Harbin Diary #2 - Mr. Ding Yu!

My ear felt like it was filled with sour cream and it was starting to hurt. I didn't know what to do as none of us spoke any putonghua and didn't know how to find a doctor or a hospital in a city with 3,6 million inhabitants.Catriona had being sitting on her bed in our room for an hour or more to try to write a sentence, we could show the ladies at the reception, asking if they could arrange train tickets for us to our next destination.
The whole day we'd been walking around the city to find the train station. We found it all right, but then the serious trouble started; how to figure out which train left for Yanji, as everything was -of course- in Chinese. Even that we asked somebody they wasn't really able to help us or sent us to the next floor of the huge station, where more people was lined up in ques in front of the ticktet stalls. The train is still the most comon transportation in China, so there was thousands of people trying to get tickets to where ever they had to go. After some hours without any luck we gave up, and decided to ask in the Hotel for help, for that we needed Catrionas translation.
We came down to the reception and gave them the piece of paper with our issue written in Pinyin, which is a system developed to write chinese with western letters.
The ladies at the desk was very friendly and tried always her best, but with the two of us she was just overwhelmed. She took a short look at the note, grapped the phone and phoned someone. As she got through, she said something very quickly and then handed me the phone.
"Halloo, I am Mr. Ding Yu; what can I do for you?"
A friendly voice with excellent english. At first I was first like lamed -I just didn't expect to hear anybody speaking english- before I finally could answer and told the friendly voice what we were trying to ask for.
"Ok, I'll be at the Hotel tomorrow at 10, you can find me in the reception."
Great, again saved just before the finish line and that we'd used the whole day to find the station and then given up getting any tickets, didn't matter anymore; now it seemed that we could get some things done; tomorrow. Well it wasn't just a lost day, on our trip through the city to the station, we'd had some not so nice coffee in a copy coffee shop called US Bucks -I wonder where they got that name from- and we'd again been in the beer gardens, had a walk at the riverfront and and and.... some nice food.

End of part 2.