Scenes of Harbin on May 12th, and some food.These photographs share some scenes I observed on the way back from the wedding, and also there are some close shots of food served at the wedding. As usual, if I have anything to say, I’ll put it after the photographs. |
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| Almonds and leafy green vegetable, a tasty dish. | Peanuts and herbs, a dish I'd never had before, but I found it very enjoyable. | This was the wedding cake. The Chinese are not as interested in sweet flavors as those of us in the Western Hemisphere, and their attention to desserts and cakes is less intense. |
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| The broccoli was very good. I didn’t try the meat, but I'm sure it was also tasty. | Shrimp, even though Harbin is pretty far from the sea. | I thought sweet-and-sour pork was an American Chinese dish, but here it was on the wedding banquet menu in Heilongjiang. |
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| I'm told this was at one time a Russian church, and then it was some sort of a Lin Biao monument to Mao-Tse Deng, but when Lin Biao went from being a hero to being an enemy the monument was destroyed and replaced with what you see here. | A monument to Russian victory over Japan and an older building dwarfed by the massive towers behind. | The monument to Russian armed forces in their victory over the Japanese and their liberation of Manchuria from Japanese rule. I believe it was the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan (in mid-August 1945) that forced Japan’s surrender, and the nuclear bombs were of secondary (but also important) significance. |
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| A statue of Mao Tse-Deng. | I liked the shape of that lilac tree in front of this older decaying building, and the eldery person sitting by the tree also made the scene interesting. | At a traffic light I noticed this child with a very traditional style haircut for a chinese kid. |
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| Hey, I can read these characters. This is an American California Beef Noodles restaurant. I didn’t realize California was famous for its beef noodles. I wonder if they have a no-meat version of California noodles, because if they do, I want to try it, being a native Californian myself. | This seems like an older style of communist architecture influenced by the Russian Soviet Union style, or I could be mistaken. | Click on the image to get the bigger picture and you will see a guy riding a utility tricyle bike at the middle of the bottom of the image. The building in the center of the image is interesting as well. |
The wedding was over very quickly. We left campus at around 8:00 a.m., and we must have been at the hotel where the wedding was held by 8:30 a.m., and I think the ceremony and banquet began by 9:00 a.m., but by 10:00 a.m. it was over and the guests were quickly leaving. The poor bride and goom tried to get a little to eat, but the next wedding was being set up, and there was some pressure to finish up and get out of there so the second wedding of the day could start at 11:00 a.m.. It was a lovely clear day. I spend most of the afternoon working on student papers and e-mails and so forth. I did some work on my presentations as well. In the evening I went out for dinner at a Korean restaurant and enjoyed some exellent noodles. After that, I walked around the track with scores of other people. Some groups of faculty/staff/students were dancing/marching in formation around the track in time to lively popular music. The wind began to pick up, and we had rain. I was asleep by 9:00 p.m., and then I woke up around 2:30 a.m. on the 13th and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I started putting up this summer diary. |
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