HIT it, maestro!

We are in Harbin and all is well. After being kept awake during our all-night train ride by a loudly snoring man who slept in the bunk above Lisa, we stumbled through the train station with our loaded bags clanging like gongs against the stairs. As we stepped outside, all kinds of cab drivers, hawkers, peddlers, and beggars surrounded us, and, through the confusion, we chose an honest-looking cab driver to take us to a hotel to drop off our stuff.

Trying to figure out exactly what to do, we went to the main pedestrian street in Harbin (Zhongyang Jie) and gawked at the Russian-style architecture lining the street. We finally decided we needed to get lunch and get to the school at which we wanted to study. Lunch consisted of two delicious bowls of "pulled noodles" (la mian) for a total of $1. Afterward, we took another cab to Harbin Institute of Technology (a.k.a. HIT, or Haerbin Gongye Daxue) and looked for the foreign student center.

Much questioning about the loaction of the foreign student center later, we found our place and quickly ascended three flights of stairs. In a whirlwind of paperwork and 15 minutes later, we were all registered for classes.

This morning, we moved to a better guesthouse (luguan - cheap hotel) near campus and began to pick classes and pay tuition. Right now, we're looking for an apartment (the dorms are expensive and less connected to actual Chinese people), which should be easy because a teacher gave us a list of several open places located within walking distance of campus.

Two interesting notes on Harbin:
1. The Mandarin spoken here is crystal clear. In Beijing, the cab drivers and working-class people tend to have an thick accent, adding Rs onto the ends of words and sounding like they had marbles in their mouths. Here, however, just about everyone sounds like a language professor.
2. The majority of foreign students we've seen so far are Russian and Korean. It makes sense - Harbin is in the area formerly known as Manchuria, which is right between Russia and Korea. The strange thing, though, is that most of the Koreans are North Koreans and nearly all the Chinese students speak some Russian.

Sorry that we don't have pictures yet. We don't have internet access with our own computers right now, so we're at a "net bar" (wang ba), which is basically a room with 100 computers and just as many nerds playing online games. When we get access with our own computers, we'll upload pictures of campus and such.

Thank you for reading.