One step closer

The Black Swan, a resort on the otherside of Harbin. We celebrated Dragon Boat Day with our "work unit" there.

We bought the tickets to Anhui today!!!! As always it was not as easy as going to Expedia and few clicks you're done. The chinese airlines don't take foriegn credit cards online. So, our previous ticket purchases had worked out that we found the rate we wanted and then went to a travel agent and bought it. In Dalian, we had the best boss ever, and they would get the travel agent to come to us and deliver tickets, it was so great. That was last year, in another city. So we printed the list of tickets prices from Elong (Expedia's Chinese cousin) and jumped on the bikes and went to where we bought the tickets for trips last year. Except, they were gone. The subway is being constructed infront of our univeristy and the roads are torn up and detours everywhere. So since the detour led everyone on the road away from their shop, I guess they moved or something. I knew there was another one a few blocks down. Since the road is torn up the sidewalk has a big baracade edging the road. Blocks and blocks of these baracades. We were on bikes so we thought it wouldn't be a problem. Some stores or restraunts had done away with the sidewalk, and have grand staircases. So we ended up carrying our bikes up and down these stairs. It was just crazy.

Swapbot scrapbook page

The new travel agency was empty, and had 4 ladies working. For some reason the woman who chose to help us didn't speak English. 2 of the others had a conversation in chinese that I understood as, "oh, I can't remember anything in English, just a dialogue about the weather" Her coworker, then said, "I studied Russian." Luckily, we had reviewed our dialogue on tickets and could conduct almost the whole thing in Chinese. I was just so pleased with myself. We didn't get the price we had found on the net, but were able to get cheaper than the next price range of tickets, so we were happy. I even got the child discount for princess. They tried to tell me that she didn't get a discount, but I knew better. So we have the tickets to Anhui!!!! As it stands it is just for the teaching job, but we can hope the fates let us get our son while we are down there!

Harbin, China