Arrival In Harbin

The Air China economy class seating area was thronged with folk; guess I'd better get used to that.

The seats were arranged in banks of three down each side, with a raft of four-abreast in the centre of the plane. Tam, Gina and I had tickets for the four-seater bit, but Danuka slunk off and arranged herself at a window seat beside an elderly couple. Then when Gina sat down her chair broke. She tried to make out that it was broken already, but we had heard the snap and crunch of plastic and metal. She went off in a strop and found another seat, leaving Tam and I with two seats each. As we roared across northern Europe, Russia, Mongolia, Beijing-bound, the cheap Sinclair computer-style graphic on the big TV screen at the front of the cabin plotting our route east at the frustratingly slow pace of a snail, we munched M&M's and drank beer to take our minds off what we were getting ourselves into.

Thirteen hours later, we arrived at Beijing airport, changed some money, and got piles of pink hundreds, green fifties, brown twenties, all with the grinning warty face of Chairman Mao, as well as these brown slips of paper with old-fashioned thirties-style trucks on them, which look more like lottery tickets or Monopoly money. Then on to Harbin airport, and a welcoming party of four, two foreign teachers and two Chinese: Karen, an English girl, nervous and friendly, our 'Director of Studies', Alan, a taciturn sarcastic Scotsman, Charles, a Chinese guy with a squint psychotic smile who's one of the big-wigs of the school, and Casper, the 'fixer', whose job it is to look after the foreigners.

The eight of us piled into a little van and headed off into the cold, grimy, foggy Harbin night. I couldn't see much out of the steamed-up windows except countless monotonous concrete over- and underpasses. Rising Moon English Language College is to be found in the industrial part of the city, surrounded by narrow filthy streets of crumbling cracked pavement bordered by high-rise tenements that look like dirty, stacked rabbit hutches in a derelict pet shop. It's going to take some time to get used to this place. Maybe when I see it in the daylight...

The college building is a ludicrous monstrosity in the shape of an unused stack of metal staples dropped on end: the front of it one long eight-storied wall of classrooms, then a wing to either side which house the dormitory blocks. We were first ushered into the student canteen on the ground floor, to eat dumplings that were nigh on impossible to pick up with the chopsticks. As we dropped, splashed and fumbled with these slimy boiled conundrums, a bunch of the foreign contingent just returned from 'gong-fu', which I'm presuming means 'kung-fu', joined us and proceeded to eat them all up. Jet-lagged, confused and still hungry, we were then shown to our rooms.

The foreign teachers live mostly on the fifth floor, but as there are now so many of us (twelve, I think), and there aren't enough rooms, I've been stationed on the fourth floor along with the Chinese staff. My room resembles a prison cell minus the bucket. It is a little smaller than our spare room at home; the walls are of stained, flaking, chalky plaster, there is a bed with an ancient mattress and patchwork covers; a tall wooden wardrobe; a rough wooden writing desk with chair; a separate room, no bigger than an alcove, with toilet, sink and shower in such close proximity that I could brush my teeth, take a shower and have a shit all at the same time; and that's it. I should count myself lucky, though: the Chinese teachers bunk six, sometimes eight to a room, and have no shower or toilet en-suite (if you could call mine that). I can hear the sad, one-man-clapping slap of flip-flops on cold concrete, the mumbling of an unintelligible tongue, and the hawk and spit (they're spitting on the floor!) as they trudge to the communal toilet at the end of the corridor.

I couldn't bear to be in that bare cell alone, so went up to the fifth floor, where there's a common room with DVD player for the foreigners. Tam was already there, sitting on the sofa talking to a petite pretty girl with red hair and green eyes (he doesn't hang about) called Anita.

'Yeah, it's well cheap 'ere,' she was saying in a south coast accent. 'I usually take only two hundred kuai - that's RMB - for a night out. Mind you, I am a gell!'

'What's the beer like here?' Tam asked.

'Rough as a roofer's glove, mate, but it does the trick. It's called Hapi, which is funny, ain't it, as you don't feel so 'appy the next day, I can tell ya.'

'Happy beer?'

'Yeah; stands for Harbin Pijiu. Pijiu means beer in Chinese.'

'Pee-joe,' we repeated in a mantra, as if Anita were our Beer Guru.

Before she left, sweet Anita, taking note of our frazzled jet-lagged demeanours, stuck on a DVD, A Knight's Tale, with Heath Ledger, and Tam and I were left in this strange room, strangers to each other up until yesterday (or today, I'm a bit mixed-up), listening in a surreal daze to the refrain of 'We will, we will ROCK YOU!' until, realizing we’d been rocked quite enough for one day, we decided to brave our bare jail cells for the night and try to get some sleep.

But I couldn't. So I've been sat at the desk writing my diary, my diary to her which she'll probably never see, so perhaps it's really my diary to me, and it's now 1.30 am and I feel lost and lonely in this cold room, this strange school, this big dirty city, this alien country. I peer out through a gap in the colourless curtains and see only empty, unlit streets. I feel like the only one awake on this whole planet.

I wonder if she's sleeping. If so, I wonder what she's dreaming.