About six months ago my dear friend, Helen,
ask me if I would travel with her to her home town in Heilongjiang Province,
China to meet her family and participate in her brother’s wedding. I agreed, and was eager to see the rural
village that she’s told me so many stories about. We made a plan to travel in August but weeks
past and Helen kept delaying the date for our trip.
Finally she started dropping subtle hints
like, “Ashlee I wish you could see my village in Winter. It is the most
dream-like” or “There are many interesting things in January.”
An Arizona girl to the core, each time
Helen suggested that we visit during snow season I responded in horror and gave her a resounding,
“Nooooo way!” But Helen knows me well. She
worked away at me, reasoning that if we went in January we could visit the legendary Harbin Ice
Festival. She continued by describing her town in Winter as a 'frozen paradise you can't miss'. By the end she practically had me convinced
that Elsa and Olaf would be there to greet me when I got off the airplane.
And that, my friends, is how I spent six
days in the coldest (and one of the prettiest) places I ever hope to
experience.
Our first stop on our trip was Harbin, a freezing
city just a few hours from the Russia border that is home to the largest ice
sculpture festival in the world. It
draws thousands of visitors each year from around the world for it’s winter
activities and is also home to Harbin Beer.
The photo above was taken at a giant ice wall in front of the train station.
I thought that the ice exhibits would be
isolated to the Ice Parks where you have to pay admission to get in but I was
surprised to find that the entire city had been transformed into a Winter
Wonderland for the festival. Everywhere I looked there were ice gates, ice
walls, giant snow sculptures, vendors selling things on tables and sofas made
of ice, and carefully chiseled ice carvings.
On most streets there were workmen assembling elaborate ice monuments or trucks/forklifts transporting giant blocks of ice from the river to be sculpted. We convinced these guys to let me try my hand at some ice carving. It's harder than it looks but I think I show real promise.
We
arrived early in the day on New Years Eve and one of our first stops was
Central Ave.
This
is a historic cobblestone pedestrian street with European architecture.
It’s
quite pretty, and my favorite part is that they pipe in music from The
Nutcracker, The Sound of Music and The Carpenters. Obviously. Boy does China love it’s Carpenters.
We
spent three hours walking up and down this long road taking photos with ice sculptures, watching people
perform on lit up stages made of ice and ducking into shops to warm up when we could no longer move our fingers inside our gloves.
Light-up ice stage (I'll spare you the video Helen took of me dancing on it)
and graffiti wall made of snow.
GIANT SNOW BEAR!
I wanted to eat a stick of candied fruit but my face was frozen! I finally had to go inside to eat it. (Incidentally, the best thing on the stick was the candied grape tomato. China takes the whole 'tomatoes are actually a fruit' thing quite seriously. I've never had a fruit salad here without them)
Each time I saw one of these guys I'd turn to Helen and say, "WORST JOB EVER." In the cities it's common to see government workers walking up the street sweeping or picking up trash. In Harbin, guess what they do? Shovel snow...BY HAND. There are dozens of middle-aged (and older) people walking around in the 0 degree weather shovelling. Some, like the man above, are just using their brooms made from wrapped together sticks to sweep the snow while snowflakes poor down on them from above. How futile would that feel? What a sucky job.
Harbin
has the strangest feeling of being a typical Chinese city but then also possessing "Russian
Characteristics". Here and there you'll see Cyrillic letters in the
windows and I bought these nesting dolls in a shop near the ice park.
Why on earth would they have nesting dolls in China? I had to have them.
Glacial bear hug anyone? I must be adjusting to the cold.
My favorite thing about the festival is that there are snow and ice activites everywhere! Mazes made of ice, sledding, bumper cars, inner tubing, ice slides, skating, dog sledding (which I refused to do because I couldn't tell if the dogs were well treated), line dancing on ice (which I most definitely did), and more!
Above are pictures of the strange bicycle contraptions we rode around on the ice and the giant ice slide we went down. I screamed the whole time.
Note: All of this running around and dancing on the ice resulted in several occasions of me falling, in typical Ashlee fashion, flat on my face and my butt.
Helen's a good friend. Each time it happened she'd gasp and say, "Are you ok?!" then she'd laugh and take a picture.
Those photos have been destroyed.
And now....some photos of CRAZY things made of ice and snow!!!! Ta-da!
It's the year of the goat so...colossal snow sculpture of
goats with a massive rocket MADE OF ICE just behind it.
I didn’t really believe it was actually snow until I
touched it.
Oh I see they made a giant sculpture of a bottle of beer. Did they know I was coming?
Keep Scrolling Down for more Pics
I mean why wouldn’t you have a collection of ice sculptures that represent the phonetic alphabet? That’s a given, right?
Did I mention that it was really, REALLY cold?
On our way home from the Ice Festival we asked the driver if he could take us by St. Sofia's Church, a Russian style cathedral that I had read was 'a must see'.
I got out of the cab, took about four pictures and then decided I was too cold to see any more and jumped back into the taxi. 5 minute viewing was fine with me, I was happy to find a warm restaurant and settle in for some yummy hot pot.
One draw back about Harbin, it's really hard to get a taxi. Once we finally found one we negotiated with the guy to be our driver for the day. He brought us to the city from the airport, took us to the Ice Festival and back, brought us to dinner and even picked us up the next morning and took us to the train station. All for 300 RMB (about $50)
Seems Harbin is not a place know for it's awesome bars and clubs so we rang in the New Year at a stange little dive bar. Typical Chinese bar with big groups of people sitting at tables, every single person on their phone and a, truly truly horrible keyboard/singing duo performing off-tune Chinese pop music. The highlight for me was that we got these cool sparkler torches and that I was able to go around to every table in the room and tell them "cheers" and "Happy New Year" in Chinese.
There was actually a dramatic moment where a man we were sitting with fell over and passed out on the floor. Everyone kind of stood there in shock and I crouched down and slapped him in the face until he came to. When he was able to sit up his jaw looked like it suddenly had some minor paralysis. It didn't seem to be alcohol... I was pretty sure he'd had a mini-stroke or something. Helen went and got the wait staff to help but they basically bundled him up and whisked him away. He was standing and seemly cognitive, I think they just took him out and sent him home but I can't be sure. There was a lot of confusion and we left shortly after. It was a weird moment where I couldn't really understand what was happening because of the language barrier and cultural things prevented anyone from knowing what to do. (Later I tried to explain what a stroke was to Helen but she had no idea what I was talking about.) Helen and I thought about it several times the next few days and wondered what had become of him.
Anyway, that was a strange moment in the trip and I document it here (because I want all of my stange moments in China to be documented) but it was only a small few minutes of an otherwise lovely day.
Below are more pics from the Ice Festival see my next post to find out more about visiting Helen's village and teaching in the local school!
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