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Photos by MJ Klein & Hui-chen

Hui-chen and I are off on another adventure in Thailand. By the time you read this, we will already be there.  Of course we’ll have some new blog articles about our trip and you can be sure there will be plenty of photographs!

Now for today’s article.

We’ve all heard about visiting the large cities in China.  But have you ever wondered what it would be like to visit one of the more remote areas of China?  Recently we’ve been talking about our trip to Hegang which is in the Black Dragon Province of far northeastern China.  Hegang boasts a population of about one million people and yet it has a smaller town flavor about it.  Hegang is also way off the beaten track so the presence of foreigners in that town causes quite a stir sometimes.  In this article we’re going to show you what it’s like to go out for a night in this sleepy, coal-burning industrial town in the far northeast of China.

That’s Hui-chen in the bottom right corner of the photograph.  Others in our group are waiting on the food to arrive.

This is the opposite side of the table.

We’ve been to this restaurant before.  They serve hot pot, which is very popular in this cold region.  Even though it was April, the outside temperature was approximately -3C.  Here you see the dipping sauce for the food.

This was their “standard flavor” hot pot broth, with a few Chinese medicinal additives.

These are the condiments that one adds to the soy sauce to make their own custom dipping sauce.

Hui-chen likes sheep/goat, and this is her pot with a large piece of lettuce.  Getting used to cooked lettuce is one of the things you experience when living in Asia.

I stepped back and took this overview shot of the room.  Believe it or not, the staff told me that photographs were not allowed.  This explains why I don’t have any food photos to show you.  The staff was hovering all over us like Chinese waitstaff do.  I often ignore these types of statements because I’m a paying customer and I take photographs to use in articles on our blog.  If anything, our blog helps promote business, unless the place is bad.  There is a dumpling restaurant in Juibei where the boss knows who I am because he has seen his restaurant on our blog.  He was very thankful for the publicity.

This was our third trip to Hegang.  We’d all gone out for karaoke before so everyone has heard me sing.  It’s both a blessing and a curse as everyone was saying throughout dinner that I was going to entertain them later at a karaoke place.

And here it is!

Everyone expected me to start singing right away, so I didn’t disappoint.

My shirt kept coming un-tucked as I animated my singing.  It was fun anyway.

After standing up for one song, I sat down for the rest.  I did a couple of songs and then I let other people sing.  I can’t stand a mic hog!  The computer used for selecting songs was OK but not as sophisticated as the systems in Taiwan.

This was a large room and the whole place seemed a bit surreal.  Very different than being in Taiwan!

This is Mr. Wang, whom I think would be very popular on Korean soap operas.

Mr. Wang is not a bad singer either.  He had fun.

This was the beer of the evening.  I’ve never heard of this brew before but it was pretty good.

Different country but lots of the same songs.  Just nothing in Taiwanese.

By 22:00 we were ready to go home.  Up in the far northeast, people go out earlier and then go home earlier too.  Probably because in the wintertime it’s dark around 16:30.

Thanks for reading.  We’d like your comments and ratings, so feel free to leave them!