-35C in Harbin

This post is a little behind, but the weekend of the January 15th we flew north to Harbin with our friends Leon & Kevin, to the northern most major city in China. Harbin is famous for quite a few different things:

1) It is horribly cold, I am talking Edmonton, Canada & Minnesota level cold. The warm days were -25C (-13F) and the coldest we saw was -35C (-31F). 

2) Sausages, but honestly they are nothing special, but they sure do smell. 

3) The Snow Sculpture Contest

4) The Ice Festival

5) The worlds largest tiger preserve with more than 800 Siberian (Manchurian) tigers. 

We arrived Friday night and checked into the Shangri-La hotel, it was about 10:00 p.m. so we opted for a drink in the hotel bar, which happens to be made almost entirely of ice. This was a good starter for us as it was only -10C (14F) inside the bar, and it let us start to acclimatize a little. 

Saturday morning the temp had dropped to -30C (-22F) and it was off to the snow sculpture competition. The carvings were incredibly detailed, and some of them where absolutely gigantic. The competition pieces were all carved from a ~3x3x3m (~10x10x10f) cube of snow. 

We spent about 3hrs wandering around the competition until we were extremely cold. We then headed into town. We just kind of walked around in town and did not find much exciting except a bar called "Star _ucks" which had apparently lost a fight w/ a coffee company of similar name... who knew they had copyrights here. 

After a quick bite we headed back to the hotel to try to bring our core temperatures up for the Ice festival that evening. 

A balmy -10C inside the Ice Palace bar... 

Tanya & Leon on ice benches... they did have fake fur seat covers though

Blue Ribbon Beer... AKA Pabst Blue Ribbon. Only $103 USD per bottle. That is not a typo, they have re-branded in China and apparently are making a killing.  

Tanya resting on the ice piano

All bundled up at the snow sculpture competition

It was "roman" themed... that did not make this sculpture of Romulus and Remus any less creepy

I was dancing a little (and seriously, I was sober... weird) 

Kevin and I getting strapped into a Zorb... 

And this is us getting pushed down a the hill in said Zorb

The sculptures were huge... 

They carved the side of the snow pile we zorb'd down.

Tanya on the tube

Those black specks near the head? yeah that is like 5 guys trying to finish the sculpture. 

Kevin and I driving these things... for some reason the girls did not want to ride shotgun... 

This was my favorite by far. the detail was incredible. You really need to double click this one to see the full detail in the big shot. 

Somehow this one won the competition... must be the judges brother or something

This is one of the saws they use to cut the ice for the Ice Festival

After a dip in the hot tub at the hotel we piled into a cab to go to the Ice Festival. Pulling up to the entrance gate was almost overwhelming. I was expecting it to be big, but this was kind of insane; the wall was about 40 feet high and a few hundred meters long. The gate itself was easily 80 feet tall. Little did we know as we walked up to pay our way in ($75/person, which seemed way to high given the number of Chinese there. But they were all showing passports and it looked like they were getting a discount) that this would be one of the smaller things we would see. 

Me eating frozen strawberries on a stick... probably would have been good, but it was so frozen solid it was hard as a rock. 

From Left to Right: Leon, Random Chinese man who wanted to have his picture taken with the girls, Tanya

This was one of the main structures... had to be 150 feet tall. This needs to be seen in a full size picture.  

The entrance gate... this was about 80 feet tall and 200m long

You need to see this one full size (double click the photo)... 

Tanya riding a yak... obviously

Sunday morning we checked out of the hotel and piled into a cab once again for a visit to the Harbin Tiger Park. The park is home to over 800 adult tigers which are intended to be reintroduced into the wild. Somehow I don't think that will really work as they seem a little to accustom to getting chickens and goats tossed to them. Unfortunately for us, China banned feeding live animals to predators by tourists the week before our visit so instead of getting a chicken tided to a stick, I had to pay a zoo keeper to throw a chicken out of his car for me to watch. We'll have to go back later when the loop hole is discovered that allows us to feed the tigers directly again. 

The tigers have it pretty good here or so it seems. The park is few hundred acres of large pens, each about 10 acres. In each pen there are about 8-10 tigers. They have plenty of room to move around, and on a regular basis chickens are randomly thrown in for them to eat. 

The tour is in buses which moves from pen to pen. Unfortunately for me, tigers means bars on the windows a little closer together than the width of my camera lens, and 25 people on a bus built for 15 means fogged glass... so my pics did not turn out really well. Fortunately Kevin got some real gems, so I am reposting them w/ full credit to him. 

Tiger fight... (Photo by Kevin) 

Sitting to jumping to the roof of a toyota 4runner in one smooth motion. It did not even look like the tiger was trying and it happened so fast. (Photo by Kevin) 

The chickens face says it all (Photo by Kevin) 

(Photo by Kevin)

MMMM Chicken

They are not malnourished