparently the rape capital of the world. Since the women's car also is often half as crowded as the other cars I've been taking it and Danny goes in the regular car closest. The morning rush hour is way later here; most people don't go to work until 10:00 am. Shorter work days would be nice; it is longer in China than in the states. Another weird thing about the subway here is the security checks at the subway entrance are really intense like airport security. Also in random spots around the station there are stacks of sandbags and armed police officers that stand behind them. When I say armed I don't mean little pistols the cops carry in the states. They have giant rifles, I’m not sure why but I found it scary. I’ve been told it has to do with threats of terror attacks.

We also tried taking a few tuk tuks. They are ok but it is kind of funny riding around the city in a golf cart. The drivers all try to rip off foreigners and offer prices triple what it says they should be online. There are a ton of them so my strategy is mostly to just walk away and find another tuk tuk. Most of the time they are only overcharging you by $2 but it is more the principle. I'm really glad we hired a car for most of the trip but it has been an interesting learning experience taking the subway and tuk tuks around Delhi.

I think our hotel is a pretty standard mid-range hotel for India. The hot water only works on rare occasions and the bellboys shamelessly wait around for tips. One of them carried our bags up and two more came to "tell us about the room" in hopes of getting a tip. The heat doesn't work but it is only a tiny bit chilly at night right now. Danny thinks it is the worst hotel we ever stayed in because of the lack of hot water.

For our first meal in Delhi we went to a McDonalds after our plane landed quite late. If only McDonalds at home had spicy paneer burgers. I have to say, I'm sort of excited to be able to eat at fast food places. It doesn't happen at home. We also tried a veggie snack burger from KFC. Also amazing. The restaurants even have separate ovens for meat and dairy. The food is definitely the best part of being here. India really is a vegetarian culinary paradise. Now I know how great it is getting food everywhere we travel for Danny. We aren't eating any street food though in an attempt to avoid stomach bugs. We tried a nice Indian restaurant called Moti Mahal for dinner one night, we aren't exclusively eating fast food. Our second night we tried a place down the street from our hotel called R1 which was also really yummy. I think our stomachs are slightly less happy with Indian food than we are but fortunately we packed some Tums.

For our first full day in India we went to Red Fort and Jama Masjid.

Red Fort is a UNESCO site, which at one time was a residence for Mughal emperors that housed about 3,000 people. It is sort of Delhi's version of the Forbidden City. It was built with red sandstone and has a lot of beautiful man made water canals that are kept empty today. When there was water running all around it must have been breathtaking. We got the audio guide which has a few mildly amusing bits of information.

Jama Masjid is the largest mosque in India. It was a pretty building. It is supposed to be free to enter but there is a 300 rupee ($6) camera fee. There is also a minaret at the top with a decent city view that is 100 rupees to climb but is included in the 300 for the camera fee. Since Danny and I only had one camera it should have only cost 400 rupees total but the guys who sell the tickets are total scam artists. First they told us 600 and Danny paid it before I checked the price and then they refused to give us back the other 200. Then we got to the top where the minaret was they tried to charge us again. I said I wasn't paying and we would just leave, then the guy changed his mind and said we could go up. The thing that pissed me off even more was that they insisted I wear this incredibly filthy shawl because they decided I wasn't dressed modestly enough even though the rule was that your legs and shoulders need to be covered and mine already were. I wore it half opened the most of time and the time and Danny and me bickered about whether it was disrespectful of me. I think it is a stupid patriarchal rule that deserves to be broken. Rules like that always leave me wanting to put on a tube top and hold a protest. Women should be allowed to wear what they want.

For our second day we went to Qutub Minar and DLF Emporio. 

Quitab Minar is also a UNESCO site. It is sort of a memorial complex built for unknown reasons. It was the world’s tallest skyscraper at the time it was built in 1290. It also had Delhi’s first mosque. Some of the structures were ruins and some were still in perfect condition. Danny was really excited to see wild parakeets, which seem to be indigenous to the area. Forgive my ignorance but I never realized previously that most of the historic architecture in India was built by Muslims. Pretty much everything we saw in Delhi was a Muslim sight built by the Mughals.

The DLF Emporio was according to wikitravel the fanciest shopping area in Delhi. We were pretty unimpressed. It mostly left us wondering if there actually is a nice part to the city. It did have a few nice shops but it was mostly a half empty shopping mall and the streets outside weren’t well maintained. We had a pretty yummy lunch in the food court though. There was supposed to be an art museum inside one of the malls but it turned out to be closed. A lot of stuff was closed because of Republic Day, a national holiday which had just passed.

In the evening we went shopping near our hotel at an area called Karol Bagh. It was kind of cool and we got hassled less than most areas we walked around. We bought a few gifts and some Indian spices.

Harbin

Harbin is famous for its annual ice festival. It is very far north close to the Russian border and it is the coldest place I ever went. As my trip to Harbin got closer, I became more and more nervous about how well I would handle the cold. I went to the fake market and bought a coat a few sizes to big for me and then wore another coat and several sweaters under it. I also went to Decathalon and bought several pairs of thermal underwear all of which I wore at the same time. We also picked up some heat patches that have some sort of chemical reaction and get really warm once they are exposed to air. I put them inside my gloves and shoes. Unfortunately, they seemed to stop working when it got too cold. It turned out when we were in Harbin it happened to be an unseasonably warm weekend (only about -10 Fahrenheit). It can get down to -35. There were a few times when we were out sightseeing that I got pretty cold but we just ducked into a coffee shop or gift shop to warm up so it wasn’t too bad.

Inside it was actually way warmer than our apartment in Shanghai. Buildings in Shanghai are terribly insulated and constantly drafty. For whatever reason, Chinese locals love to keep the windows opened all the time in the winter to air the room out. Last year I was always freezing at work and had to keep my coat on all day. Fortunately, this year I have my own room, which I keep nice and comfy. One of the best things we brought to Shanghai from the states is plastic window insulators. The heat in our apartment is also not the best so we have bought a space heater for each room. The other foreign postdocs and us always have electrical bills way higher than the Chinese locals in our building. I think they all sleep in their winter coats to save money on heat.

In Harbin we stayed at two different hotels the two nights in Harbin because the one I really wanted to stay at, a converted synagogue, was only available for one night. It turned out to be pretty unimpressive, it was really filthy and smelled from the squat toilets downstairs and melted ice from people’s shoes. Harbin at one point had a community of about 5,000 Jews and there are two synagogues in he city. Our second hostel wasn’t much better but it had heating under the floors so the room was nice and toasty.

I went with a friend I met on my painting excursion in Hangzhou.  Danny didn’t come because he went to California for a work conference the week before and we planned a trip to India the following week so he decided it was too much traveling for him.

Our first night in Harbin we went to a Russian Moscow Theater show that my friend had wanted to see. I wasn’t terribly excited about it because it hadn’t shown up on any of the travel sights. We were the only foreigners in the audience and the menu only came in Chinese and Russian. I’m pretty sure the waiters were confused by why we couldn’t read Russian and I had to use my best Chinese to try to order. The show was kind of ok. It was mostly a typical Chinese variety show, there was a Chinese opera dance and a Chinese calligraphy demo and a comedian that I didn’t understand much of. There were a few parts with Russian dancers, which turned out to be rather risqué dances where the Russian girls got almost naked. The Chinese women were dressed modestly for the whole show. I think there is a lot of tensions between the Chinese and Russians in Harbin and I got the feeling there wasn’t much respect given to Russian women.

We mostly got around Harbin by taxi, which gave me a good opportunity to practice my Chinese since taxi drivers there don't speak a word of English. My Chinese is almost kind of passable at this point, at least for brief conversations. Getting a taxi in Harbin requires bargaining every time and is a giant pain in the butt. They almost never agree to use the meter. I tried to make sure we knew approximately how much each place should cost before we went. The most annoying thing about taxis there is if you are going far out they will agree on a price, drive for five minutes, then pull over to the side of the road and sell you to another taxi that you need to switch to. It makes me feel quite fortunate that in Shanghai official taxis don’t do any of that nonsense.

Our first morning at the hostel we met a really nice guy from the States who was traveling by himself and he ended up going around with us for the whole weekend. We started out by going to the Siberian tiger park. You get to see a lot of tigers really close up. They also sell animals like chicken, goats, and cows that you can watch them feed to the tigers. Fortunately we only saw them eat a chicken. It was still pretty gross.

Afterwards, we checked out St. Sophia Church, a Russian church right in the center of town. At one point there were a lot of Russians living in Harbin and most of the noteworthy architecture in the city is Russian. I almost felt like we were visiting Russia. Inside there were a bunch of old photos of Harbin but it wasn’t really worth paying to go inside.

We had lunch at the main shopping street, Zhongyang Da Jie. It was an average street with souvenir shops and Chinese and Russian restaurants. It was decorated with a few ice sculptures. We went to a Russian restaurant, where I learned that Russian restaurants have terrible service. The guy we met had been taking the Trans Siberian train said all the restaurants along the way in Russia had equally unfriendly service.

After that we went to our first ice show stop, Zhoalin Park. Zhoalin Park was the least impressive of the ice show sights we saw. A lot of things seemed to still be under construction, although it was really interesting to watch them work. It mostly had a lot of small ice sculptures. They had an ice slide, which we all tried several times since it was free and there was no line.

That night we went to Ice and Snow world, by far the most impressive ice show sight. They actually built a whole city out of ice. There were real world size buildings we could walk inside. There was even a bar made of ice. They had several pop culture sculptures like giant Disney characters. They also built replicas of several famous sights around China.  Everything was lit up with LED lights placed inside the ice. The only downside was because China doesn’t often care much about proper safety precautions there were several parts where you had to walk on sheets of pure ice and several people fell, including me. There was one guy who went down and didn’t move for about five minutes. It was still a totally amazing place to see.

Sunday morning we went to Unit 731 Museum. Unit 731 was a Japanese Unit during World War 2 that did chemical and biological warfare testing on locals in Harbin. It is a really sad piece of history that American schools never get around to teaching about. The museum itself is located in unit 731’s army base. The curators didn’t do a very good job. We got the audio guide, which described everything by number although none of the objects were numbered.  I think the museum in Nanjing’s section about unit 731 was more interesting, although it is much smaller.

In the afternoon we checked out a third section of the ice festival at Sun Island. It had lots of giant statues made of ice and snow. It was really beautiful. They also had dog sledding, which we decided to try. We didn’t go very far but it was still fun.

 Our taxi driver on the way back took us on a shortcut straight across the frozen lake. Since it is China, I'm pretty sure nobody ever did the proper tests to see if it was frozen enough to handle the weight of the car. I was terrified the whole way but I survived. Overall it was quite a unique trip.