Sun Island

Romulus and Remus




The sign on this one said Christopher Columbus, I like the sharks chasing after him.


This is what the sculptures start out as.



















The next day we went to another place called Sun Island (太阳岛). Here they had an array of snow sculptures that were pretty impressive but many of the works were yet to be completed. The theme had something to do with Italy, as there were Italian flags on the drive in but I couldn't really figure out the connection between some of them. We ended up wandering through the north end of the park too. There weren't any sculptures there, but there also weren't any people, and the landscape was beautiful covered in snow.

Ice and Snow World

The following night we got tickets to the Ice and Snow World across the river. We bought them at the hotel and it included a tour bus that picked us up at the front door. It seemed a bit pricey, but I'm not really sure, but the tour was full so it seemed like the way to go. Anyways this was the big thing we had been planning to see so it didn't really matter. The parking lot to this place was filled with buses; it was quite a contrast to the empty tourist sites we went to in Datong. At first the place didn't seem very big but it kept on going and going. We had about 4 hours to roam around, which was pretty long to be out in the cold (it was somewhere in the vicinity of -15˚F). We covered almost ever inch of the park, found an ice maze, several ice slides, a ski slope, a hot air balloon, some kinda of cheesy performance with robot backhoes, a party yurt, ice skating bikes, white yaks, and we somehow even ended up walking through the back end of the place. Our scarfs became frozen stiff and we had frost on our eye lashes and hair, so we dipped into a little cabin coffee shop to warm up. When we returned to the bus we found the whole group waiting for us but they just laughed as we got on board. All in all the sculptures where pretty impressive and we had a good time, but man was it hard keeping my camera batteries warm all night.

Wandering Around Harbin

Transferring trains in Beijing, we arrived in Harbin about 17 hours after we left Datong. The negative degree weather wasn't as fierce as I expected but don't get me wrong it was pretty dag-on cold. After resting at the hotel a bit we went out wondering for a while. We found "Central Street" (中英大街), a popular shopping/touristy street, and walked around there a bit. It dead ends at the Songhua River (松花江), which is completely frozen over this time of year. There was a giant ice slide from the street down to the river, people were scooting around on these ice skate chairs, and there were horse carriages taking people across to the other side. I couldn't believe how frozen everything was. Spit, throw up, trash – it would all just freeze to the ground, preserved there until it thaws in the spring. In the days following we discovered one of the bomb shelters that had been turned into an underground shopping mall, encompassing six blocks or something like that. We also bought ice cream off the street because it the outside temperature was colder then a freezer anyways; In fact, the beer was normally warm because its kept inside to keep from freezing.