January 5, 2008
Harbin was the 2nd to the last stop before my year as a student ended in China. This was one of the places I would highly recommend for people to visit when going to china as long as you can the cold.
Harbin is best visited on January since it's when the ice & snow festival is celebrated. From Beijing, we traveled overnight via train and it took about 8 hours and we arrived about 5am in the morning. The temperature in Beijing during my time was about -18C but when we got to Harbin it dropped to a whopping -36C. I had four layers of clothing on, a thermal wear, shirt, wool jacket and a bubble jacket at the top and thermal pants, jeans and ski pants for the lower extremities. I learned my lesson that when going to Harbin you really needed good quality gloves and snow boots since my joints were freezing it felt like it was falling of.
1st stop is the orthodox church. Nothing special about this church except it was one of the first churches the Russians built. Inside the church isn't all that amazing since in my own country there are churches
everywhere with a lot of unique architecture so to me it just looks like a common church except for its historical value.2nd stop was Zhong Yang Da Jie (中央大街), it's one of the biggest streets in Harbin. A little window shopping is quite entertaining and as you go along there is an ice bar which serves vodka in a ice shot glass (cool).
3rd stop is snow world, the place was full of snow sculptures and they were huge. A lot of other sculptures were displayed and it was really overwhelming on how the place allotted a lot of land for this event. Here are a couple of pics but it's nothing compared to actually seeing the real thing.
Last stop is ice world. Now this is the main attraction of Harbin I highly recommend that going here at night is really awesome. You can see how the people here placed luminous lights between the ice in order to light them up. Remember, every year the festival has a them we were lucky enough that they were having an olympic theme since the Olympics are coming-up.
Me and my friends went back to Beijing so
touring Harbin is possible even for a day and we saw a lot the only draw back was the very cold temperature but hey without it the festival wouldn't be even possible. This kind of one day style was on "student budget" so if you can still spend a couple of more cash for comfort then it's up to you. Also, be careful of the tour guides here since they will really squeeze money out of you luckily for us we studied Mandarin and stayed for a year in China so we know some of the tricks here. I recommend (if you have extra cash of course) to get a more legitimate tour agent and if not then have a local friend go with you.
Here some of the other pictures:
