“Привет!”  Our presence in the tiny Russian cafe was heartily acknowledged by the old Chinese man in the fedora who had just entered, elbows linked with his small, silent wife.

“Er, nihao? Hello? Hi?”

“Я думал, ты русский” I thought you were Russian, he explained (in Russian). We don’t speak Russian. Our Mandarin is pitifully limited  but our Russian is non-existant. These small details do not bode well when venturing into China’s far north, as close as you can get to Russia without needing a visa. Up here, the comforting picture menus with English subtitles and pinyin Chinese found in cities like Beijing and Shanghai are replaced with stark, unillustrated Cyrillic and Chinese characters. People are genuinely surprised to discover that we are illiterate in both Russian and Chinese.  On the street, white people are assumed to be Russian and are greeted as such.


Not in Siberia

We were in Harbin for the Grave Sweeping long weekend, the national holiday when all of China uproots itself and goes home to tend to the ancestors’ graves. We have no ancestors based in the Middle Kingdom. This opened up our travel options considerably. We decided to fly to Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang. China’s northernmost city, Harbin was founded by Russians in the late 19th century to house the engineers building the Trans Siberian railway. During the Russian Revolution, the czar-supporting White Russians took refuge there. Persecuted Russian Jews fled there. Labourers from as far away as Poland joined the Russians and Manchurians to find work there. Harbin was only captured by the Chinese in 1946. These days, Russian entrepreneurs and tourists pass through, starting up businesses and taking pictures of  each other in front of onion-domed cathedrals. The city centre architecture is decidedly 19th century Russian.

Harbin is China with a Russian interface.

We're not in St Petersburg, Toto

We had two and a half days to get our bearings. We were too late for the ice sculpture festival, which takes place every winter (they were half melted and the park was padlocked shut). We were too early to take a pleasant boat ride across the Songhua river (it was still frozen solid). However, in early April, Harbin is warm enough for long strolls by the frozen river along the tree-lined pathways of Stalin Park without developing frostbite. Hovering around freezing with bright blue skies, the weather was deemed balmy enough for the many people flying big, bright kites at the river’s edge.  Families strolled, eating mung bean and green pea ice creams through misted breath. Russians in fur hats and fur-trimmed coats walked small dogs.

Go fly a kite, whydoncha!

At the eastern end of the river promenade is the enormous, Soviet Realist-styled Flood Control Monument, which marks the beginning of Zhōngyāngdàjiē, the main pedestrian shopping street. We checked out the half-dozen Russian shops that cluster around the monument’s square. If you feel a burning need for a collapsible metal camping cup with Lenin’s face lacquered onto the lid, this is the neighbourhood for you. You can get hunting knives, fake designer purses, fake jewel encrusted watches, Russian chocolates and enormous Russian fur hats.  The Chinese staff in each of these Russian shops greeted us in Russian.

Heading South along Zhōngyāngdàjiē, away from the river, you pass by the inevitable KFCs, McDonalds and Adidas outlets, as well as Chinese and Russian restaurants, fruit-on-a-stick vendors, chestnut roasters and a Chinese-owned American bar. The pedestrian-only street is paved with cobble stones and lined with beautiful old Russian buildings. There are cool and unexpected sculptures and statues tucked into the entrances to many of the alleys darting out from either side of the street.


My new best friend, the shirtless metal trumpeter

In the small streets on the western side of Zhōngyāngdàjiē can be found old disused synagogues (now containing an IH hostel and a lovely, calm cafe with excellent espresso), an empty old Jewish middle school, a mosque, and many old Russian onion-domed buildings in various states of disrepair.  We spent two mornings wandering around this part of Harbin, taking photos, poking our noses into doorways and making poorly-pronounced small talk with the knife-sharpeners, fish-mongers, potato-sellers and blue-egg vendors. We stopped in unnamed small parks to watch groups of men show off their singing birds in wicker cages. We ate mounds of dumplings dipped in Russian dark yellow mustard in busy subterranean restaurants, with bowls of horseradish-heavy vegetable dishes on the side: long, cold slices of grilled eggplant; shredded pickled cabbage the texture of soured glass noodles; vinegary  shoe-string potatoes with semi-spicy sliced peppers. We guessed at the menu’s contents, as we were functionally illiterate, and ordered from my phrasebook using key words and hoped for the best.

In the second afternoon, we stopped our aimless wandering and eating and ventured farther afield. We took a taxi to the Siberian Tiger Preserve, a 40rmb ride north across the river.  The premise behind the preserve is to give the endangered tigers a safe haven and a place to start getting their population numbers up again. In reality, it’s a huge  park separated into many much smaller wire-fenced enclosures, with a metal-grille-covered tourist bus rumbling through every hour with a dozen tourists jamming their cameras through the bars and shouting at the tigers. If they want, tourists can buy live chickens, ducks, pheasants (or even a live cow or goat) to feed to the tigers. It felt like a grim tiger gulag to me, but everyone else was having a very good time shouting at the tigers and getting the keepers to throw live chickens at them.


In the tiger gulag

Back in Shanghai,, we took a taxi from the airport directly to the small, crowded Dong Bei restaurant up the street from our flat. We weren’t yet finished with Harbin.  We told the owner, who is from that city, where we had just flown in from. His eyes widened in surprise and he grinned broadly. He opened a bottle of Harbin beer and set down two small plastic cups. We toasted numb fingers and toes; we toasted three layers of trousers on a cold day; we toasted steaming dumplings dipped in mustard; we toasted red-cheeked babies and big fur hats.

Gan bei! Chtob vse byli zdorovy!

The Pesky Details

Where did we stay?

We stayed at the Modern Hotel, which faces onto Zhōngyāngdàjiē (89 Zhongyang St., Daoli, ☎ (0451)4615846). It is an old Russian hotel, well-maintained and quite elegant. Our room had a wide, double wooden door to the hallway and a windowed door to a small balcony overlooking a square. The lobby is a low-key kind of grand, with Russian and Russian Jewish artifacts and photos tucked into corners and onto walls. It feels like a living museum.

Where did we eat?

We first ate at Cafe Russia (露西亚西餐厅), which is up near the Flood Control Monument at the top of Zhōngyāngdàjiē. It is run by a half-Russian, half-Chinese fellow. It is small and cozy and feels like it ought to be in Prague or in a forgotten corner of St Petersburg. They serve excellent coffee. We ate stuffed cabbage  rolls, fresh, hot piroshki, red soup and potatoes with a black pepper sauce. It was so good we ate there again the next day.

We also ate at an unnamed dumpling house in Zhōngyāngdàjiē, just south of the McDonalds, on the right side of the street as you look north. There are pictures of dumplings postered to the door, which opens to a winding staircase that takes you down into the restaurant. It’s crowded, noisy and very good.

We tried the USA Bucks American bar also on Zhōngyāngdàjiē because we had seen it on Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations Harbin episode. It’s run by a Chinese Hot Pot franchise millionaire who is obsessed with the mythology of America, American military uniforms and karaoke.  The walls are literally papered with photos of him posing in cowboy outfits, navy uniforms, army uniforms, sometimes in the arms of a heavily made up Russian model (or three), sometimes alone.  This is a dude heavily into cosplay. It looks like a parallel universe’s interpretation of a Wild West saloon. The atmosphere, alas, is significantly more interesting than the food.

And what about them tigers?

We went to the Siberian Tiger Preserve by taxi, which wasn’t difficult or complicated. We just showed the driver this: 老虎公园(pinyin: Lǎohǔgōngyuán). It costs about 60rmb to get in and that includes the hour long ride in the caged truck around the grounds. If you are at all squeamish or have vegan/animal-rights leanings, you might want to think twice about going. I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Animal preserve for endangered species: good. Gulag atmosphere and flung chickens: dubious.

How did we get there?

We flew in on China Southern and flew out on Shanghai Airlines, neither of which I’d particularly recommend. They were just the cheapest flights leaving at the right time. Except they didn’t leave at the right time– both flights kept changing their times after we had booked them and we ended up having to fly in at 1am instead of at 10pm and we flew back three hours later than we had wanted.

Miss Mu told me I could buy loose flower tea from a man at the address on the little slip of brown paper she handed me. The flower tea I’d bought in the hypermarket out in the suburbs of Shanghai had little lumps of sugar in it that looked like styrofoam tucked amongst the rose petals and dried curls of orange peel. The blossoms and whole flower-tops bobbing in her tea jar were impressive. I wanted the same.  The address was written out in pinyin, with the street names on the rough map scratched out twice when she couldn’t remember which angle of the crossroads housed this shop.

I went out during my lunch break, stepping from my tiny, silent university campus out into the immediacy of Shanghai. Before me lay a tangled spiderweb of six lane highways topped by eight lane overhead expressways, joined in a five way intersection at the corner.  It roared. The air was heavy and white and slightly gritty. The stinky tofu lady outside the school gates was busy immersing the blue-veined cubes into hot oil and making the air smell like hot limburger. Scooters and electric bikes swarmed past in their lane, narrowly missing my toes, my knees, the hem of my skirt.

I started walking in the wrong direction.  Miss Mu’s second map obviously wasn’t the right one. I turned around, crossed the street in the shadow of the looming overhead expressway, and dodged taxis making illegal left turns into my crosswalk. A bus went through two red lights and rolled calmly toward me, driver calm and expressionless. I was the only person  scurrying. In Shanghai, you don’t acknowledge that you’ve seen traffic. You play dumb. You make it their responsibility to avoid you, not your responsibility to avoid them. I scurry. Everyone else shuffles. I am one of fifty crossing this particular segment of the six-lane crosswalk.

The tea shop is not a exactly a tea shop. At the far side of the road there are three other tea shops and a small alleyway. This alleyway opens up into a warren of more tea shops, each the size of my bedroom. Some sell loose green tea, others sell bricks of fermented black tea. Some have barrels of dried flower tops and bags of petals and bins of goji berries. A bored security guard points me toward my tea shop, down several corridors and around a corner. I am faced with a tiny shop filled with flowers and fungus and dried roots and dried lizards stretched on a stick.  The owner and I exchange mutually unintelligible pleasantries, requests and suggestions. My Chinese is appalling. His English is non-existent. My dictionary and phrase book fail me. I have no idea what I want or how to ask for it. Every inch of wall and floor is stacked full with earth-scented mysteries.  A business man in a sharp, elegant suit appears next to me, an unexpected bag of roots and fungus in his hand, and in fluent, perfect English, he smiles and asks me,”What shall I ask him to get for you?”

I woke  to a grey morning on a bed that certainly wasn’t mine. I’m just passing through this week, en route from here to there, and my beds are changing accordingly. This morning I found myself in rainy grey Vancouver in my old high school friend’s flat, staring into an unflatteringly angled full length mirror placed beside the bed. I’m still tired and anticipate being even more tired over the next few days as I make my way back to Shanghai, where I officially lay my hat and call home these days.  I manage to catch my friend for a dozen minutes of chitchat as she pulls on coat and shoes and shoulder bag, then retire to the lovely airy kitchen that ought to be sunny and bright if only the clouds and rain would permit. I boil some water in the copper kettle and carefully pour it into a tea pot full of loose English Breakfast tea leaves. I pull out two slices of perfectly square bread and toast them. I eat toast with cream cheese and drink a big mug of hot tea at the table next to the windows in the kitchen. It’s raining.  I’m dreading my flight tomorrow, the inevitable jet lag, the imminent end of my two month school break.  I drink a second mug of not-so-hot tea and watch the few pedestrians out in the grey, rainy street. Vancouver, in spite of the Olympics, can be a very empty place.

A dozen or so years ago, I found myself sitting at a similar kitchen table drinking tea, watching the rain, except it was London rain and the crowds out on the street were thicker and noisier. I had just moved to England with grand plans to find work and travel around Europe and my high school friend was conveniently already living there. She offered me a portion of her bedroom floor to sleep on. The floor was sloping and I woke up every morning under the sink. I didn’t mind because my universe was getting bigger and I was simply thrilled to be watching it expand. I spent my days roaming London, exploring the streets with a huge hunger for discovery.  I was fresh and the city was huge. Even though I had yet to even start concretely planning my big European tour, nor had I even managed to line up any work to fund this journey, I knew the proverbial ball was already rolling.  I was now in a position to really travel, to move, to change, and that was awesome in itself.

Thirteen years later and on the other side of the world, I spend the day walking the streets of Vancouver. Everyone is holding paper cups of coffee. There are clusters of Olympic volunteers from all over the world, wearing identikit windbreakers and backpacks, milling around giddily, ready and willing to direct any lost soul to anywhere, providing it has something to do with the games.  In less than 24 hours I’ll be back on a plane and on my way to somewhere even further away.  The geographical scope of my current life is far beyond the ken of my early London years. Thirteen years ago, I wanted to create the biggest life possible, a life with endless possibilities. I was ridiculously successful. Today, those endless possibilities I’ve created feel awfully huge sometimes. I wonder what it would be like if I had done as my friend had done after her decade of intensive travel. A stable, quiet life in a stable quiet flat with a stable quiet job and a stable, quiet husband all seem strangely appealing to me right now.

My friend breaks me out of my reverie. Over cocktails at night, she asks me if I think she and her stable, quiet husband might be able to find work in Shanghai. After five years of this quiet, stable life (the one I had been silently yearning for all day), she’s restless and aching to return to a life closer to my own, full of instability and movement and change.  She’s bored and feels herself to be digging herself into a velvet rut.  I look out at the grey, still streets and realize, with a metaphorical slap to the head, that my life is exactly as big and unwieldy and chaotic as I’d wanted it and that maybe, just maybe, all I needed was a little perspective.

Sprouting for the Locationally Challenged

I see sprouty things

Let’s say you have found yourself in a nutritionally awkward position- maybe you’ve been on the road just a little too long and are sick to death of momos or mie goreng (or you are vegetarian so you couldn’t even have the momos), or perhaps you’ve found yourself in a tiny kitchenless student housing bedsit somewhere in Beirut while doing your MA in Classical Arabic, or like me, you’ve settled in to a pleasant flat in urban China with all mod cons but no access to veggies that haven’t been drenched in dubious chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Let’s say you don’t want a pint of Guinness to be your main source of nutrition on an average day. What can you do that doesn’t take up too much time or space?  For one, you could learn to sprout.

What is Sprouting and Why Should I Even Bother ?

Sprouting is basically home farming on a very small scale. We’re talking jam-jar sized farms, which are very portable and which can be easily nurtured and maintained, even if you are on the road, provided you have regular access to clean drinking water.  What you are doing is taking the dried seeds of something that you would normally eat if planted, grown and harvested (say, broccoli, soy, radish, barley, buckwheat) and waking them up just enough to burst open with lovely little nutritionally dense buds that contain all the potential of that mighty large vegetable in one small sprout. If you can get your hands on a packet of organic seeds, you’re set.

What Do You Need?

You need seeds, first of all. These seeds should be kept in bug-free containers. If possible, they should be kept away from extreme temperatures. Check the seed packet to make sure they are still viable and haven’t yet expired. I have tried in vain to sprout long-dead fenugreek. Try to get organic seeds.

You need a wide mouth canning jar with a screen lid (see photo). You can find these at most hardware stores. If you can’t find a screen lid, make one from mesh held down by the twisting outer rim of a jam jar lid.

You need somewhere to drain the jar two or three times a day.

You need clean water.

How Do I Sprout My Seeds?

First of all, check to see if there are any stones or twigs or dirty amongst your seeds. Pick them out and give a seeds a rinse in the jar, draining it through the screen lid. Add water for soaking then soak away for the recommended time (more on that later). After the soak, turn the jar over and drain the seeds.   After they have drained, rinse them again and leave them propped up at a 45 degree angle to drain again.  You will need to do this rinse and drain routine about two or three times a day until they are ready for eating. Make sure they are well drained or else they’ll get all soggy and start rotting. Keep them away from direct sunlight. Once they have sprouted, keep them in a refrigerator and use within a few days.

There are other ways to sprout, such as using cloths or sprouting bags or  trays, but I’ve found using the jar to be the handiest and most reliable method.

When Can I Eat Them, and How?

This is really up to you and your sprouts, as the different seeds and growing conditions will vary, as will your taste buds. I’m a big fan of sprouted radish, which is fiery hot and only needs about 8 hours of soaking and a day more to sprout. I read somewhere that a good way to tell if a sprout is ready if the growing root is about the same length as the original seed.

You can use sprouts in salads as a topping, or in a sandwich instead of lettuce. I’ve thrown them on crackers with a nice goat cheese. If you sprout grains like oats or wheat, they can be really nice for breakfast. I’m a big fan or red clover sprouts straight up out of the jar.

Happy sprouting!

Links:

How to Sprout on the Road

How to Eat Sprouts

Pick Your Favourite Sprouts to Eat (Pdf)

Living Foods (How To Sprout 101)

The Evolution of a Person in a Place

The first time I found myself in Long Beach, halfway up the Pacific Coast of Vancouver Island, was shortly after my birth, 35-odd years ago. My father was teaching in a rural junior high school in a mill town nearby and the three of us lived in a small wood cabin on a lake.  The road to Long Beach was long and winding and mostly gravel. Those who lived on the  two villages on the peninsula were loggers or hippies or the local Clayoquot First Nations, and the lone sea road connecting the two was lined with uninterrupted massive, ancient forests. Tofino, at the northern end, was where people went to start cooperative bakeries and organic gardens and do yoga and try to live off the land in an inspired ’70s kind of way; Ucluelet was where the resource-industry workers and their families lived.  Over the decades that followed, the generalized ideological concepts behind the two small towns occasionally pitted them against each other, with anti-logging protests and anti-anti-logging protests. Trees have been massively thinned and the road widened and paved.  The hippies and their vegetable gardens have been replaced by foodies and spas and West Coast Art galleries.  The loggers and their families have been thinned by the slow death of the resource industry, and the foodies and spas and West Coast Art galleries have started edging their way in.

Supervising the Waves

Most of my adult life has been spent far away from here, far from where I first started out, far away in enormous cities in Europe and Africa and now in Asia. After university, I was pretty much away and rarely back to the island. However, if my skin could be peeled back like the paper-thin bark of an Arbutus tree (bountiful on Vancouver Island), the terroir revealed (a bit like a nice French grape or  strong Italian parmesan) would be concretely and decisively from here.  When I think of who I am, this is what I see: the waves, the rain, the trees, the mist, the fierce open Pacific, the trees, the ravens, the mist.  As a child, I came up here with my family and we camped in our old VW van. As a larger child, I came up here with friends, whose parents thought it would be a grand idea to celebrate a 7th or 9th birthday in an A-frame rented cabin on the beach. I remember lying awake all night, unable to sleep from the overwhelming roar of the waves and bone chilling moistness of the air. In my teens, I came up with my friends every New Year and we camped in the rain, with puddles forming moats around our tents pitched over huge orange tarps.  We drank cheap local wine and played hackey sack in the rain, like good alterna-teens in the early ’90s. We spent most New Year’s Days in the laundromat in Tofino in our underwear, trying to dry our clothes. One year, my big toe didn’t thaw for a week after. In summer, I sometimes found myself on logging roads, trying carefully to avoid being arrested for protesting the destruction of the surrounding ancient Clayoquot rainforest, along with hundreds of others who fought to preserve the old growth over the years.  As an adult, I’ve pulled all-nighters driving up from Victoria, the provincial capital at the bottom of the island where my family lives, to do yoga at dawn on the beach with friends who thought that would be a nifty thing to do. In recent years, I’ve come up with my parents for a late Christmas gift of a week of storm watching from the comfort of a beach-front suite with a fireplace and free use of enormous rain gear. Annual rainfall here is three meters (no fooling around with mere millimeters here).

Rudolph the Red Nosed Rain Gear

As we speak, a bazillion people are pouring into Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics. Not many tourists have made their way here, even though it isn’t far by air or by ferry.  It isn’t on the easy tourist trail. This is not a place you can casually day-trip to.  There are, however,  many surfers in full wetsuits taking advantage of the winter storm waves crashing on the shores. Long Beach has surf schools that run year round, including one just for women. The hippies and their organic cooperatives have morphed into a large handful of lovely foodie-centric cafes and producers of artisanal breads and cheeses and heirloom vegetables and whatnot. In summer, there are whale-watching trips and in winter there are storm-watching packages at the mushrooming resorts, popping up like cedar-shingled puffballs along the coastal road.  You can still camp, but you can no longer casually show up and pitch your tent on the beach.  Things have changed.  However, the surface changes- the increased comfort level, the increased flow of people, the increased construction and development- have not changed the intrinsic energy and feel of the place.  Like the terroir just millimetres below the surface of my urban, internationalized skin, what remains essential here is still intact: it is still all about the fierce and pounding waves, the cry of the raven, the heavy mist descending over the trees and the strong scent of wet earth. We will continue to change (not always for the best) but the vitals remain constant.