Exploring Heihe

Changing money

With the 1h time difference from the Russian side of the river, I woke up at 0600 despite the blackout curtains.

We have the day free today, as it is a buffer day in case things had not gone well in Russia or during the border crossing.

Due to me being undercharged for my boat ticket and D having to pay for his bus in CNY, we had about NZD90 in RUB leftover.  I decided that it is too much to keep just for a possible future trip to Russia.

I went to the Bank of China at its opening time of 0830.  The reception staff there were super helpful but the actual transaction took 45 mins just to change my RUB to CNY.

The cashier entered my data (DOB, passport issue date, passport expiry date) three times.  Each time she had to ask for the month as it is written in my passport in alphabetical format.  In addition, she had 2 photocopies and also took 2 scans of my passport and my face.  The supervisor approved the transaction 4 times with her fingerprint without checking anything.

That was a lot of work for NZD5 cut they took from the NZD90 they changed.

With my newfound cash, I popped round the corner for a haircut, using cash for a change instead of scan-to-pay.

Russian supermarket, but not what I had thought

I met up with D back at the hotel and we went out soon after.  I was keen to find the cathedral-like building that we had seen from Blagoveshchensk.

We tried our best to locate it on the map but with some uncertainty, we decided to take a taxi to the big flagpole.  It was nowhere near the building.

The weather had turned fiercely sunny compared to the last few days and we were keen to get out of the open space.  We retreated to what looked like a Russian supermarket.

I thought it would be a supermarket catering to Russians coming to buy Chinese products.  But it was quite the opposite, being a supermarket for Chinese to come buy Russian products!

They had more Russian products under one roof than all the supermarkets in Russia that I had visited this trip!  And along with that, they had products from Georgia, Armenia, Belarus (all ex-Soviet countries) and Malaysia!

They also had Chinese-made products in packaging that look absolutely Russian, e.g. cookies.

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Cathedral?

From there, I showed a taxi driver a photo of the cathedral-like building.  He confidently said that he knew the place and would take us there.  But he went in the opposite direction to where I thought the building would be.

We ended up at a wedding hall that looked much like the building I was looking for.  But it was noticeably different.  It was fake rather than historical, so I gathered that there are two such fakes in Heihe!  We drove past the other one by chance in the evening and it wasn’t as good as the one we were taken to.

Wedding hall that looks pretty authentic as a historic cathedral, from a distance.

Finding lunch

Next, I wanted to go to the pedestrian street, hoping that it would be a good place to grab some lunch.  Hopping out of the taxi there, we recognised that it was where we were last night, being the night market venue.

By day, there wasn’t too much interesting food and D wasn’t the type to look at an eatery and walk based on what he saw.  It had to be found online with a review.

We ended up walking forever in the sun to get to Xinjiang eatery which had been wrongly placed on the map.  The stir-fried nang bread in spicy sauce was delicious but the porridge of dough-bits wasn’t quite for me.

By now, I had already learnt that Heihe was set up in modern times for cross-border trade whereas the historic city on the Chinese side of the river is Aihui (Aigun in Manchurian) about 30km away.  Apparently, much of the historical sites have been destroyed in wars and fire and what remains didn’t particularly appeal to me, especially considering the distance.

In the evening

After a rest in the afternoon, we returned to a different part of the night market that didn’t sell food, near the waterfront.  It was a hive of activity there with people dancing and exercising by the water.

From there, we made our way along most of its length of the pedestrian area to the food area of the night market.  Like last night, it started raining but this time we got off lightly and were still able to eat sufficiently without retreating to a restaurant.