Ice sculpture festival
Trip Start
Dec 30, 2006
1
5
15
Trip End
Feb 08, 2007
Harbin, China
Monday, January 15, 2007
We arrived in Harbin at 6.30 in the morning and got to our hostel quick smart. Harbin was cold no doubt about it, but what also struck you was just how poor places outside Beijing and Shanghai really are. Whether it was the donkeys on the roads, the buses that had holes in the roof (not good when it is -10) or just the general condition of the city, this was China that is not shown in those nice coffee table books.
Being so close to Russia, Harbin is heavily influenced by Russia and this can be seen by its most famous site, a Russian church that had escaped the cultural revolution.
Furthermore, the main street was a car free zone and displayed many renovated Russian buildings which was great for Nic as she hadn't seen anything like this before. It was really pretty, the weather was great i.e. clear skies and no wind (thank god). Everyone seemed really happy to be so far away from anything else. Especially the women who were getting around in these amazing furs - PETA and the general 'animal rights' groups obviously had not made it up this far, not that anyone would have given them much attention anyway. Indeed, there were whole stores dedicated to furs, we went into one (to escape the chill) and were astounded by how much they were - minimum $10,000 up to god knows what.
Not knowing how long we would be up here we decided to jump right into sightseeing, we visited 'Stalin Park' which was great , it had a few ice sculptures to wet our appetite until we got to the big one. The river had frozen (naturally) and all the ice had been cut out to make the sculptures so all that remained was the river bed - quite an amazing site. Numerous rides had been set up including sledges drawn by horses, dogs and snow mobiles - the horses didn't look to happy about being there! Nicole went on a huge ice slippery slide that had been created. All in all Harbin seemed like a pretty 'cool' town, though I wouldn't want to live there!
We filled up with hot chocolates at Mcdonalds (and defrosting), waiting for it to get dark so we could see the ice sculptures lit up.
Then the sun went down, at 4:30pm (!!!??) and it got cold, really cold. It's really hard to describe the feeling of being so cold it starts to hurt but needless to say we were rugged up and had our faces covered and that still wasn't enough. Though this may have had something to do with me wearing a $1 beanie and $5 pair of pants!
We went to the 'Ice Sculpture Festival' after paying the entrance fee which was twice as much as our room we were amazed at what we saw:
1) Huge buildings made of ice, with lights in them were everywhere. What was more amazing was you could go inside them - though no guardrails were present so you had to be careful not to slip on the ice.
2)There was also an ice sculpture contest in which various countries (mostly from the northern hemisphere) had created these amazing sculptures.
3) Slides had been created. However, these looked like death traps as they were not so much 'slides' but 'drops', nevertheless we had fun on a few of the ones that looked a bit safer.
I'm sure the pictures will say so much more!
After catching a bus home, which was being air conditioned because of it's roof holes. We had another issue here with the trains and the spring festival, if
we wanted a train out of Harbin we would have to wait 4 days, thinking
we would freeze by then, we opted for the more expensive (but still
relatively cheap) flight to Xi'an. So we had just one more day in Harbin so had to make the most of it.
Next day was cold (surprise), we decided as we only had one day left that we had better put our foot down and explore - after catching another shocking looking bus we made our way to a museum outside of Harbin - in doing so we got to witness the industrial side of Harbin i.e. a section of town that looked like bombs had hit it (not to mention all the coal chimneys spewing pollution into the air)
Unknown to us the Chinese hate the Japanese just like the Koreans - seemed they came over here and did some pretty nasty things - ones of those things was chemical and biological warfare testing at a secret prison and this was what the museum was about. While mostly in Chinese, the pictures and props didn't need and translation - pretty nasty stuff. Eg. they tested different means of releasing biological agents, gas, water, bloodstream, monitored how long it took for someone to die left outside in the cold or hanging upside down...AWFUL STUFF! The thing about this museum was that it indicated that when the Americans bombed and took it over that they gave the doctor's that worked their immunity in exchange for the results of their experiments.....
We then decided to catch a taxi to the snow festival - up to this time we had not personally experienced the issue of taxis ripping foreigners, only heard through other people we had meet. So when this bloke told us where we wanted to go would cost 100 yuan ($16) we almost died from laughing if he wasn't being so serious. After what amounted to us shouting at him to stop the taxi and him swearing at us in Chinese we finally got a taxi that used the meter and payed him the 20 yuan it cost. Score 1 for the dumb white people.
The snow festival was great - again the tickets were so expensive i.e. 100 yuan each in comparison our double room cost 70 yuan! This time people had made sculptures made of compacted snow - many were several stories high. I'll let the pics do the talking.
Well that was the end of our chilly stop in Harbin onto Xian via an overnight in Beijing.
