Harbin
is in the top 10 cities of China the advert on the flight stated but didn’t
specify top 10 of what?
About 2
hours flight north of Beijing takes you over mountains (first hour) then vast
fields and rivers. In the spring Haerbin is a massive producer of fruit
and veg for the rest of China but in the winter it becomes a frozen landscape.
Flying over it looks like the worlds gone into monochrome.
Three of
us (me, Chris and Gabriella) left Beijing early Sat morning -it was -4 and
grotty air quality, 2 hours later it was -17 and clear blue skies.
The coldest we saw was -27 which was cold enough for me but I think we were
lucky as the week before had been -35 at one point.
And cold
was the reason we’d come as every year Harbin hosts an international Ice and
Snow sculpture contest worthy of thousands of visitors each day.
Some
guesses then as to what Harbin is in the top 10 of…..
- Places you’re likely to fall over in. The entire
city is frozen so you’re either walking across lake, over ice (often black ice
for added fun) or snow. For someone who can fall over on carpet it made
movement quite challenging. And accompanied with flailing arms and a
‘whhjooooooo’ noise.
- - Miserable restaurateurs. China doesn’t trouble
itself with customer service; it’s quite normal for your waiter to walk off
mid-sentence, to start shouting to their mates over your head, to huff and roll
their eyes if you ask for anything from the menu etc. Couple that
with a surly Russian attitude and you’ve got the vibe of Harbin. It’s
close to the Russian border (relatively anyway – still a good few hours travel
but in this province that makes it a neighbour) so the influence is clear. Not
only in the food, the language and the occasional orthodox church but also in
the impressively miserable staff in the restaurants. Thank god they’re
serving such delights as cold pickled vegetables with tongue or the whole
experience of dining out could take on quite a sour note.
- - Snow
sculptures. These were really
impressive. A whole park full of sculptures, some big, some really really big
but all incredibly impressive. Harbin is
a typically built up, polluted, traffic-congested Chinese city so to take a cab
to Sun Island and escape it all for a few hours was great. Chris and Gabriella did some sledging down
the ice-ramps in the castle while I admired more art such as ‘3 pigs on a
motorbike’, ‘dragon stuck in a pipe’ and
‘frogs and peanuts’. Nothing is not
diverse.
- - Ice
sculptures. The ice contest happens in
early Jan and then the exhibits get pushed into one side of the ice park where
they are largely overshadowed by the giant structures sponsored by car
manufacturers and beer makers. They are
stunning and require up close viewing even in extremely cold conditions but the
whole experience was marred for us by the ugly castles and giant sheer walls
being lit up with neon flashing lights against a thumping base soundtrack. Like being stuck somewhere between the
waltzers and an ugly ice Disney park.
Clearly big is better than artful so there are a lot of monsters to
crane your neck at, each one housing a fast food outlet, a sledging ride or a
skating rink. From the 1000’s of people
queuing in -25 to go on the slopes it’s clearly a crowd-pleaser but a bit too
Blackpool for my liking.
- - Hot
coke with ginger. Yep. That’s a
thing. A horrible sugary teeth-melting
thing.
- - War
Museum. We enjoyed the neon ice-monsters
so much we took at 50 minute cab out of town to the war museum. Keeping it
light as always. Based on the site of Unit
731, this was a very impressive exhibition detailing the human experimentation
done on Chinese and Russian citizens by the Japanese in the 1940’s. The aim was to develop ways of spreading
disease through water supplies, animals, insects, hot air balloons etc. so the
exhibition pulled no punches in showing the impact of several horrific diseases
on humans, and the tests that had been carried out to make sure the variants
being spread were most harmful. After 3
hours of learning we jumped in a cab and headed back to the city. ‘That was a little bit depressing’ was
Gabriella’s summary of the morning. Ain't no party like a Scarth-Cogs party….
48 hours in Harbin is plenty. We were over layering-on and layering-off of
clothes each time we moved from indoors to outdoors, we’d seen everything there
is to see. And plenty of stuff that wasn’t really worth seeing. The temperature changes are so extreme that
moving indoors and getting warm brings about instant sleep so after a couple of
days of it we were ready to return to Beijing where we didn’t have to wrap our
faces into tunnel vision and there was a slight chance I could walk more than
20 minutes without falling over. (Note:
while I Bambi’d around the whole weekend despite my snowboots, Gabrilla wore
heeled boots and carried a designer handbag throughout)
As we came into land the air steward announced the
temperate in Beijing was -2. Pffff. We laugh
in the face of such weather…
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