Off East

First impressions of Harbin when we got off the train were that it was still freezing (which was a good thing as we’d come here to see the Ice Sculpture Festival!) and that Chines tax drivers and pedestrians are mental. The favoured driving style in Harbin (and indeed in the rest of China as we’ve found out) is to weave in and out of several ‘lanes’ of traffic whilst the pedestrians just step out in front of the cars and keep walking despite the constant blaring of horns the whole time. Traffic lights or pedestrian crossings don’t seem to count for much here. Taxi’s were ridiculously cheap in Harbin with the average fare around the city costing about £1. All the taxi’s were VW Jettas.

After checking into our Chinese hotel we wandered around the streets and undertook our first foray into a Chinese city. Harbin has a very strong European feel to it as a result of it having been developed/modernised by the Russians c1800.There were many beautiful Eurpean buildings everywhere and the longest pedestrianised street in the world! And more shopping malls than you could shake a stick at!

We went to the Ice Lantern Festival in the evening. This was sponsored by Disney (!) and was a total rip-off and very tacky. Thankfully this was only a small part of the the whole festival and wasn’t a patch on what we were going to experience the next day! We then discovered Oriental King of Dumplings where our love affair with Chinese food was about to start and where we subsequently ate for the next three days. We had three massive plates of dumplings and washed it down with loads of beer for a fiver. For both of us! Yummy!

The next day we wandered around the city in the morning and discovered the joy of Chinese bakeries that make and sell freshly baked biscuits all day long. Steve’s in heaven! We also discovered the joy of Chinese shopping mall food halls which are vast spaces filled with loads of different food outlets all cooking freshly prepared dishes of your choice. It took a while to work the system out i.e you buy a pre-payment swipe card, order your food at the counter, get your food, get a receipt, take your receipt and card back to the counter and get the money back that you haven’t spent…All a little unnecessary really!

In the afternoon we went to the Harbin Snow and Ice Festival which was what we’d travelled through Siberia and come to Northern China in the middle of winter for! Despite having seen loads of photo’s of it, words cannot describe the spectacle that appeared before our eyes! On an island in the middle of the Songhua River that surrounds Harbin the festival covers a huge area; almost like a theme park filled with ice sculptures of all shapes and sizes. There were huge life size structures that you could climb onto/into/slide down and they were all lit up with LED’s and generally all had music blasting out of them. It was kitsch, it was tacky and it was psychedelic but it was also AMAZING! It was easy to forget as we clambered all over them that these were made of ice from the River and had been crafted by sculptors working 12 hour days in freezing conditions. See http://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/heilongjiang/harbin/ice_snow.htm for a bit of the history…

After wandering around and freezing our butts off for a couple of hours we headed back into the city and went for dumplings (again) having narrowly avoided having dinner in a restaurant which was adorned with cages of manky city pigeons – some dead, some alive. We later learnt that generally (despite not being able to read Chinese characters/signs etc) that quite a few restaurants rather helpfully have a neon-lit picture of the animal that they specialise in cooking. This restaurant had taken this a step further and (street) pigeon was firmly on the menu!

As we were catching a night train to Beijing that evening, we spent the next day wandering along the riverfront which is really pretty, watching the locals going nuts for all the ice-based activities on offer on the frozen river which included sledge rides – pulled by Alsatian dogs (?) or horses, ice skating and slides etc all done with a lot of enthusiasm and to a soundtrack of banging Chinese techno!!!

We also had our first (and last) experience of shopping in a Chinese Walmart (so that I could buy some knickers!) and it can only be described as a total frenzy (the other shoppers that it, not us!) The knicker shopping was however something of a challenge given that all measurments here are given in centimetres, not inches and that they only come in sizes (S,M,L etc, etc) which seemed to bare no relation to any of the actual measurements. Given that the Chinese are generally a lot smaller than us Europeans I was disappointed to find that the only ones I could squeeze my butt into were a massive XL

Note to Dan Pallett – thanks to the brilliant book you gave me, I now know everything there is to know about the Chinese pant manufacturing process – unfortunately, it wasn’t the least bit of help on this particular knicker-purchasing mission