Tiger Attack: A Tale of a No. 1 Adventure Bus and a 50RMB Chicken

I, like so many other people, have watched the movie Jurassic Park with somewhat mixed feelings. Obviously the film is supposed to be an adventure, thrilling and frightening viewers by warning against the dangers of a dinosaur amusement park; however, on some level, the movie fails. Why? Because I still DESPERATELY want to go to Jurassic Park! While this blog post won't relay any tales of freakish science experiments or velociraptors (unfortunately), it will tell the tale of the Harbin Siberian Tiger Park, which comes pretty close.

Damn straight the scene was THRILLING!--But not too thrilling to make me miss this wonderful Chinglish sign

Earlier today, three friends and I hailed a cab and headed to 东北虎林园, the Dongbei Tiger Park. About 30 minutes later, we climbed out in Tigerland: tiger figurines, paintings, dolls, stuffed animals, murals, statutes, etc... I would say some of the decorations verged on kitschy, but when I saw the top-hat-wearing, pipe-smoking baby tiger figurine, I quickly realized that everything was totally necessary and appropriate.

Have no fear: Sherlock the tiger and I are on the case!

We lined up to buy student tickets, but were slightly distracted by a group of middle-aged Chinese men taking our pictures. Uh-oh. The paparazzi had been tipped off to our location and they were at it again. After answering the usual questions (ni shi eluosiren ma?--Are you Russian?), we politely posed for a few dozen pictures and then jostled back to the ticket counter. For 57RMB per person (about $9), we each purchased a student ticket and the split the cost of a 50RMB live chicken. SCORE.

Wait...What? A live chicken?

As we learned in our 1 on 2 classes this week, 入乡随俗...When in Harbin, do as the Harbiners do--which in this case means buying live animals to watch large Siberian tigers attack, destroy, and enjoy. NOMNOMNOM.

If you are interested in donating money to help me purchase a live cow to feed to a very hungry tiger, please let me know. Every donation makes a difference.

In case you've made it this far, I'll provide one last warning: If you find this sort of gruesome, carnivorous thing repulsive or offensive or you're a card-carrying member of PETA, I advise you to stop reading this post now (and to never accompany me to a steakhouse; I've been known to eat ungodly quantities of steak, my favorite food. NOMNOMNOM).

So with our chicken receipt in hand, we boarded onto a No. 1 Adventure Bus (according to the Chinglish sign). The bus, a sort of safari bus with bars on the windows, loaded up and headed towards the gaping mouth of a tiger that doubled as a gate into the park. The gate opened, letting our bus into a middle area between a series of about three gates, each 20 or so feet high and topped with barbed wire...Welcome to Jurassic Park.

We bumped along through what looked like pretty average terrain until I spotted some orange out of the corner of my eye: A TIGER! We kept bumbling along until we sided up right next to it. Up close, the tiger was both enormous and beautiful. It powerfully glided over the ground, gracefully placing its giant paws one in front of the other. After the initial gasps and squeals, the passengers of the bus collectively AWWed as the tiger laid down.

AWW, so cute.

We passed tiger after tiger until we entered a new part of the park, where a small van rolled up next to our bus. Suddenly, a hand reached out of the van and placed a squawking chicken--OUR squawking chicken--on its roof. Before we knew what was happening, BOOM! A tiger jumped on the roof of the van and sank its massive teeth into the chicken. The chicken, which had gone silent--SURPRISE!--accompanied the victorious tiger into a bush, where the tiger proceeded to pull mouthfuls of feathers, meat, and bones off the chicken. NOMNOMNOM.

GO TIGER! NOMNOMNOM

The people on the bus erupted in cheers. And I'm not going to lie, I cheered as loud as any other person on the bus (maybe louder...I was pretty proud of OUR chicken). Everyone kept buzzing about the tiger's snack until we entered yet a different area of the park--the LIGER section.

What's a liger?, you might ask.

"It's pretty much my favorite animal. It's like a lion and a tiger mixed... bred for its skills in magic."

If you're like me, your knowledge of ligers is limited to Napoleon Dynamite. The animals are, in fact, crosses between lions and tigers, though unfortunately not bred for their skills in magic (but then again, with the Chinese government ANYTHING is possible). The ligers, slightly smaller than their full-bred counterparts, were equally beautiful. We paused beside a pair grooming each other before heading back into Tiger world.

Our No. 1 Adventure Bus tour came to an end, depositing us in front of a pathway that led over several other tiger areas. These areas brought us up close and personal with a few dozen more tigers. As we passed through the walkway, we came across a museum employee standing over a bin of live, clucking chickens (probably the siblings of the one we sacrificed to a tiger) and dangling a piece raw chicken meat into the tigers area. The tigers quickly spotted the meat and zeroed in on it. One jumped up on the fence, gnashing its teeth at the meat.

After being so wary of Chinese food safety and sanitation (or more accurately, lack there of), my instinct was to warn the tiger, "Zhuyi nide weisheng!"--pay attention to your sanitation--but I remembered that all tigers eat raw meat and watched as the satisfied tiger ripped the chicken chunk away from the employee and swallowed it in one gulp.

But it's raw meat...in CHINA!

We continued our way through the maze-like walkway and exited back into the parking lot, unable to contain our enthusiasm: hao wan debudeliao!

Other than the fact that I still have yet to see a velociraptor, the trip was a success. I mean, I got to cheer with Chinese people as a 700 lb. mammal annihilated a chicken...what could be more exciting than that? (Please note the utter lack of sarcasm.)

And if you ignored my previous warning and are totally disgusted with my post and enthusiasm for tigers ripping live chickens to shreds, TOO BAD.

NOTE: All of the pictures from my trip to the Tiger Park can be found by clicking on the album link below:

Siberian Tiger Park, Harbin

Naive Bear Paradise, and other tales from Sun Island

Welcome to Sun Island!

When I climbed onto the bus this morning, I was certain that I was headed to Taiyang Dao, Sun Island. But now I'm not so sure of where I went. If Alice fell in a rabbit hole in China, I'm pretty sure she would end up on Sun Island.

Dragons? The basilisk in Harry Potter? A phoenix? All of the above? Probably.

Don't get me wrong, that's not a bad thing...I mean, I like trippy, bizarre places. It's just when you make that a trippy, bizarre, Chinese place, it can be a little strange.

Dr. Seuss called. He wants his forest back.

Sun Island is an island across the Songhua River from Harbin that's known for being a sort of escape from the city. Despite the connotations of its name, it's actually best known as the site of the annual Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival. So the attendance rate on the island spikes when the average temperature hits about -1 F. Makes sense, right?

In the summer, the island becomes an eclectic mix of...actually I'm not really sure. Most of the time we spent walking around through the lush greenery we were distracted as we dodged high-speed tourist trains. Picture those trams you see moving about 5 mph, carrying kids and the elderly through amusement parks; now, picture them moving about 15-20 mph on the sidewalk. Yeah. Scary.

Rule #3: Children, the olds, pregnant women, and the one who gets drunk or the person suffering from heart disease are not allowed to rent bikes. Otherwise "you will accept all the consequences yourself." Who is left over?

After a few close encounters with these trams, we head off the beaten path to Naive Bear Paradise. I wish I could say that the name, ben xiong leyuan translates into something more eloquent and that this is just an unfortunate example of Chinglish, but the translation is actually quite accurate. If not "Naive," it might translate better into "Stupid Bear Paradise," so I'll stick with what they have. As it is, it sounds like it might fall somewhere between the Gumdrop Mountains of Candyland and Winnie-the-Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood.

Also translates to "Stupid Bear Paradise." Take your pick.

Look at those cute bears with 魏德. Oh, and is that a prison behind them?

Which of these Naive Bears does not belong?

Naive Bear Paradise was what you might get if you crossed a park with an amusement park, and sprinkled in a few creepy buildings that look like prisons. In other words, like nothing you have ever seen before. The icing on the top of the bizarre cake was the figurines sprinkled throughout the area. The vast majority were bears--in every pose imaginable--but there were also apples, birds, corn, pumpkins, and Bugs Bunny's evil Chinese twin. Once we passed some of the epic bear figures, we found a big blue roller coaster that 乐然 and I just had to ride (魏德 claimed he didn't want to ride because it looked bu name lihai--not that exciting--but let's be honest, he just chickened out). The roller coaster in itself really wasn't that great, but the experience was pretty exhilarating, if for nothing else than because I was sure that the frequent, violent jolts meant that at any moment the ride might fall apart.

乐然 eyes the roller coaster ready to go. 魏德 quivers with fear.

We left behind the bears, rides, and wandered around the park for a while. We approached taiyang hu, Sun Lake, with paddle boats and decided to inquire about the price for renting a boat, but we were stopped by a group of eager, middle-aged people. Pointing at us, one man threw his companion his camera and ran over to pose with us for a picture. Caught off guard and baffled by his actions, we stood there, motionless as a series of five different people took turns posing with us: arms around our shoulders, on my left, in between us, smiling, stoic...I'm not sure how many pictures we were in, but the general consensus is that it was about 20 too many. So we ducked out of sight and took a break in the wooded area at the foot of taiyang shan, Sun Mountain.

Sitting on a bench near taiyang shan was like putting ourselves on display as the resident waiguoren: children ooh-ed and aah-ed, teens tried to stealthily snap our pictures, and elderly couples stared in disbelief when they heard us speaking Chinese. When we finally got up to leave the park, we were approached--nay, ATTACKED--by a group of people hollering and waving their cameras in our directions. With mutual glances and knowing nods, we did what any experienced celebrities might do: lowered our heads and ran away.

Safe out of reach of their voices or lenses, we chuckled and loaded back onto the bus, just in time for the sun to finally come out after what had been a rather sun-less day on Sun Island. Between the sun shining over our heads and our harrowing experiences with the renmin paparazzi, our discussion as found our seats focused on only one thing: where we could find the sunglasses we so desperately needed.

The sun finally comes out over Sun Island and the city of Harbin.