Yesterday afternoon I finally kicked myself out the door at about two in the afternoon, and headed west, toward the mountains and the green patch of the map marked Haidian Park, not far from our place.

A new direction is always exciting, and I hadn’t gone too far when I found a spectacle — a crew of men removing trees in a narrow street. This was a four-story tree, with a guy in a leather harness clinging to the top and using a handsaw to saw off boughs. I stayed and took pictures, deciding it was curious enough that I shouldn’t worry about being a random laowai with a camera. When all the limbs were off, the man in the tree shimmied down ten feet and they sent him up a chainsaw on a rope, and he cut off the top section. Below, a group of men on a rope pulled so it landed in an appropriate spot in the street. The same for a second section, which shook the ground as it hit. The guy came down the rest of the way and had a smoke while some of the others were cutting the logs into sections. It seemed they only had one chainsaw amongst the group — there were maybe half a dozen men — and they were in no great hurry to get to the last twenty feet of tree still standing, so I kept going.

I came upon a canal, empty despite the recent rain, followed it up, then continued west on what turned out to be the fourth ring road, a large highway, where I was going against traffic and didn’t seem to be getting any closer to a way into the park, though I could see fenced in greenery. Eventually I came to an entrance — for a gold course. I turned back and went up a smaller road, again following a fence and despairing of a way in. This time, though, I was rewarded after a bit with a sign saying ENTRANCE, and a very obvious entrance next to it, with a young uniformed fellow standing at attention.

I had no idea if there was an entrance fee, and I also no idea how to ask, but I didn’t see anything obvious saying you needed to pay, so I put on my best impassive laowai who knows exactly where to go face and walked in, ignoring the guard completely. He didn’t say anything, and I discovered a large and lovely park worth the effort of finding it (which really was minimal, so I didn’t get lost of anything).

After I walked around for a while, I was approached by two teenage boys, one of whom asked me something. I gave him a blank look, and he said “picture?”, gesturing with his cell phone. So I let his friend take a picture of us standing next to each other.

This happened last year in Harbin — people finding me so odd and exotic looking that they wanted their photo with me. I imagine it is like when you drive across the country in the US, and you take your picture next to a giant egg, or a statue of James Dean, or with the really big fish you caught, except in this case the remarkable object comes to you.

Or maybe this guy will try to tell his friends he has a laowai girlfriend — see, photographic evidence! Or maybe, the way that all Asians look very much alike to Westerners, perhaps they think I look like some particular white female celebrity. Who knows? In both cases — and I’m sure there will be others — there has been no conversation, no small talk, “Are you American?”, just the photo, and goodbye.