Harbin - Getting there

The 1st challenge of the week-end was to get to Harbin. After spending a week or so looking for plane and train tickets, a colleague of Tamara managed to book us tickets for 1500 RMB, about half the price of what we would have paid by air, and roughly the same than by train (the big difference being that the flight is 1.5 hour vs. 10 hours by train). So on Saturday morning I woke up at 5:30am, got dressed, grabbed the suitcase and stepped out of the building. There are always taxis waiting in front of Somerset, even at 6am. I knocked on the window of the 1st one to wake up the driver and showed him where I wanted to go: Nanyuan airport. He looked at me and said something which I guessed meant "are you sure?" Nanyuan airport is known as the "other airport" of Beijing. It's located in the South of Beijing and the only description I could find of this airport is the following: "Nanyuan airport is the purgatory of Beijing air travel. Only travelers with frightening karmic debt end up here and all clients of China United Airlines (me!)". Sounds like the airport you want to go to, isn't it? Still tickets were cheap and we assumed it would be some kind of low cost airport.

After 35min taxi ride, I arrived in some kind of domain with walls all around and no light on the road. 5 more minutes of total darkness and finally I could see the airport, well at least the building. I entered and thought "this is real China". Everything was written in Chinese (the only English words being: check-in, unusual size luggage (another example of bad translation; I believe they meant oversize), security check and gate). In total there were 6 non Chinese persons in the airport including us. We were standing there surrounded by Chinese people going back home for Chinese New Year, having at least 3 suitcases per person, kids running all over the place, eating noodle soup (yes at 7am!), spitting every now and then, pushing anyone in the way to get to the check in. We checked in, passed the security with a smile then waited for the flight until we realized we'd better watch the gate. The announcements were only in Chinese, so to find out when you are boarding, just watch the gate until you see people getting through.

The nice thing about flying in China is that the majority of the aircraft are quite recent. So the one we took was in good shape and smoothly brought us to Harbin (including a nice meal with a cake, a clementine, and a sardine (Dad I thought of you at that moment)). Let the cold begin.