{"id":7379,"date":"2012-01-12T02:24:04","date_gmt":"2012-01-12T07:24:04","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=7379"},"modified":"2012-01-12T02:27:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-12T07:27:00","slug":"california-beef-noodle-king-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/?p=7379","title":{"rendered":"California Beef Noodle King USA"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Our train to Harbin arrived plenty early in the morning, and we attracted quite the crowd as we unfolded our bikes on the platform, strapping bags down, and generally preparing to wheel. \u00a0It was a big station, this one, built in part by the Russians. Harbin is the terminus of another one of the three trans-eurasian trains. The Trans-Mongolian (which we rode<\/a>) terminates in Ulaanbaatar, the trans-Manchurian terminates here in Harbin, and the famed trans-Siberian terminates in far eastern Vladivostok. So it was out into a giant open Soviet-style parade ground that wheeled after being released from the immense building. We spotted a place called \u201cCalifornia Beef Noodle King USA\u201d and decided that we might as well stop in there.<\/div>\n
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It seemed no meal during AsiaWheeling\u2019s northern China chapter would be complete without the ubiquitous cucumber dish, so we ordered that and a couple of bowls of the house noodles.We also noticed that they had Pabst Blue Ribbon beer on tap\u2026 that must have been the \u201cUSA\u201d part of the place.<\/div>\n
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With noodles in our stomachs now to fuel us, we headed back into the city, and began wheeling in search of a hotel. Hotels were abundant, but for one reason or another, it took us quite a few tries to hit one that satisfied all our criteria: cheap, in-room Ethernet, and a window. While they did not end up being places for us to stay, the initial hotels that we stopped into were certainly quite interesting. If there was any Russian influence left in this city (and we hadn\u2019t seen much so far) it might have been detectable in Harbin\u2019s \u201cconcept first\u201d approach to hotels and restaurants, most of which were quite grand and strange.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0We finally did find a place, of course… and what a place it was! The establishment was called the \u201cElephant Motel\u201d and it was a very 1970s, with angular plastic shapes, and colored in the orange, cream, and dark brown of yesteryear. It even sported included breakfast, which was not common at all in China.<\/p>\n

We threw our things down, and headed downstairs to hop on the cycles. We wheeled away from the hotel, over a bridge underneath which a large canal ran. Not long after the canal, we spotted a Baozi (steamed pork-bun) joint, and decided we might run in and eat a quick few of whatever was hot. It was definitely the right choice, for they ended up being the tastiest of the entire trip.<\/p>\n

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From there, we wheeled on, out of the urban center and into a district of brand new, modern high rise apartment buildings. There was another canal running through this section of apartment blocks, except that this one was mostly dried up, and there seemed to be people working or harvesting something out of it. It seemed interesting enough to warrant lugging the Speed TRs down into the canal and wheeling it. We rode for a while, and the further we went, the larger the puddles of water became. Eventually we ran into a few people who were harvesting some kind of lifeform from the muck. We did our best to question them as to a more in-depth explanation of their work, but they were busy, and Scott\u2019s Chinese was not quite good enough to collect the rushed full explanation of what they were doing. So I guess this encounter must be placed firmly in the \u201cspeculation is invited in the comments\u201d section.<\/p>\n

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So we wheeled on, using the canal as a kind of bumpy puddle riddled highway. Eventually, the puddles began to converge and then it was suddenly no longer a dry canal, but one filled wall to wall with water, so we hauled the bikes back up onto a pathway that ran alongside the canal. The path was nice, and nearly completely empty for the kilometers that we rode on it.<\/p>\n

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It dumped us out into a kind of pedestrian square, with a large statue showing the globe being pierced by some kind of a savage halberd. You guess is as good as ours, and most welcome in the comments, as to what\u2019s being communicated by this one.<\/p>\n

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From the park, we headed back onto a larger road. It felt good to be wheeling in real China again. Beijing had been like an price-inflated, calmed down, slightly neutered version of the China that we\u2019d come to know and love in Cities like JianShui<\/a>, Urumqi<\/a>, and Hohhot<\/a>. Now we were wheeling with the people again, like this lady, transporting a giant load of flattened out cardboard boxes.<\/p>\n

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We were up north again and was starting to get cold, but also we were up north again so there was plenty more light left in the day. This could mean only one thing: leather jackets wheeling. So we stopped back by the Elephant Motel to pick up our leather jackets, and headed back out into the fray of the extended northern sunset.<\/p>\n

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We passed a huge ferris wheel and continued to pedal on into new parts of the city. As we pedaled, we began to realize: this place was big. It was not quite as densely populated as some of the other Chinese cities that we\u2019d visited, but it certainly managed to make up for it in terms of being vast, confusing, and spread out. \u00a0Unlike most chinese cities, it was neither gridlike nor structured with ring-roads. We continued to wheel through a pollutant-scattered sunshine haze, into one neighborhood, then through it and into the next.<\/p>\n

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We stopped to snack a little when we spotted a woman grilling up skewered sausages, and painting them with spicy sauce. She would grill the sausages, which honestly seemed pretty much impervious to the little charcoal fire that she had, then scrape them off the of the spit, and stab them with a chopstick, to be served up lollypop-style.<\/p>\n

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Now that we\u2019d started eating, we realized we were a little hungrier than just one sausage lollipop could fix, so we purchased a few other things: a meat filled Chinese pastry, and a kind of egg roti that was being cooked up by a particularly grizzled fellow on the street.<\/p>\n