June 27, 2006
We left Changchun by another 'luxury' bus on Friday and arrived in Haerbin, four hours later. Haerbin is famous in China for it's Russian district. The city (and presumably the area) belonged to the Russian empire for about 50 years, ending in the 1920s. One of the results of this is a long pedestrian street with French-style Russian architecture on either side. There used to be several Orthodox churches as well, but most of them were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. One of them, St. Sophia, has been somewhat restored and now houses a collection of photographs from the turn of the century in Haerbin. It's a neat space and the exhibition is somewhat interesting, but there are no captions in English, so we weren't really sure of the point of the collection or the photographs themselves.
The architecture along the Russian row is really fun, but it's much more enjoyable just because there are no cars. David's mentioned the traffic as being anarchic and it really is. We talked about it being chaotic, at first, but his mathematically inclined self couldn't deal with that, since there are actually patterns, or order, in chaos. No such order exists in traffic here, so the pedestrian only street is especially nice. There's an enormous river that the street runs into and running parallel to it is a lengthy boardwalk. It has rollerbladers, a neat park with gymnastics and other sports equipment, lots of ice cream vendors and plenty of people watchers.
This morning, we went to two of the three Buddhist temples in town. The third is an active monastery that non-community members are only allowed to enter twice a month, but the first two, the Temple of Sacred Bliss and the Temple of the Seven-tiered Pagoda, are open to the public everyday. The Sacred Bliss temple, unfortunately was anything but blissful (too much noise), but the Seven-tiered Pagoda temple had two halls filled with hundreds of wonderful carved wooden deities, painted (or layered?) with gold. Unfortunately we need an art history class in Chinese Buddhist art to appreciate most of what we saw, but it was really lovely nonetheless.
-Leah
