15/03/2013-20/03/2013

Every Chinese person I've ever mentioned Ha'erbin to has told me horror stories about the cold there and/or told me I'd be better off staying away because it's so cold and I'll die, so I'd mentally prepared myself for Arctic conditions and the likely loss of several fingers to frostbite. Turns out, everyone was being very dramatic and it wasn't that bad at all, so long as you layered up and kept moving. The night we arrived was -24ºc, probably the coldest it ever got whilst we were there, and I think that was partly because we arrived so late. After pulling on as many extra clothes as we could by the baggage carousels, we braved the cold and managed to find a shuttle bus to the city centre. As usual, about six taxi drivers were waiting to pounce on us as we left the bus, so we went to hide in Dicos for a little bit. At least, we were going to until we got a call from the others, who'd arrived earlier, warning us that the hostel wanted to lock up for the night and was only staying open for us. We tried to hail a taxi and accidentally hailed about six; all the drivers were shouting for us to choose their cars, so we took advantge of the opportunity to insist that one driver took all five of us... plus our bags (which are each the size of a not-so-small child). Somehow we all crammed into the car, and then we drove about for bloody ages because it turned out our driver had been lying completely when he said he knew where we wanted to go. Anyway, we made it to the hostel, met the world's grumpiest receptionist (tried to make me pay the full bill for my room on the spot, then wanted me to wake Beth and Cat up so they'd come and pay theirs too. I think not) and crashed out.

Day 1 (Saturday 16th)
The first place we visited in Ha'erbin was St Sophia's cathedral, which is a tiny but very pretty Russian cathedral, with half price entry for anyone who can pass off an old library card as a valid student card. There were stalls in the square outside selling Russian-esque souvenirs, which I have to say were much less tacky than what I've seen everywhere else. They were also selling lots of fur products, including whole skinned animals, although I can't say any of us were tempted. After this, we walked down to the river. The river was brilliant: it's completely frozen over and a huge area has been fenced off and given over to ice-based activities. Or, as they should be called, ice-tivities. The entrance to the ice-tivities (yes, I'm sticking with ice-tivities) area was huge archway flanked with towers, all built from giant ice bricks that light up at night, and the towers at the sides actually led to ice slides, which you could go down on your bum, in a rubber ring or on a sledge, depending which tower you chose. If you opted out on the slides, you had to survive a terrifying flight of steep, icy steps down to the river. These steps were charmingly decorated with bloodstains, which should give you some idea of just how awful they were. The ice itself was packed with people pushing themselves about on ice-sled type things, and there were separate areas for different ice-tivities, like skating and (very tame) ice hockey. We hired skates, and set up camp on the ice rink for the afternoon. My personal highlight was when Beth slipped over and fell flat on her bum because she was laughing too violently at Dan's fall the minute before.

Cat's guidebook assured us that Ice & Snow World, the famous ice park full of incredible ice buildings and sculptures, was just on the other side of the river, so that's where we headed after dinner. We were maybe halfway across the frozen river when a light-show began, projecting beams of multi-coloured light across the width of the river. Accompanying the light-show was some wonderfully dramatic music, which Dan and I felt warranted some interpretative dancing. We both started leaping and throwing ourselves around in a Kate Bush-ish manner, the others ran over to join us (bonus points for not questioning what was going on first) and we all Thriller'd and frolicked, by ourselves in a wasteland of ice, until the music ended. When we reached the other side of the river, it turned out that (as usual) the guidebook had been wrong, and Ice & Snow World was actually 8km away. Luckily, the man lurking in the trees by the river turned out to be a taxi driver (none of us really fancied Nold's idea of walking there) and was able to call a friend to help him drive us all there.

Ice & Snow World was expensive and not nearly so relaxed about student discounts as everywhere else, but I think it's worth it. It's basically a really really cold fairyland of multi-coloured ice palaces, pagodas, bridges, slides and snow sculptures. There was a combination skiing/skating/singing performance supposedly detailing the history of Ha'erbin, a novelty Angry Birds-themed maze and castle with its own catapult and staff dressed as pigs and birds (these photos went down a storm when I showed them to my students), firework displays, an international ice sculpture competition, a giant conga line (which we elbowed and barged our way into) and even a mini concert with a load of dancers dressed as rabbits and bears. We queued with all the small children to go down the smaller ice slides, which I had to awkwardly bum-shuffle down because there was too much friction from my jeans or something. A small fat kid came bombing down one of these slides straight after me and knocked me flat onto my face in the snow as I tried to get back on my feet. Another time, we climbed to the top of Ice & Snow World's surrounding wall for a view across the whole park and then took the slide all the way back down to the bottom. By this point, we'd learnt that you go much faster if you stand or squat than if you sit, but this revelation had yet evaded the group in front of us so we crept along behind them at the pace of an elderly snail for a few minutes before losing patience and climbing around them.

Day 2 (Tuesday 17th)
The next morning seven of us, plus a guy called Ryan we'd met the night before at our hostel, got up early to visit the Japanese Germ Warfare museum on the outskirts of town. It was as depressing as you'd expect, with lots of vitriolic anti-Japan captions (e.g. "to satisfy their desire for destruction, the Japanese invaded China..." "the blood-thirsty Japanese...") and a corridor covered in memorial plaques for all the hundreds who'd been killed at the Ha'erbin facility. Previous visitors had brought and left thousands and thousands of origami cranes, and chains made of stacked origami cranes, in memory of the victims. After lunch, the plan was for us all to go to the Siberian tiger park just outside of Ha'erbin together, but we all got separated and/or lost in the search for taxis so this went to pieces. Those of us who didn't manage to get to the tiger park spent the afternoon relaxing in the warmth of the hostel. When the others came back, we went out for a fancy banquet meal to celebrate Cat's birthday, which was the next day. There was a slight delay because Beth and Rob had disappeared on a walk, which we all whined and complained about... and had to apologise for later, when it turned out they'd gone to secretly buy Cat's birthday cake. Oops.

The restaurant we'd gone to had been absolutely packed, but rather than turn us away they led us to a private room across a car-park and in the basement of someone's house. Dodgy as it sounds, it was really good! Mostly thanks to Ryan, we managed to order lots of foods we didn't even know we liked, and then we took it in turns to toast Cat for her birthday. Cat gave us each a lovely personal toast in return, although somehow Ryan, who we'd only known a day, ended up with the longest toast of all. We had to be up at 2am to go skiing the next day, but Cat, Nold, Pete, Ryan and I decided to stay up and play drinking games anyway. We stayed up until everyone else woke up, and then it was off to the station to catch a train to the nearby ski resort of Yabuli.

I'll write about skiing and the rest of our time in Ha'erbin soon - this blog is taking me a while to get up, so I'm going to do it in two parts.

Ella xx