Trash Collection

Oh you know, just picking up the trash...with a backhoe...

Ice and Snow Sculptures on Zhongyang

大白! A snow sculpture of Dà Bái or 'Big White,' as Baymax is known here. Apparently Baymax likes Manchurian kvass...

A sweet ice sculpture near Zhongyang Avenue's Bomele 1931.

An ice sculpture commemorating the 118th anniversary of Harbin's founding in 1898 by Russia's Chinese Eastern Railway.

Another lovely ice sculpture.

Another of the snow sculptures up now along Zhongyang Avenue.

Harbin Ice Festival 2016

The entrance to the Harbin Ice Festival on Sun Island, part of the Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival. I didn't realize until recently that there are actually two separate festival grounds, one housing ice sculptures and ice block buildings and the other of snow sculptures.

The Ice Festival was pretty amazing, although quite pricey by local standards as entrance tickets cost ¥300 (just over US$46).

I was able to visit the Ice Festival from mid-afternoon to evening, which was a great way to see the grounds in both the pre-sunset light and lit up in the dark. (As you can see, the lights were already on when I got there in the afternoon.)

The Ice Festival featured ice block structures inspired by buildings all over the world, although this is obviously a tribute to Harbin's Russian foundations.

It really is amazing how large some of the structures are!

A view of ice block buildings modeled on a Chinese building and either the Ottoman Blue Mosque or Greek Orthodox Hagia Sophia Cathedral.  

An overview of the Ice Festival grounds from the sledding hill.

The lighting was magnificent in the dark! 

I'm pretty sure you would easily be able to spot the Ice Festival grounds if you had an evening flight in or out of Harbin!

The Ice Festival did include this rather striking snow sculpture. I can only imagine how amazing the Snow Festival itself must be!

Another view of the night lights at the Ice Festival

A closeup of the Ice Festival's tribute to the Hagia Sophia or the Blue Mosque.

I still have no idea what this was supposed to be!

Although the festival grounds were markedly colder than the rest of the city, the Ice Festival is definitely worth checking out the next time you find yourself in Harbin in the winter!

Christmas Lights in Manchuria

It was an unexpected treat to see some proper Christmas lights out and about, in this case on the Nangang Christian Church on Dongdazhi Street (a congregation of the Chinese Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Movement). The church was originally founded as the parish church of Harbin's German Lutheran community.

Siberian Tiger Park

Near the entrance to left-bank Harbin's Siberian Tiger Park!

Prices for entry to the Park and for the live animals you can feed the tigers. Only in China! (Note that tickets are actually ¥100, not ¥90.)

I think the "Warm tips" is supposed to read "A Friendly Tip." Oops. The process is as described however, you purchase your tickets before walking through the Tourist Center (really a hall of souvenir shops) to queue for the bus that will drive you through the tigers' paddocks, after which you're dropped off to wander through tunnels that take you through smaller enclosures housing more regular Siberian (also known as Amur or Manchurian) tigers as well as white Siberian tigers, jaguars, ligers, and cougars, after which you exit back at the ticketing area near the Park entrance.

A picture from the tour bus that really doesn't capture how magnificent (or close) these amazing animals are!

Harbin's Siberian Tiger Park is also - somewhat strangely - home to lions as well as Siberian tigers.

These guys were not happy to be behind fences, but I sure was relieved they were! (This is at the start of the pedestrian-friendly enclosures at the Park.) 

As I mentioned above, you can buy and release live fowl (and larger animals, if desired) for the tigers. Here you can see a chicken plummeting to its untimely death...

It was breath-taking how close these two were! It was sad to see them caged, but magical to be so close to them.

I absolutely loved this guy. So still and peaceful.

One of the Park's ligers, a lion/tiger hybrid.

Ice Sculptures In Progress

An ice sculpture dedicated to the coming New Year!

It's amazing how delicately beautiful so many of the ice sculptures along Zhongyang Avenue can be!

One of the ice sculptures outside the Coca Cola hall on Zhongyang Avenue.

An homage to the contents of the Songhua River, which I'm told is where all the ice blocks for Harbin's Ice and Snow Festival come from.

Our Air: The Source

On the way into the city from the airport you can see one of the many sources of our air pollution here. Ugh...

This ≠ Parking

There is literally no end to the ridiculousness that passes as parking here in Harbin! Often quite exasperating when you're just trying to walk down the sidewalk. I literally have NO idea how the handicapped I very rarely see out and about in wheelchairs navigate the sidewalks, especially when many of them are blocked by piles of snow and badly parked cars...

Ice Blocks Building an Ice City

It was so neat to see the ice buildings and ice sculptures start to go up on Zhongyang Avenue recently! Despite the at times horrific air pollution the winter really is a magical time in Harbin!

St. Sophia in the Snow

Harbin's former St. Sophia Orthodox Cathedral (now the Municipal Art and Architecture Museum) as the snow begins to fall.

Zhongyang Avenue in the Wintertime

Lovely Zhongyang Avenue in the wintertime just before another snow. 

Another view down Zhongyang Avenue...

Bomele 1931 in the Wintertime

A wintertime view of the Bomele 1931 on Zhongyang Avenue. A great place for a coffee or a cheesecake!

Air in the Cancer Kingdom

Our air pollution has been climbing back up into the 400s and 500s lately, so I thought I'd put up a couple pictures from Hongbo Square of our air over the weekend. Excuse the title, it should be 'the Middle Kingdom,' but I can't help wondering how many of us breathing the air on days when the pollution is up in the 800s and 900s are going to have cancer when it is generally agreed it's unhealthy to be breathing it in when it's over 70...

Looking from Hongbo Square down Hongjun Street towards the city's main Bank of China branch and Zhongshan Road.

Center is the building of the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum, formerly Harbin's Moscow Department Store.

The city's main China Construction Bank branch, shining through the smog with China's national bird just to the right.

Winter Traffic

Curiously enough, China's Ice City is not so great at dealing with snow and ice. We recently had some heavy (for here) snowfall and it paralyzed the city for a couple of days. Buses driving busy routes that normally came every 5 or 10 minutes stopped running entirely, others came at much longer intervals than normal, taxis became impossible to find, and horrendous traffic jams made off-rush hour trips that usually took 15 or 20 minutes by bus take an hour or more. It's my second winter here and even though I left for work extra early each day I still barely made it on time, and once not at all! (Pictured above is the tail end of a traffic jam I got stuck in on a bus - it took nearly an hour to go a kilometer and a half. When we finally made it to a bus stop I walked the rest of my way.) So be warned, if you're going to be in Harbin in the winter, bring your winter gear and think about walking to wherever you're going if it's just snowed!

Harbin: Game of Doors

I don't know what the rest of China is like, but in Harbin malls are into having lots and lots of doors. They're also into locking all but one set of these doors so that people have to push and shove past each other to get in and out. In winter big cloth panels are added to make the game even more fun. (And presumably to keep heat in. Not sure how effective they are at that, but the panels certainly help to spread various germs and diseases about as they wipe all over the people trying to pass through them.) One would think that if the malls only wanted a couple of doors to work that they would just change the designs to only have two small sets of doors at each entrance, but maybe I'm wrong in thinking that doors are for walking through. Perhaps doors are purely decorative, and only occasional functional? That certainly seems to be the case here in the Ice City!

Money for the Afterlife

The modern PRC truly is all over the place. Mao Zedong adorns the money and can be found saluting away in quite a few statues across the country and atheism remains the de facto state religion of the country, yet many people cling to remarkably pharaonic ideas about sending fake money and other items on to their dead loved ones for use in the afterlife, albeit via fire instead of via pyramid. There is something quite beautiful about the little bonfires, which can often be seen burning at major intersections at night. (Something about the intersections makes them good locations for forwarding things on to the underworld apparently.) This is from a friend's fire for a newly deceased family member, may they rest in peace.

Update (11/12/2015): A friend recently posted an interesting alternative perspective on the meaning of burning joss paper and other items after a loved one's death that can be read in full here.

First Snow of the Season

Our first snow this year as seen on Xinyang Lu. The first snow is always so magical! (It didn't hurt that it cleaned our air pollution up for a couple of days too!)

Fall Light

There is such beautiful light in the fall! The haze of the fall air pollution can make the light especially wonderful, in a coughing-inducing, cancer-causing kind of way...