Speculations from China: Harbin (aka, the coldest place in China)

A few days after my parents and sister left Beijing, I left it as well, to travel to Harbin for the New Year's Holiday. Apparently Chinese people do not consider the Roman calendar New Year to be nearly as important as their own in the beginning of February, but are willing to tolerate celebrations for the sake of a day off work. ;) I traveled on Friday with Simon, the Fogarty scholar with whom I also traveled to Mongolia, and his friend MoMo, with Adam, Alison meeting us 1.5 days later and Alberta (another Fogarty scholar in a different city) and her boyfriend met us our last day. Harbin is in the northeastern part of China, the part that stretches up next to Russia, and it was abominably cold! The worst I saw during the day was -15F, with a wind chill of -21F, which is about -35C! Yikes! And the temperature dropped further at night! (and it got dark around 3:45pm) The coat that I bought on the recommendation of one of Lara's friends and my ski pants were actually up to the task, keeping me quite toasty, but my feet were the weakest link, becoming painful blocks of ice after a mere 20 minutes outside.

An ice slide on the main drag of Harbin's nightlife.

They have a huge park full of Siberian tigers...very majestic!

On my first day there, I went skiing at Yabuli Ski Resort, known as the training ground of the Chinese ski team. I think the national team must train on a different slope that I was on, as it wasn't that steep and there was only one lift, but for 4 hours skiing, it was good fun. All the snow was real, and the scenery was amazing for the first several hours before the visibility got too bad to appreciate it.

Despite the hardships of the weather, Harbin was amazing for its snow and ice attractions. Every year, there is a Snow and Ice World which draw tourists from all over China during the winter. The Ice world was a fairlyland of castles, pagodas, and mansions, completely made of ice blocks, and some several stories tall and several blocks long! The ice blocks were made with holes for LED lights, so the buildings were all lit up at night with changing colors; it was very beautiful. There were also numerous ice slides and toboggans which were very amusing!

The gang from left - Simon, MoMo, Alison, and Adam.

This picture and the one above are the same structure!

The Snow World, was a big park next to the (frozen) river with huge snow sculptures. Since we visited a few days before the actual opening, we got to watch workers carting in the snow in big truck-sized blocks, and shaping the sculptures with picks and other tools. There were amazing sculptures, ranging from a huge bust of Michaelangelo's David to Pinnochio to Marco Polo and his caravan. We went tubing down a huge snow slide, and walked on a completely frozen flat lake! The sculptures were really impressive, and we also thought it was interesting that there were so few Chinese themes in their subjects - I don't really understand why, since it seemed like things were for the most part geared at Chinese tourists, although there were a number of Russians as well. Actually on our second day we were spoken to in Russian 3 times by different Chinese people!