This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Harbin!

Traveling 7 hours north to Harbin, China

To get our outer-Beijing travels started, a few classmates and I took the train 7 hours north to visit Harbin. Harbin, in Mandarin pronounced Ha-er-bin (哈尔滨), is one the northern most points in China (where traditional Manchuria was). It's bitterly cold during the fall/winter/early spring months but then can warm up quite nicely in the summer. Harbin is a lot like Beijing but a bit less crowded, MUCH windier, and very Russian-ized (?). Due to the close proximity of the two countries, there is a strong Russian presence in architecture, food, and culture. Although, after tasting Russian food for the first time (minus meat stuffed cabbage yum!) I have to say.... I'm disappointed. We went to the "Russian Cafe" for lunch while checking out the big Commercial street. They had really great french fries but my lamb stew was more like lamb fat and bone soup. So I pretty much just ate french fries for lunch...

After the cafe, we paid a visit to USA-Bucks, a bar with some pretty unique flare that Anthony Bourdain visited when he did his Harbin special. Being a huge Bourdain fan, I had to stop in for peek and a pint of Harbin brewed beer. The bar itself is a small little nook sandwiched in a row of shops, restaurants and souveneir carts. Once inside, however, the cozy little establishment suprises the senses with smells of beer, cigarettes, and ice cream (I don't know how) and wall-to-wall American memorabilia all circa 1920-1960. The main attraction to this bar is the owner. A Harbin native, this eccentric man in obsessed with American culture, especially hunting and the military (of which he has uniforms from each branch and wears them on a daily basis). He is said to own a banana yellow Hummer and scoot around the streets of Harbin on a segway scooter. Needless to say, I had to meet him!

On the last day we went to the tiger park. It is a nature reserve with about 1000 wild tigers living on it. Tickets were cheap- only about 45RMB per person. The cool part was that you could buy an animal to get fed to the tigers at the end of the tour. Phil bought a pheasant and a few other people bought  chickens. Live chickens.

Find out what's happening in College Parkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The tigers are enormous in real life. They look big in pictures but even bigger when they are snapping at the tires of your safari bus. They really didn't do muuuccchhhh though- they just sat around and ate grass while we all freaked out and took too many pictures. When it came time for feeding time, however, thats when all the fun started. The bus drove us out into this big pen with about 30 grown tigers and we watched as a park ranger fed the tigers live chickens out a car window. It was raw, brutal and utterly fascinating!

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?