Although it was a little expensive to get there, I spent only a short time in Harbin. One day was spent getting to it, the next day was spent seeing its old downtown area, and the next day was spent traveling away from it. Had I spent a few more days there I might have been able to see the somewhat nearby nature preserve (apparently it has some Siberian tigers) or the WWII war crimes site (where Japanese soldiers perpetrated Menegele-like experiments on Chinese people), assuming I could have figured out how to get there. I had my hands full just trying to figure out how to get to/from the airport. Harbin does seem to get a lot of foreign travelers (especially from Japan, Korea, and Russia) but since most of them are likely business people traveling with expense accounts, they are charged accordingly. As a result I didn't find Harbin a particularly affordable place, although the taxis may have been a bit cheaper there than in other cities in China.
In any case, the rule of thumb for sane traveling is that travel days are travel days, and nothing else should be expected from them. The traveling is enough of an adventure itself. On this occasion I woke up in Harbin very early to catch a cab to the CAAC hotel, from where I caught the airport bus, which got me to the airport ridiculously early for my flight to Beijing, where I had to figure out yet another airport bus and then find my hotel. It all worked (correct bus line was boarded, hotel was located) but it was kind of messy. Beijing is supposed to get an airport train in time for the Olympics, and it really needs it. The city is just way too massive and teeming to easily insert yourself into without some infrastructure to help pry it open for you.
I'd thought I had it pretty well worked out though. My hotel was near the train station, Beijing Zhan, which my guidebook said the airport bus stopped at, and I had the address written in Chinese characters (necessary if you need to hail a cab). But I didn't know where it was exactly with respect to the train station, and I also underestimated just how spread out things in Beijing are. It was sort of like Warsaw in that respect, where small blocks on my guidebook's map were actually 1/2 a kilometer long... I stumbled off the bus when it reached its apparent (final?) stop somewhere slightly west of the train station. Prevented from reaching the sidewalk by all sorts of gates and barriers, I ended up walking in the street (a pretty big street) towards the station entrance, thinking I could find a cab there to take me the rest of the way since I didn't have the slightest idea where to go. The problem was that I couldn't find the taxi stand. Buses, cars, bikes, tuk-tuks, taxis, and throngs of people all converged in front of the station in a confused mess, and I couldn't see any pattern to it that would indicate where taxis might be queuing. It turns out there was a taxi stand a bit further on, but I had already given up and hailed the first one I saw, thereby apparently forcing him to get dispensation from the monitoring police to pick up this unauthorized fare. It was a quick 10 yuan for him though, because after making the next right, and then the next right after that, we quickly arrived at my apparently walking-distance hotel. I was a little nervous upon arrival, though. I expected it to be on some big street; but instead it was tucked off of a little lane behind the train station. But it was fine. The hotel itself was fairly new, and there was nothing wrong or unsafe with the neighborhood. On closer inspection it all seemed pretty residential.
The hotel is the yellow building on the left.
It had an interior courtyard done Roman-style.
The inside of the second room.
The room I had booked wasn't ready when I checked in so they gave me a different room for the first night. Conveniently, this room had a computer with Internet access in it, so I spent the rest of the evening putzing around with it. But not before making my way back to the station to pick up some dinner from the KFC in it. KFC in China is ubiquitous, possibly even more ubiquitous than McDonalds. And I think it's safe to say that there are more public portraits of the Colonel hanging up around China these days than Chairman Mao. Why even on this evening I had a choice about going to this KFC, or the one across the street...
But the cross-section of people I had to wander through in the plaza in front of the station seemed like a representative sample of today's China. There were travelers of all stripes (mostly Chinese but some Western), commuters, peasants, police, vendors, people with suitcases, people with bundles and boxes. Rich China, poor China, new China, old China. It's a country in transition, and that evening on the Beijing Zhan plaza was a window into it.