Travel in Jilin

I could go on and on about traveling China.  Everyone has their favorite places to visit, and I was fortunate enough to see about half the provinces.

Jilin: home sweet home.  During the spring of my first year the university took all the foreign teachers to visit Changbaishan, the crater-lake that straddles the PRC and DPRK.

 Ascending Changbai Shan, even in May it's freezing!

 Crater Lake, legend has it there's a monster lurking beneath the waters- not seen are the Chinese soldiers who stop travelers from wandering into DPRK territory...

Apparently Kim Il Sung was from there, not the area of Changbaishan, but literally arising from the crater lake in all his authoritarian glory.  Nearby in Chanbai city we had a chance to view Haesong, the third or fourth largest city in North Korea.  It was a cool experience.  There were no cars on the streets, the Koreans were playing in the Yalu river, and upstream was a paper mill.  There were no trees at all in North Korea, which was shocking because just across the river in Jilin there were lush forests and waterfall parks.

                 Hyesan, North Korea.  There are North Koreans swimming in the Yalu!

 North Korean paper mill

North Korean countryside, where are the trees you may ask? In China as it turns out

Lush forests in Jilin, the Yalu River marks a stark contrast between the PRC and DPRK

Songyuan.  Worthless place.  The coolest thing about Songyuan, which lies about two hours from CC, is that there are more taxis than people who live there.  I guess that isn’t cool.  Sorry Songyuan.

Jilin City.  I’m a bit torn about this place.  I read in the NY Times that there was a chemical plant which caused 1,400 people to get sick.  The local authorities called it a classic case of “mass hysteria” and didn’t do anything about it.  I’m no local authority, and pretty skeptical about the whole thing.  Industrial waste aside, Jilin is a pretty nice place.  In the winter the trees freeze over and it’s quite beautiful.  There’s also excellent skiing nearby, at Beidahu, about the best winter activity around.

 Jilin City temple

 Skiing at Beida Hu.  Jilin hosted the 1997 Asian Winter Games!

Siping City:  This is an increasingly nice place to visit.  Up and coming, there are lots of shops, and if you’re eccentric enough you can by a Chinese sitar for 1,300rmb.  That’s a great deal for an instrument that always sounds nice no matter what you do with it!  Apparently this city was taken and retaken multiple times by tanks and armies when the KMT and PLA fought their civil war, and while war memorials may not be your thing, the walls in the city center depict the battles pretty clearly.

Siping City by night- it's "Yuk" season in March, when the snow melts during the day and freezes over at night.

 There’s also a river walk promenade in Siping that is clean!!  Next to the river, which borders the city hall, is a stone carving in calligraphy that proclaims all the great things the local government has done for Siping.  Specifically, it reads, “before the government restored the river walk it was a cesspool”.  Thank you Becky for the funny translation!

So that’s about it for Jilin.  I do think Changchun deserves it’s own posting, in fact it has a lot of history and was the birthplace of the Fulan Gong.  I’m pretty sure that quasi religion started because life is so hard there.  And it got a lot harder for practitioners once a million people or so joined it, threatening the CPC.  But there are other cool things about CC.  Statue Park, one of the largest such parks in the world with artists from 100 countries or so.  Also Puyi’s palace, where the puppet Emperor lived under Japanese occupation.  The architecture is also unique, it’s cold and military style inspired by Japanese rule.  Nanhu park is probably the main attraction though, and one of the best I have seen in China.

                                            Nanhu (South Lake) park

                                            Nanhu Park bridge