Travel to Harbin

This morning Stacey, Laura and I had to fly to Harbin for the start of the tournament. We caught a cab from the hotel at 6:00 this morning to head to the Beijing airport. The cab ride was interesting - none of the cab drivers speak any english so you just have to hope that the hotel people told them where we needed to go and that they drop us off at the right place. If I haven't already mentioned it, the drivers in China are absolutely crazy. There are no traffic rules - they go where they want to go and pedestrians are expected to yield to cars. Stacey and I had to play frogger at the airport when the cab dropped her and my bags off on the far island, meaning we had to twice cross about 4 lanes of oncoming traffic. Once in the airport, we were able to check in for our flights and make it through security way easier than any of us were expecting. Although 90% of the people that work at the airport speak no english, they have signs in english all over the place from the olympics.

At 8:30 we boarded our Air China flight from Beijing to Harbin. This plane was awesome! The Chinese obviously have not followed the trend of american carriers charging you for everything. The seats in coach have lots of leg room and on this flight we had tvs in the back of every seat with free entertainment. The really interesting thing on these tvs was the "camera" channel. This was the feed of an actual live camera on the very front of the plane. You could see us move along the runway, take off and rise above the clouds. It was wild to watch us take off and land from that perspective.

After the short 2 hour flight we landed in Harbin. As soon as Stacey, Laura and I stepped off the jetway a Chinese woman grabbed me and asked if I was American and here for the Universiade. I answered yes and we then had 3 police officers surround us along with another airline employee. We were then escorted through the airport down to baggage. Stacey stopped to take a picture at one point and the police would not leave her side. Not sure why we got the special treatment - it was really strange. At baggage they asked us if we had the Universiade tags on our luggage. We must have missed that memo because we had no idea what they were talking about. I guess they were specially pulling anyones luggage involved with the games. Since we had no tags they actually made people move away from the baggage carousel and roped off a section for us to stand in and get our bags. Once we had our bags they took them to the van that would be transporting us to the hotel. This goes along with one of the cultural things I have noticed here - they do not let you do ANYTHING on your own. I honestly think if they could wipe your ass when you went to the bathroom they would. It is really bizarre.

We then loaded up the van and started to drive to the hotel. It is really really cold here and there is lots of snow, but that didn't seem to matter to our driver. We had to be going over 90mph at one point in this rickety old van. Stacey, Laura and I just kept looking at each other thinking "we are all going to die here." The driver would just lay on his horn if someone was in his way and god forbid anyone driving here actually stay in their lanes - I honestly don't even understand why they bother to paint lines on the road, they certainly don't use them. It took us about 30 minutes to get to the hotel, where the driver just pulled up on the curb right in front of the door. We walked in and had to go through metal detectors before checking in. At check in we had to fill out these ridiculous forms for the Chinese government with all our visa, passport, arrival and departure information. After all that we finally got to our rooms. Laura and I are roommates, which is awesome. The rooms are pretty small and bare bones, even though they say this is a 4 star hotel. The beds are as hard as a rock too...my back is going to be so bad after sleeping on these for two weeks. All of our meals are buffet style here at the hotel as well. They have mostly asian dishes, although tonight at dinner they did have french fries. Based on what I saw today I will be eating a lot of rice, noodles and dumplings these next two weeks.

We had our first meeting tonight as well, where we met some of the delegates from the IIHF and were officially welcomed. We were told that tomorrow we have a skate in the morning, which will be great to loosen up the legs from all of the travel. All in all today was busy but rather uneventful. I think the travel is finally catching up to me, both Laura and I are exhausted and plan on crashing really early tonight.

I was able to post the rest of my pictures from Beijing today on my website. Tomorrow I'll post some pictures from today and some of some things in our hotel room which I'm sure many of you will find very amusing. Goodnight!