Sunday Morning - The Streets of Harbin

Take the elevator, 16 floors down, students get on, we all get off. Walk through the glass doors, around the corner and through the streets of HIT and surrounding neighborhood. A wooden cart filled with various fruit, some in piles, some in boxes neatly wrapped in netted foam and brought in from the south or farther. Another cart, stacks of corn and corn husks piled all around. A large boiling pot of steamed corn besides a pot of coals, a woman roasting corn, one by one on skewers. 2 yuan a roasted corn. 15 yuan for 10 peaches, now sliced and freezing in my little fridge. Stay on or close to the uneven dusty side walk, walking around each tree. The taxis, cars and buses heed their own call and not the signs on the road, nor the people skittering about. Signs everywhere in Chinese characters, I recognize a sign for water but the rest dart the concrete landscape like decoration and do not help me determine the within. The railroad tracks run a block from the HIT gates by my dorm. The train comes by; little guards in blue suits come out to ensure traffic, human and gas-powered, heed the lights and dropped post. A man in a skull cap, perhaps Muslim from western China, roasts skewers of all kinds of meat on the sidewalk in front of his shop. Here, an old man enjoys a trim from an impromptu corner barber while a anxious looking lady supervises. Here, a couple youths strip plastic off large white window frames. Stiff, serious faced ladies and gentlemen walk slowly about under both gentle willow leaves and sharp banging of the nearest high rise, less welcoming perhaps but currently faster growing. Mist, pervades to soften the noise and the dirt, for a moment there is hush. Even the, "ugh ugh ugh," of the wise women doing morning tai chi, is quieted. The black canal, loosing a few pieces of trash to a freshly clad young woman sweeping with a net, remains, as ever, black and unmoving. Every tree, thin or thick, painted with a white substance, create a manicured appearance and keep bugs off. Swooping small birds, brown and black, careen across the well-kept lawn, snatching at these unfortunate bugs left on the ground. It is a morning of tradition, yet a morning of tomorrow. Walking 'home,' I sense an unease that is not uncomfortable. An adjusting taking place at a rapid pace but not unwelcome. If these are the streets of Harbin, perhaps they are also a small face of China. I wonder.

Thus ends my Sunday morning walk. (I enjoyed it, did you?)