Harbin there, done that

One of the great things about being an English Language Assistant (ELA) is the amount of time off we get. I only teach about 16 hours on a weekly basis so I get a lot of free time in the week to do as I like. As Chinese New Year is one of, if not the most, important holidays in the Chinese calendar, schools take about a month off for holiday. In the run up to this, students take their end of term exams which for me meant not needing to teach my lessons around 3 weeks prior to official holidays as foreign language lessons were cancelled in order to give students more time to focus on important exams.

Knowing that I'd have around 7 weeks free to do whatever I wanted, I'd made a pretty extensive travel plan to make the most of my time in China. First stop? Harbin for the annual Harbin Snow and Ice Festival with my flatmate and fellow ELA, Beth.  

Now some might think we were crazy to want to head further up north to somewhere even colder and possibly more polluted than Tianjin. We'd been religiously checking the weather forecast for Harbin to keep an eye on what we were up against. Temperatures read -20/ -24, and as each day in January passed, this reading kept falling. No matter though, we were really psyched to go see some amazing ice sculptures. Scenes from the festival were widely reported in the media because it's a pretty popular festival in China. I'm pleased to be able to say we went for the opening ceremony and had a really great time. Here are some of my Harbin highlights: 

Food Glorious Food

When it comes to travelling, one of the things I'm most keen to do is try out the local cuisine. Having told some of my work colleagues I was heading to Harbin, they told me it was quite famous for a particular kind of sausage (哈尔滨红肠). It's pretty much the Chinese equivalent to a saveloy but it goes down well as something to snack on in the cold.

We also sought the advice of a friend of a friend who lives and studies in Harbin. Nick gave us some great suggestions for restaurants to visit. On our first night we ended up on Central Street (Zhongyangdajie - 中央大街) at a place which was very popular for serving Chinese spring rolls (Chun Bing- 春饼) - think more duck pancake rolls rather than the deep fried kind. 

Lao Chang Chun Bing (老昌春饼) on Zhongyangdajie (中央大街)

So whilst my Chinese is slowly but surely improving, ordering food from menus at a place I'm unfamiliar with can be a bit of a struggle. We weren't really entirely sure of what combinations of filling were best for this type of spring roll. Looking across to the tables of other diners, everyone had very different fillings, all of which looked delicious. How to solve the issue? Get the Chinese characters for 'recommend' up on Pleco and show the waitress. It was pretty hilarious but I have no regrets about the slightly embarrassing way we ordered because it was all delicious. 

Along came some shredded potato, scrambled egg, cooked pork, cucumber slices, spring onion and plum sauce, all of which you layered up into a pancake, rolled up and devoured. It was massively filling and a great dinner to start the trip on. 

On other days, we ate lunch with some lovely fellow travellers in our hostel. We'd headed to Oriental Dumpling King (东方饺子王) for some, you guessed it, dumplings (饺子 - jiaozi). Also located on Central Street, it's another very popular restaurant in Harbin. Maybe dumplings aren't too specific to Harbin, but they were still great. We also tried some Harbin stuffed buns (哈尔滨包子) at a restaurant not too far off from the hostel for breakfast one morning. I'm not sure it differed too much from the other baozi I've tried in my life but tasty all the same. 

The only other notable local delicacy I would recommend for people to try out if they ever end up in Harbin is the ice cream. 

You probably don't need ice cream in -34 degree weather but I thought it was pretty cool that vendors just had them out in the open. There was no need for refrigerators because the outside temperature is cold enough to keep them frozen. The ice cream itself was actually really tasty, possibly some of the best vanilla ice cream I've ever had. And for 5 kuai, why the hell not? 

Me with a red nose eating ice cream in extreme cold

Harbin Snow and Ice World

Of course, one of the main reasons we decided to go to Harbin was to visit the festival. One of the main sites was the Harbin Snow and Ice World (哈尔滨冰雪大世界) which displayed truly impressive ice sculptures. 

We were lucky to be accompanied by another girl who was also staying in our dorm room. Sarah was a really sweet girl who was studying in Beijing. Despite us not really being able to fully communicate with her, she was persistent with her efforts, often translating what she wanted to say on a phone app. 

Sarah, me and Beth before we spent 9 hours at the Harbin Snow and Ice Festival 

In temperatures of -34 degrees where it physically hurt to have your hands exposed, you had to give it to Sarah for wanting to speak to us via her translation app. She was also sweet enough to give us spare face masks and heat packs because she'd had so many left over. For anyone going to Harbin, I can't stress enough how essential having heat packs is. They're not only helpful to keep the main parts of your body warm when you're outside for long periods of time, but we also found them useful in keeping our phones warm. Due to the extreme cold, our phone batteries would get zapped and turn off randomly, making taking photos of all the amazing sculptures a bit of a challenge. But heat packs are the way to go! 

Anyway, we arrived at the Snow and Ice World just after 1pm. Perhaps one of the downfalls of the festival is that tickets into each of the sites are a little pricey (by Chinese standards). Tickets into the Snow and Ice World were 300RMB alone so us arriving so early meant we took full advantage of our day. It was also worth it to see the ice sculptures in both daylight and at night when they are lit up in beautiful neon colours. 

Daytime ice castles

Ice sculptures by night

There's a fair bit to do to keep you occupied whilst you're at the arena. We actually queued for about an hour to go down the world's longest ice slides. I couldn't feel my feet by the time we got to the front of the queue and there were definitely times when I considered packing it all in because I couldn't feel the ends of my legs, but it was worth it in the end - it was great fun. It was clearly a popular ride because the queues looked like this by the time we got to the top. 

Huge queues for the world's longest ice slide

You can also take rides on giant rubber rings down snow slides, have a play on ski sleds, ice skate, see fashion shows and exhibitions or even buy your own plastic sled to sledge down smaller ice slides and snow hills. There's plenty to do to fill your time. I personally felt like a big kid amongst it all. 

Loving life on ski sleds 

I guess what made our day was that we got to catch the official opening ceremony for the whole festival. There were live drumming performances and music (the anthemic 小平果 got played, of course) as well as a fireworks display. This all going on amongst the colourfully lit ice sculptures was a great end to our 9 hour visit to the Snow and Ice World! 

Fireworks for the opening ceremony 

Frozen Songhua River

Standing on a frozen river 

One of my favourite moments on the Harbin trip was walking over the frozen Songhua River just before sunset. It all felt quite surreal. The river itself was quite wide but due to the cold, it was frozen completely solid, so much so that there were people offering rides on rubber rings pulled along by snow mobiles or horse and carriage rides. 

I never for a moment considered it might be a slightly dangerous thing to do - until I saw a couple cracks in the ice towards the end of the river. Still, there was such a chilled out and easy going feel. Here's one of my favourite photos of a guy casually riding a bike over the river: 

Sun Island 

The other main site for the festival was Sun Island, the main place displaying snow sculptures. We headed there with more friends we made at the hostel who coincidentally studied in Tianjin and had mutual friends with us. 

It was a good job we did because our new cheeky but charming Korean friends managed to swing us a little discount by persuading some of the staff to pretend we knew him. We only saved about 30 kuai but that was enough to buy a well earned coffee later that evening.  

Again, it was really amazing to see the snow sculptures as well as the sculptors hard at work turning huge blocks of packed snow into intricately detailed sculptures. Some of them were absolutely huge, so I can't imagine how long it took to create. 

Huge snow castles and ice pagodas

I genuinely recommend anyone who finds themselves on this side of the world to take the plunge into minus-silly-degrees and visit Harbin during the Snow and Ice Festival. I'm so pleased to say that I have Harbin there, done that!