Frozen River Fun

2/4/2008 (cont’d)

-Our next job was to meander on over to the river, which we would cross and make it to ice world! I say meander because we didn’t really have an exact idea of how to get there. But since the river loops around the town, there’s only so far you can go before you eventually hit the river anyways. On our way, we got an idea of Harbin’s personality. First of all, it was just as crowded as Beijing, if not more so. All of the shops had people out front doing everything they could to attract customers. Some had speakers blasting rave music that you could hear several blocks away. Some had people singing with a microphone and speakers, or even just a guy yelling things into a megaphone.

-I also had never felt like such a target before in my life, but I suppose a group of six Americans is pretty hard not to spot in a place such as this. Everyone who saw us chased after us, saying “Hello!” followed by a bunch of Chinese that in some way was instructing us to buy things. The one cool thing about being hassled so much is it allowed me to bargain, something I hadn’t experienced yet in China. I remember bargaining in Guatemala, only barely knowing how to say numbers in Spanish. Now it was nice to have a quicker understanding of what I was saying and hearing, and I could even throw in a few phrases to make the bargaining more genuine. I felt a little too guilty to bargain the person down all that much, though, since I could really afford it more than any of them could.

-On our way to the river, I saw a funny-looking dog that I stopped to take a picture of. As I did, a woman came up and tried to get me to buy the dog from her. I’m pretty sure she was not the owner, as she kept on walking when I said no.

-The river itself was gorgeous! Tons of entertainment was set up along the “shore,” like snow tubing, an ice luge, skating, and of course, blaring music. People sat on horse-drawn carriages and dog sleds to take people across, and far off in the distance we could see a cable car taking people across by the sky route. We, however, decided to go the fun way and cross it by foot! The river was incredibly wide, maybe as much as half a mile. Very slippery at parts but most of it was covered in snow as well. At the areas of exposed ice, you could see it was frozen for at least a meter down.

-Once we made it across the river, we were eager to find this magical world of ice! But as we started walking, we realized the island was empty. Where were all the people coming to see the festival? This was a bit strange. The few people we could find to ask said there was no ice festival on the island and pointed us back to where we came from. No! This couldn’t be! Determined, we began walking towards the cable car line. Surely the gondolas were there to take people to the ice world. The one problem? It was getting dark, and with darkness came even more cold. I hadn’t really thought that could be possible at this point. It took us a good long walk to make it to the cable car let off point, where we saw bright green lights. Yes! This was it! No. Actually, this was snow world, an area of various snow sculptures. This was another cool attraction (no pun intended) that we were planning on visiting but not nearly as good as ice world. Plus, it was closed at night. Fortunately, there was still someone at the ticket booth who told us to travel down the road a bit further, but that we “should take a cab because it is far.” Somehow, though, there were no cabs in existence on this stretch of abandoned road. So we continued to walk, across a long bridge, and on to roads that seemed to be going further and further away from civilization. I began to get a little nervous about our situation… We were wandering blindly through Siberia in the dark with the temperature rapidly dropping, and we had no idea exactly how far we needed to go. This is the way bad things can happen. Then! Miraculously, we came upon a slew of taxis waiting in a parking lot, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. We couldn’t believe or understand it, but we didn’t care! We all piled into a taxi van that took us quickly to ice world. It turned out to not be much farther away but still was further than we would have (or should have) walked.