Harbin is cold and icy

At one point during our visit to Harbin, Stefano-shi turned to me and said exactly what I'd been thinking: "This is the coldest place we've ever been." We were standing on a frozen river at the time and the wind was driving past us in snow-tinged gusts. Horses pulled sleighs along the surface, confirming that the ice was indeed solid, and people used what can best be described as fireplace pokers to propel themselves around on metal chairs doubling as sleds, assuring us that frozen rivers are meant to be fun.

It's worth noting that world famous ice festivals don't exist without ice and frozen rivers notwithstanding, cold temperatures in Northern China are all relative. For this time of year - the MLK long weekend - we were actually experiencing a veritable heat wave as air temps didn't plunge below zero.



In considering the geographic hand the city was dealt, Harbin deserves credit for the sheer unadulterated grandeur of its thinking. This city has affectionately taken its biggest drawback and amplified it into a full throttle advantage. Go ahead and name several cities where ice won't melt between December and February. Excellent, now of those cities, how many have responded with multi-storied ice palaces and full-sized ice pirate ships?

Workers scrape ice off the highways with squares of plywood nailed to boards and if you spend any time indoors your boots will quickly be resting in a pool of melted black slurry. Historically, Harbin was a Russian railway stop and so this Chinese city also has an unmistakable Russian flair. Much of the architecture is distinctly European, wooden nesting dolls are the easiest souvenirs to find, and the frigid airport is filled with underdressed Russians transiting through after vacations in warm places. The chemically-red cherry on top of Harbin's scenic milieu was the unmistakable pair of nuclear cooling towers we noticed on our way out of town.



Nuclear cooling towers and sandal-wearing Russians aside, Harbin's ice festival is one of the wildest things I have ever seen. The sheer scale of the ice sculptures and the intricacy and quality of the work is absolutely mind-blowing. This is also the most fun I've had outdoors in wintertime. Ever shot down a four-story ice slide with only your winter coat between you and the cold, smooth ice? I have, and it was awesome. All four times.



The festival has three main sites around town, each worthy of as many hours as your frozen toes can take. The biggest park felt like a small town populated by the world's most famous cathedrals, temples, and palaces - all made entirely of ice. The open spaces and paths of a second park were lined with gigantic sculptures made of packed snow. And a third park smack in the center of town was sponsored by Disney and its ice creations all referenced Disney's internationally recognizable repertoire.



The scale of the structures at all three sites was magical and the experience of being in the middle of these ice and snow cities was worth every flight of ice stairs we had to climb. Yep, even the stairs were made of ice - apparently you can still do that sort of thing in China.



It's hard to get photos that really do justice to the experience, partly because your camera keeps freezing and partly because photos can never really show just how good a pair of toe warmers feels on a cold Harbin night. (Among other things I credit our toe warmers with allowing us to join a very long bunny-hop on the ice field under Milan's Duomo, and with letting us hang out with a little Chinese girl who kept asking us - in English - to go down the slide with her.)

We should have taken our new bilingual friend to dinner; she might have been able to save us from our enough-food-to-feed-a-small-village ordering technique. We think the wait staff may have been trying to warn us but our lack of shared language got in the way and we ended up with one very large fish in sauce, noodles, and tofu; a big bowl of chicken, mushrooms and noodles; and about five pounds of deliciously vinegary shredded potatoes. Oh, and beer that we drank out of saucers.



When people walked past our table they laughed. Good naturedly and with big smiles, but they definitely laughed. And at one point in the dinner show performance - this was a restaurant in which costumed performers belt out party songs at ear-crushing volume - the man on the microphone directed all attention in the room towards our table and then said something hilarious in Chinese. I say hilarious because everyone else was smiling, not because I have any idea of what he said.



And that's part of the fun of visiting China - it's one big experiment. You don't know what people are saying. You never really know what you're eating. And you sure don't know how they built all of that stuff out of ice.