02/01/08-02/04/08- HARBIN (I feel like poem)

02/01/08

“The especially charming and beautiful scenery, fresh air and novel elegant pavilions reflecting in green jungles are very strongly impressed on your memory, but also forget to return home. …. If we roam here listening birds and insects’ singings, we will feel like poem.” –Jin Wei Hotel Guest Services Directory

We arrived in Harbin at 1:00AM local time, and were instantly greeted by a brigade of black-market taxi drivers who make the Beijing drivers look like patrons of virtue. As Will later put it, “I don’t think I’ve ever actually been shoved towards a taxi.” We settled on two of the least sketchy taxis that we could find and headed for downtown Harbin. Once we checked in at our hotel (all in Chinese- I wasn’t involved) Steve, Will and I pushed together our two beds (cheaper than three) and tried to find things to do other than sleep. First we tried to turn on the TV, but all that we could turn on was a small red light. We decided that this must be high entertainment in near-Siberia, and went to sleep.

02/02/08

The next day we went out on the town. No matter how many layers of clothes we had on, it was still freezing. I’m writing this now from Beijing, and we went out to get dinner and it felt downright balmy. Harbin is really a difficult place to describe. There’s the Russian architecture, but also Chinese and Modern and Turkish, etc… and it seems vaguely reminiscent of New York City. Below you will find a picture of me at a Russian supply store.

I made a hao pengyou (good friend).

We wandered for a bit, and then found the river of ice.

The sun setting on the river. I'm standing in the middle of it while taking the picture.

I’ve never seen a frozen river before, and it was amazing. It must be about a kilometer across to the island, and all that you can see is ice and horses with carriages and, on the banks, ice luges and inner-tubes and skating rinks divided by mounds of snow. We all decided to go down a hill with inner-tubes, which I thought was going to be the scariest thing I did that day. I was sure that at some point, halfway down the 45 degree hill, I would spin around and hit a small bump and go THWAP with a very graceful Olympic-style back-flip onto my head.

After our death-defying, we decided to find the ice festival. So we walked across a frozen river of ice, you know, like any intelligent person might do. I watch a lot of Man vs. Wild, so if anyone HAD fallen in, I would have known what to do. I'm sure that Mom is laughing right now, and by laughing I mean writing me an e-mail about personal safety (there were cars on the ice, so we figured it was safe).

After a good fifteen minute walk, we hit dry land again in the form of Sun Island, which was apparently a barren ghost town. We walked around for about thirty minutes without seeing anyone, which was very strange considering this was supposed to be the general location of the ice festival. We expected a crowd to jump out at any moment and yell "surprise!" After all, this is China, and the one time we can't find anyone is the time when we were most trying to find a large gathering of people. Oh irony. We did find a strange patch of red liquid on the road, though, and imagined a scene in this deserted place where a car could just wheel around a corner and take one of us out.

We think it would look sort of like that. We may have been delusionally cold, so please forgive the utter inappropriateness of taking such a picture.

In time, we found the festival. The snow festival. Which was closing (because it was almost dark), which explained why we couldn't find anyone. We were told (in Chinese, no one speaks English in Harbin) that the ice festival was down the road, but very, very far. It would help if we took a taxi.

Unfortunately, there were no taxis in sight, so we recommenced our journey on foot. Across the island we marched in the bitter, 0 degree Fahrenheit cold. Across the inverted bridge of Kazahck-Dun...

I made up the name.

And again further down the road. Dissension in the ranks was rampant. Mutiny was a distinct possibility, as was hypothermia. Steve, after all, had left his heavy jacket in our room back in Beijing. Just as we thought we could go no further, a line of taxis appeared miraculously, as though out of a dream, and we negotiated a good price for our whisking away to Ice-World.

When we finally arrived, it was as though all of the trials and tribulations of the past five hours were no more than five minutes, for the Ice Festival loomed larger than most amusement parks, and glowed brighter than the Vegas Strip (another definition of strip that I forgot to teach my students. Darn). The festival really was amazing, and from here I think I'll let my pictures and videos tell what they can about our experience there. I also now have all of my photos from China posted at http://www.flickr.com/photos/23482798@N04/. I'll be on a school trip to Inner Mongolia from now until Sunday. Otherwise, I would have written a longer post about our trip to Harbin. I decided that getting the pictures and videos up was more important than writing a novel about three days. The bottom line is that I highly recommend Harbin as a travel destination- I like everyone would love the Ice Festival. Best weekend trip ever.

Acropolis, acropolis. I feel like such a stupid American.

Me, Hillary, and Will in front of a super-gigantic ice tower covered in ice.

The whole group in front of one of the many large Olympic-themed ice sculptures.

This links to a video of the greatest song about the Beijing Olympics ever written and performed by a majority of China's pop stars, a-la "We Are the World." The moment at about 3'07" cracks me up every time. If you listen, maybe you can guess why.

Someone double-dog-dared me.