Reliable Internet Access, Strings Attached

Just to let you all know, those last two posts were brought to you courtesy of 5+ hours of fiddling with stuff and finding workarounds for China's Great Firewall. Blogger is blocked in China. GLadder + Picasa + more coding than should be necessary enabled me to put pictures in. I'm still working on embedding that video. Arg.

Anyway, we took a sleeper train overnight and are now situated in our hotel in Harbin (due to swine flu precautions we're not allowed to move into the dorms just yet). We took a quick tour of the HIT campus after a meeting about academics and the oral segment of the placement exam (!!! So glad that's over!). Afterwards, a smaller group of us went exploring/food hunting for a little bit. So far, I really like Harbin. The weather's much cooler than in Beijing, the streets less packed, and the whole place feels much friendlier. I also like that people here don't really speak English. In Beijing there were people everywhere who spoke English, often cutting off my (admittedly few) efforts to speak Chinese. This is what I came here for.

Also also, now that we're finally kind of settling in, I think this will get much less expensive - relatively, of course, because China's not really expensive anyway. I had 6 包子 for lunch for 2元, which is less than 50 cents American. Excellent.