Friday Feb. 20th…
After only a few hours of sleep it was time to wake up and get in a taxi to go to the Hongqiao airport. 10 of us were traveling to Harbin for the weekend to see their annual Ice & Snow Festival. We got to the airport early, and sat around for a while. The flight we took was on time…Thank God! The first flight was about 1.5 hours. I tried sleeping most of the way but I was unsuccessful. We stopped in Yan Tai for a 30-minute stop. We got off the plane and sat in the airport for about 30 minutes and then boarded the exact same plane and then took off. It seemed very unnecessary to me, but o well. At the airport we saw a bunch of Chinese fighter jets. It turns out Yan Tai is really close to North Korea.
We finally landed in Harbin, and it was freezing! We quickly got 3 taxis and headed towards the hotel. The most interesting thing that we saw along the way were the street sweepers. Instead of plowing the roads they have people standing on the side of the road sweeping the snow away. They seemed to be affective but I feel like there would be a quicker way to do that, but if you have the manpower, I guess why not hire people to sweep the road…oh China.
We arrived at the hotel and then had to check in. We ended up getting nicer rooms than what we paid for…Thanks hostelworld.com!!! We stayed at the JinJiang Inn-Sophia Plaza hotel. It was in a great location and really nice on the inside. Also, the people at the front desk were really helpful. They helped us get to all of the big attractions that we wanted to see. To think we stayed there for 2 nights and we each only paid about $25 total.
After we got settled in our rooms we bundled up and ventured out into the cold. We went to the main plaza area and saw St. Sophia Cathedral…it was only 2 blocks away. We just wandered around for a while and then we ate. Ironically we ate at a Chinese restaurant called California Beef Noodle USA. Very strange name. but very good food. Harbin is a very interesting city architecturally. It used to be apart of Russia so there are a lot of Russian style buildings in the city. We wandered down to Central Street (Zhongyang Dajie), it is one of the largest pedestrian streets in Asia. It has a total length of 1,450 meters (1,586 yards). Along this whole street their were small ice sculptures. Some still had a lot of detail while others were losing their shape. This road took us straight to the frozen Songhua River. The river was so frozen that cars were driving on the ice. There was an area cleared of snow for ice-skating and ‘bobsled’ type chairs. They are hard to describe so it would be best just to look at my pictures to see for yourself. We rented one of these things and thoroughly enjoyed our time on the river. The sun was setting and it was gorgeous. Cold, but gorgeous. It was so cold the batteries in our cameras were losing their life…all of our batteries were dying very quickly!
As night fell it got even colder, at least during the day we had the sun to provide some heat but not anymore. I must say what a lifesaver my knock off Uggs were! Those things saved my toes!!! They were so warm. I only wore one pair of ankle socks and my toes were fine. There were a couple of times when my feet would start to get cold and I would just start moving and everything was fine again. They were awesome! By far the best purchase I have made while being in China.
We spent the night at the Disney Ice Park. It was awesome. There were castles, buildings, and icons from major Disney films made out of ice. They also had snow sculptures and some smaller scale ice sculptures. There were ice slides as a way to exit most of the big ice sculptures. Everything was ice. It was incredible.
After Disney and spending about 8 hours outside in around -15F degree weather we went to go get dinner. We went to a restaurant with the intention of just ordering dumplings. We ordered thinking that each person would eat 12 dumplings, so we would have a total of 120 dumplings. When we ordered there was something that got lost in translation. The waitress said that all of the prices on the menu were doubled because it was an old menu but she never mentioned that the quantity was also doubled. So we ended up with 240 dumplings. Plus when we thought we were just getting 12 each Josh ordered what he thought was going to be an extra 6 dumplings, and ended up being an extra 12 dumplings. We ended up with 252 dumplings that 10 people needed to eat. There were so many dumplings on our table!!! All of the dumplings were finished…That’s what happens when you travel with 8 guys. The best part about this meal…252 dumplings, 9 beers, and a soda cost less than $3 per person. You just can’t beat those prices!! I love China!
After dinner we just went back to the hotel and went to sleep. It was a long day on a very small amount of sleep.
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