Harbin Diary #1 - Mr. Summer Spring Autumn.

“This is your disease”, the young doctor said and pointed at her computer screen, and between loads of Chinese signs I recognized some words in brackets. Now I can’t remember what it said, but I didn’t understand it anyway and they –the doctor and her assistant – didn’t give me time to write it down, before they went to another site to try to find out which treatment I needed.
How sick is that, we’re one week into our trip, and I’m already at a hospital with some kind of an ear infection.
Fade out.48 hours earlier, we’d arrived from Beijing to Harbin in the northeast of China. Yes that’s the story about the doggy taxi driver who wanted to rip us of as you can read in a previous post, so enough about that.
After checking into our hotel we went for a walk in the streets. It was around 10 PM and in the streets close to our Hotel people were barbequing kebabs on the pavements and having dinner. Further along, arriving on a European like pedestrian zone we were dragged into a kind of beer garden, flanked by numerous food stalls.

With two pints of fresh draught Harbin beer in our hands, we found an empty table and sat down. “Cheers, let’s see how this City is going to be”!
My ear had already started to bother me at that time; in fact it had been doing so since the early morning when we were still in Beijing.
We were the only western people in the beer garden, and the stirring had begun.
“Can I sit here for a moment?”
We looked up at saw the friendly face of a Chinese man.
“Of course, please sit down!”
“Sorry, but my English is bad, Welcome to China, my name is Mr. Summer Spring Autumn”.
Then we learned the Chinese word for cheers; “Gambei” and had a nice chat with this friendly and open person, who came from the Shandong province, but had been in Harbin because of work in a period of 10 days or so.
More beer got to the table as we were sharing life stories and views. So far it was a good opening to take on a new city and it’s people.
By the way; the pint of beer was 3 Yuan, just if somebody wants to know, 10 Yuan is around 1 Euro, so ask again if you think I could become a China fan?
To be continued.