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The Ice Festival

It's almost been a month since we arrived in Shanghai. With the exception of a week in Cambodia we've been in China the entire time. Shanghai, Beijing, and now Harbin. Harbin is a city in far northern China, way above North Korea and fairly near the Russia-Chinese border. Each city has been more alien to us than the last. In Shanghai we knew we were in a different country, we had difficulty communicating, we got lost frequently, it was cold, but things were not overwhelmingly foreign.

This is an ordinary Shanghai street near the bund that looks like many ordinary streets in San Francisco.

Once we were in Beijing it took us all of seven seconds to notice that whatever difficulties we would have communicating, navigating, and staying warm would be increased by a few folds. Beijing (or at least the small part of it we were exposed to) is nothing like San Francisco:

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Beijing is nothing like San Francisco. Then again, we weren't expecting Shanghai to be anything like SF either. We were pleased to be in a new environment despite our difficulties navigating and communicating. Now we are in Harbin. Increase all of those difficulties again many times.

This isn't a very good pic of Harbin but it shows what crossing the street is like. Unfortunately, it doesn't capture the bitter cold which is usually in the single digits F- sometimes it goes above 10 F.

The main reason for visiting Harbin this time of year is for the Ice Festival. We went last night and it was pretty amazing to see. We arrived in the afternoon and there are giant ice sculptures everywhere. Some you can climb in and on:

I wouldn't get on that ice train- the conductor is a maniac.

As the sun starts to set the sculptures slowly come alive with light:

This is on the second story of one of the three or four ice castles that were there. Finally, as it gets dark you then see the festival at its best:

and it gets better:

Every spot is another photo op. We ran around taking pictures of everything that looked neat. Which was most everything. Like this stargate-

as well as this ice monolith of a building:

It took forever to get this shot. I blame the photographer, so does Nicole.

The biggest problem with the ice festival is that it is absurdly cold. The area is already cold, then you cart in a thousand or two tons of block ice and you get a freezer that's hard to stand for more than a few minutes. We had to weave in time to warm up between photo ops. It's lucky they were restaurants with heaters. There were also snow foxes to cuddle with:

They were incredibly docile. We want one.

On one of our many warming breaks from the festival I somehow was served a warm beer

I have no idea how they accomplished this. The whole park was negative 1000 degrees! They could've left the beer outside for five minutes and it would've been ice cold. Just as well, and it wouldn't surprise me if cold beer isn't in much demand in Harbin.

There are snow sculptures too:

Snow Buddha also disapproves of warm beer.

We have two more days here. We'll see some more glowing ice structures tonight and do some more planning for the rest of our trip. Our passage out of Harbin is going to be a 34 hour train ride to Guangzhou. That will be a challenge. You can expect to hear about that.