Back from Ice and Snow - My Harbin trip

Harbin weekend trip

Cold, colder, Harbin.

And we were there on the so far COLDEST day of the winter.

But let me give you an introduction first:

Harbin is located in Northeast China, on the railway track from Beijing to Moscow. I don't know why anybody would want to settle down in such a cold area, but I was told that summer's there are quite pleasant so maybe they built the town in summer and had spent too much money in the construction so they wouldn't want to leave once they noticed how cold it was there in winter time. Having "only" over three million inhabitants (the "only" being an "only" to Chinese standards), it is still the capital of a province.

Harbin has a long Russian-Chinese history. In fact, strolling around Central Avenue, most buildings look like either Moscow style (Russian) or St. Petersburg style (mixture of Russian and European). So when we arrived at the train station (we took the night train there), I thought I was in Russia. If it wasn't for the people on the street.... (they are looking very Chinese).

Harbin can give you a real winter experience with the Siberian winds reaching the city in winter time.

So Harbin is famous for winter activities. They have ski resorts nearby and they have the world's biggest Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival.

That's why we went there. The Snow Sculptures are fully made out of snow and carved by many artists (mostly Chinese, but some international artists as well). This year being 2008, they had the Olympics as one motto - the other motto was France.

The Bing Deng Festival or Ice Light Festival is the second big winter festival in Harbin. There, most sculptures, many as big as real buildings in form of temples and many other forms, are most interesting at night when they use different colours of light to make them colourful. Amazing! I also attached one photo of the Ice Lights (the colourful building at night)

Though walking through the park at -28 Celsius is really really hard for your body! Frozen legs and fingers are the minimum experience. And then imagine you want to take pictures with your camera!

What else did we do?

We visited a Siberian tiger park (of course the world's biggest of the kind. Yes, the Chinese like superlatives.). There we went inside with a truck and drove around in the tiger's park. It felt somewhat awkward driving around in there. The tiger's were really impressing.

Another highlight was the winter swimming. Each day at 2 pm (the "warmest" time of the Harbin day), there's the possibility to swim in the Songhua river at Harbin. The outdoor temperature then was only minus 18 degree Celsius.

Also, Songhua river is no river in winter. It is frozen and even heavy trucks can drive on it. So they need to prepare a hole in the ice in order to enable people to have a bath there!

The Chinese swimmers (one of them at the age of 82) walked the five minutes from the cabin to the hole in the river at normal speed and without showing signs of freezing. They were only wearing normal swimming clothes - as you can see them in Europe in the swimming halls. Then they got into the water and swam around for some minutes, got out and stoically walked back to the changing cabin.

Unfortunately, we hadn't brought our bikinis and bathing suits so we couldn't join :-).

The last interesting sight I want to mention was 731. 731 was a Japanese Germ Warfare Experimental Base during World War 2. There they had a germ factory where they grew germs for dangerous diseases (like the plague) that they would then throw out of a airplane over populated areas in China so that the Chinese might get ill from the diseases.

They also did human experiments there. "Scientifics" were doing experiments on real human beings (Chinese) to answer questions like: what happens to human beings if they are exposed to a vacuum? With which temperature of water do you have to treat a frozen leg in order for it to still be there afterwards and not fall of? The visit of the sight was very cruel.

If you want to know more about any of the sights I mentioned: google and wikipedia have entries about the sights and Harbin.

Last thing to mention is the souvenir I got from Harbin: although I was wearing many many layers of clothes I caught a cold :-(!

Hope to hear from all of you again soon!

Katharina