Before taking dinner, let’s find some interesting things such as … selling ice creams in open packages

Yep, they are all real ice creams and ice-lollies in deed. We all know that ice creams can be only kept in the refrigerators before be eaten. But at this season, Harbin is totally a huge refrigerator itself. Those ice creams and ice-lollies wouldn’t melt anyhow. We these southerns can’t believe our eyes when we saw at the first time. But we got used to that because all people did it like that everywhere

Don’t be surprised so early, there were more and more funny things when we carried on.
Here was a old market in Harbin old downtown. You can see lots of fresh meat and fish were frozen without using any cooling equipments. They were as hard as rocks…. Now you didn’t consider the shelf life of those fresh goods anymore.
Not all kinds of food are suitable for refrigeration. You can see that fruits and vegetables were all kept in warming shop windows.

In a Harbin style restaurant:

Yep, it’s a stove on the table After giving our order, the waitress came again with the stuffs and cook in front of us! Amazing isn’t?

This picture was taken in Iris’s home. Her family are so warmhearted and hospitable. They prepare a lot of Harbin of traditional food for us. And just remember, here wasn’t the whole feast, there were still lots of dishes waiting to be stacked…

Having dinner at Iris’s home is a fantasy experience for us. Harbin’s food is quite different from ours in the south. It’s more generous and a little bit salty. We love those food very much. Though we couldn’t ‘smash’ one third of those dishes, we had to give up for our full stomaches.

At the front gate:


A little warm wooden hut (actually it is a shop and restaurant …):

Then show time!

Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival is an annual activity and there are many excellent snow sculptures created by many artists from different countries. As we known that snow will melt and disappear when the spring comes. And these beautiful art works will disappear. But don’t worry, people choose the best pieces of works to make the plaster copies for them. Then we can have the chance to enjoy those amazing snow sculpture years ago

Though I am totally a southerner, I still know that snow is very soft and loose. Maybe we can use it to make a normal size snow man, but it can’t form those such huge sculptures by just putting the snow together. So how the artists make it possible?
We were lucky to get the answer because we were the early visitors. Many snow sculptures were still “under construction”.

Let’s take a interview from how the snow comes to being art works:
these are some snow making machines. They were blowing out snow. Then packed the snow into blocks and transfer to different working places. Unpacking them and put them together to form the general size of the sculpture. The workers began to work on these giant snow rocks.
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I wanna to have a try this sled pulled by dogs :

That’s all, still for the freezing cold weather, our camera all “died” very early.

Left Our mark here, AFC forever~

At the post “Part 2@ Cathedral & Province Museum”, we knowed that Harbin is very much influenced by its Russian past. There are many traces that talk us the story about the old time.

So visiting the old urban of Harbin would be the best experience for those who love history and building architecture. We took bus to the old urban at a quite special street. There are lots of old building here and also plenty of antique shops. Yep, here is not only the “old” place, but also the place of selling “old” stuff.

We went into several antique shops and found kinds of interesting things there. And we almost got lost at the “Great Russian New and Old Good Trade Market”. From old radio machines to old comic book we read when we were still children, from pieces of fossil to beautiful china vase, no matter Russian antiques or domestic ones, all kind of antiques can be found here.

We spent our time there for the whole morning. And then we walked through many street with different styles. They are also very impressive.

Then we arrived the bank of the Songhua River when the sun started to fell. After spending a while on the ice in the river and waking on the iron railway bridge, we headed to the central avenue.

Central avenue is the center of Harbin City. Though the stone road is still the same as how it looks likes hundreds of years ago, the central avenue has a new modern look already. There is no different between those big shopping streets in other cities and here. The only difference is this street has its unique exotic sentiment.

Harbin is located in Northeast China under the direct influence of the cold winter wind from Siberia. The average temperature in summer is 21.2 degrees Celsius, −16.8 degrees Celsius in winter.

The annual Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival has been held since 1985. Although the official start date is January 5 each year, in practice, many of the sculptures can be seen before. While there are ice sculptures throughout the city, there are two main exhibition areas: Enormous snow sculptures at Sun Island (a recreational area on the opposite side of the Songhua River from the city) and the separate “Ice and Snow World” that operates each night. Ice and Snow World features illuminated full size buildings made from blocks of ice. Winter activities in the festival include Yabuli Alpine Skiing, winter-swimming in Songhua River, and the ice-lantern exhibition in Zhaolin Garden. Snow carving and ice and snow recreations are world famous.

The “Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival” is one of the world’s four largest ice and snow festivals, along with Japan’s Sapporo Snow Festival, Canada’s Quebec City Winter Carnival, and Norway’s Ski Festival.

Every November, the city of Harbin sends teams of ice artisans to the United States to promote their unique art form. It takes more than 100 artisans to create ICE!, the annual display of indoor Christmas-themed ice carvings in Nashville, Tennessee; Kissimmee, Florida; and Grapevine, Texas. From wikipedia.org

Thanks to Iris, her wisdom help us to get those tickets at half price by pretending we were still college students. Maybe that was not so good, but who care~~ Let’s move out!
PS: Because those huge sculptures and buildings were all made of ice, this whole area is much colder than other place. So don’t forget to keep your camera warm when you were totally fascinated with those beautiful and colorful crystal. Your camera would be “killed” by the low temperature ! That’s the reason we didn’t catch all the sculptures, but we had captured them by our eyes

This Sphinx was not just a sculpture to see, it’s also a slide to play~ Galacy was waving her hand on the slide

As you saw, there are many many “buildings” stand in this park, they were all very famous symbol of those foreign countries. Just like the “Sphinx” I mentioned is the image of Egypt. The castle above is the very famous Japanese building. And there are more familiar building you might know about them:

BTW, there were also other funny ice sculptures like this one:

WOW, this bottle of Harbin Beer can make all of us got drunk.

Aslo so funny game to play:

Is that all? Of course not! We went to watch a wonderful show at the “Moulin rouge” and saw many beautiful Russian dancers~~
But before of that, all of our camera were killed by the frozen temperature…. So no photos about those beauties~~ Sorry

We didn’t leave there until the park began to close. That is the day I watch the most great number of ice in my life!!

PS: Can you see the one stylish building on the left? That is the famous old food campany in Harbin. And its famous Harbin red sausages and candies are the best choice of souvenirs for those vistors like us.

Look at this~ A Russian goods selling mall, but my Harbin friend said those goods were too expensive to buy, so just passed it…
If you ask me how I felt in such frozen weather, I would say it’s totally a challenge! I would never consider that one day I stand upon the ground that cover ice surrounded by freezing air. Though we were wearing thick and heavy clothes, the wing was still cutting our faces. It’s definitely “cool” experience for the guys from the south like me. You can image that how could it be if you saw your eyelash covered with ice frequently…

Before we reached the Province Museum, we came across a cathedral. Like many buildings in Harbin, this red building is also in Russian style. This red cathedral is so attractive among those modern buildings and streets. Harbin today is still very much influenced by its Russian past. A city once under Russian rule, it is now a center of trade with that country.The influence of Russia came with the construction of the China Far East Railway, an extension of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and Harbin, known formerly as a fishing village began to prosper as the largest commercial, economic center of North Eastern Asia. So we can find many evidences like this in the downtown.

Human settlement in the Harbin area dates from at least 2200 BC (late Stone Age). So its history is very a chick book to read. To know a city, the museum is the very starting place. After a quite “hard” walk, we arrived the Helongjiang Province Museum.

The museum is so big to walk around. we spent hours in it. Aerock who came from Beijing is a super expert about the old stuff and history. He is keen on collecting antiques. Thanks to his guide, we experienced a great history and culture feast.

To be continued….

]]> http://www.solesky.com/2010/02/harbin-thrilling-journey-part-2/feed/ 1 http://www.solesky.com/2010/02/harbin-thrilling-journey-part-1/ http://www.solesky.com/2010/02/harbin-thrilling-journey-part-1/#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:37:45 +0000 calcifer http://www.solesky.com/?p=1336 As a very very “classical” southerner, I never ever saw a really snowflake nor knew what the temperature below zero °C feels like. Making a journey at a “snowing” place is always the most desirous one of my  dreams. Which city would be titled as ice and snow metropolis in China? All people all give you the answer, Harbin without hesitancy. Then I am at Canton, the city lies in the very south China, and Harbin, lies in the very northeast China. How to make it? that’s the biggest problem stands in front of us. BTW, can we bear in the temperature that stand at the opposite side of the red zero bar in the thermo-graph?

This crazy plan was reminded again by AFC members casual chatting and make a decision at October. Thanks to the AFC group members, especially Iris, you make my dream come true. (What’s AFC stands for ? Maybe we shall talk about it later ) With the help of them, we make up a very detailed blueprint of “AFC@Harbin”. Now, we were not just dreamers, we were rolling out! After booking plane ticket and buying winter protection stuff like down coat, snowshoes, gloves on the Internet. We are ready to fly before the new year vacation.

30th Dec. 2010, our big day to fly across the whole great China. Our thrilling and exciting journey to Harbin began! It was predestined to be a “exciting” one because many unexpected things happened before we landed to the frozen land. At first, we thought we make a perfect preparation before we got to the New Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport. That was the place where our nightmare started. For the bad driving of the airport shuttle bus, I was a little uncomfortable when we got off the shuttle bus and didn’t noticed that we forgot to bring one luggage. Then we went straight to fetch our boarding licenses without any thinking. After we realized we did a terrible things, we were totally freaked out and the perfect scheme suddenly broke into pieces.

It happened just like a chain reaction. We spent too much time to find our lost luggage to get on board. After missing the plan we have to change our ticket and waiting the other plane at night. Luckily we got the news that luggage was kept by the bus station afternoon. But we have no time to fetch anymore. This time we went to the waiting area early for our second chance, but what we got is the news that our plane would delay by more that one hour …

Finally,,, we took off from Baiyun Airport and head to…. Shenyang! Because our direct flight had already gone at noon and this plane had to landed at Shenyang first. And the worse thing was one of our down coats was in the lost luggage!!! I had no down coat to take on and stand outside under about -25 °C at Shenyang airport while changing plane …

We didn’t give up though so many troubles came to us and landed at Harbin about 2 o’clock in deep night… Our dear AFC friends kept concerned until we got there and sent warm down coat for me. Thank you! Iris and Aerock! They waited for us for more that one hour under that chilly night, almost -30 °C at that time… We four poor guys spent another hour to hotel and made this unforgettable flight finished. We were all totally exhausted…..

This is my first time to take plane and first time to see so many ice and snow. Though there were lots of unacceptable accidents and trouble, it became more exciting and incredible~!

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