Harbin

Harbin is famous for its annual ice festival. It is very far north close to the Russian border and it is the coldest place I ever went. As my trip to Harbin got closer, I became more and more nervous about how well I would handle the cold. I went to the fake market and bought a coat a few sizes to big for me and then wore another coat and several sweaters under it. I also went to Decathalon and bought several pairs of thermal underwear all of which I wore at the same time. We also picked up some heat patches that have some sort of chemical reaction and get really warm once they are exposed to air. I put them inside my gloves and shoes. Unfortunately, they seemed to stop working when it got too cold. It turned out when we were in Harbin it happened to be an unseasonably warm weekend (only about -10 Fahrenheit). It can get down to -35. There were a few times when we were out sightseeing that I got pretty cold but we just ducked into a coffee shop or gift shop to warm up so it wasn’t too bad.

Inside it was actually way warmer than our apartment in Shanghai. Buildings in Shanghai are terribly insulated and constantly drafty. For whatever reason, Chinese locals love to keep the windows opened all the time in the winter to air the room out. Last year I was always freezing at work and had to keep my coat on all day. Fortunately, this year I have my own room, which I keep nice and comfy. One of the best things we brought to Shanghai from the states is plastic window insulators. The heat in our apartment is also not the best so we have bought a space heater for each room. The other foreign postdocs and us always have electrical bills way higher than the Chinese locals in our building. I think they all sleep in their winter coats to save money on heat.

In Harbin we stayed at two different hotels the two nights in Harbin because the one I really wanted to stay at, a converted synagogue, was only available for one night. It turned out to be pretty unimpressive, it was really filthy and smelled from the squat toilets downstairs and melted ice from people’s shoes. Harbin at one point had a community of about 5,000 Jews and there are two synagogues in he city. Our second hostel wasn’t much better but it had heating under the floors so the room was nice and toasty.

I went with a friend I met on my painting excursion in Hangzhou.  Danny didn’t come because he went to California for a work conference the week before and we planned a trip to India the following week so he decided it was too much traveling for him.

Our first night in Harbin we went to a Russian Moscow Theater show that my friend had wanted to see. I wasn’t terribly excited about it because it hadn’t shown up on any of the travel sights. We were the only foreigners in the audience and the menu only came in Chinese and Russian. I’m pretty sure the waiters were confused by why we couldn’t read Russian and I had to use my best Chinese to try to order. The show was kind of ok. It was mostly a typical Chinese variety show, there was a Chinese opera dance and a Chinese calligraphy demo and a comedian that I didn’t understand much of. There were a few parts with Russian dancers, which turned out to be rather risqué dances where the Russian girls got almost naked. The Chinese women were dressed modestly for the whole show. I think there is a lot of tensions between the Chinese and Russians in Harbin and I got the feeling there wasn’t much respect given to Russian women.

We mostly got around Harbin by taxi, which gave me a good opportunity to practice my Chinese since taxi drivers there don't speak a word of English. My Chinese is almost kind of passable at this point, at least for brief conversations. Getting a taxi in Harbin requires bargaining every time and is a giant pain in the butt. They almost never agree to use the meter. I tried to make sure we knew approximately how much each place should cost before we went. The most annoying thing about taxis there is if you are going far out they will agree on a price, drive for five minutes, then pull over to the side of the road and sell you to another taxi that you need to switch to. It makes me feel quite fortunate that in Shanghai official taxis don’t do any of that nonsense.

Our first morning at the hostel we met a really nice guy from the States who was traveling by himself and he ended up going around with us for the whole weekend. We started out by going to the Siberian tiger park. You get to see a lot of tigers really close up. They also sell animals like chicken, goats, and cows that you can watch them feed to the tigers. Fortunately we only saw them eat a chicken. It was still pretty gross.

Afterwards, we checked out St. Sophia Church, a Russian church right in the center of town. At one point there were a lot of Russians living in Harbin and most of the noteworthy architecture in the city is Russian. I almost felt like we were visiting Russia. Inside there were a bunch of old photos of Harbin but it wasn’t really worth paying to go inside.

We had lunch at the main shopping street, Zhongyang Da Jie. It was an average street with souvenir shops and Chinese and Russian restaurants. It was decorated with a few ice sculptures. We went to a Russian restaurant, where I learned that Russian restaurants have terrible service. The guy we met had been taking the Trans Siberian train said all the restaurants along the way in Russia had equally unfriendly service.

After that we went to our first ice show stop, Zhoalin Park. Zhoalin Park was the least impressive of the ice show sights we saw. A lot of things seemed to still be under construction, although it was really interesting to watch them work. It mostly had a lot of small ice sculptures. They had an ice slide, which we all tried several times since it was free and there was no line.

That night we went to Ice and Snow world, by far the most impressive ice show sight. They actually built a whole city out of ice. There were real world size buildings we could walk inside. There was even a bar made of ice. They had several pop culture sculptures like giant Disney characters. They also built replicas of several famous sights around China.  Everything was lit up with LED lights placed inside the ice. The only downside was because China doesn’t often care much about proper safety precautions there were several parts where you had to walk on sheets of pure ice and several people fell, including me. There was one guy who went down and didn’t move for about five minutes. It was still a totally amazing place to see.

Sunday morning we went to Unit 731 Museum. Unit 731 was a Japanese Unit during World War 2 that did chemical and biological warfare testing on locals in Harbin. It is a really sad piece of history that American schools never get around to teaching about. The museum itself is located in unit 731’s army base. The curators didn’t do a very good job. We got the audio guide, which described everything by number although none of the objects were numbered.  I think the museum in Nanjing’s section about unit 731 was more interesting, although it is much smaller.

In the afternoon we checked out a third section of the ice festival at Sun Island. It had lots of giant statues made of ice and snow. It was really beautiful. They also had dog sledding, which we decided to try. We didn’t go very far but it was still fun.

 Our taxi driver on the way back took us on a shortcut straight across the frozen lake. Since it is China, I'm pretty sure nobody ever did the proper tests to see if it was frozen enough to handle the weight of the car. I was terrified the whole way but I survived. Overall it was quite a unique trip.