In Search of the Harbin Ice Sculptures

We haven’t, frankly, had the best start to 2013. Or Harbin, for that matter.

Among other observations on life in minus 30, I can confirm that this is not a good climate in which to be strapped for cash – however toasty your flat.

Because you want to be able to take a taxi if the bus doesn’t come. You want to be able to duck into a restaurant and warm up with a bowl of spicy beef noodle soup or some piping hot Chinese barbecue.

And as for the frustration of actually being in Harbin, a city that holds the world’s largest ice sculpture festival, a festival you’ve dreamed of seeing for at least a decade, and not, actually, have the funds to take yourself and your child to it?

That sucks. A first world problem, granted. And not a major first world problem, on the grand scheme of things. But sucky, nonetheless.

And, further, stabbing at the internet banking reload button like a starving lab rat to see if anyone’s paid you yet is neither a good, nor a constructive way to pass the time.

I’ll add that it’s even worse when your time zone’s 8-16 hours ahead of banking hours, though at least preferable to ricocheting around China haemorrhaging money on visas (yeah, OK, and theme parks, and fruit pastilles, and Indian food…).

Cleaning the bathroom and kitchen, tile by sodding tile, does not add greatly to the joy of nations, either.

Zac, by contrast, feels he’s long overdue a sustained session of watching Family Guy in his underpants in his man cave, from which he emerges every so often with random statements such as “Did you know there are actually FIVE states of matter? And one of them is Bose-Einstein condensate? But you have to make it in a lab?” or “They think Kim Jong-Un’s wife had a baby” that encourage me to believe he’s actually learning something.

Which is, with hindsight, probably EXACTLY why he’s doing it. La, la, la…

Still, some money comes through. Not the big chunks that I’m waiting on (another law of freelancing is that one lot of £1500 goes a lot further than six lots of £250, because you tend to do sensible things with it). But some money.

I’ve billed enough that we’ll either have a reasonable cushion once again or a skimpy cushion and a decent amount of skiing within the ever-theoretical 30 days from invoice, and diversified my client base a little to boot.

And, ya know, once the Chinese school holiday ends, Zac’s going to be in Chinese school – I have not yet addressed which one, as it’s beginning to dawn on me that “getting child into Chinese school” may be a project of greater magnitude than anticipated — leaving me 12 hours a day between the time at which he leaves the house and the time when he returns in which to rebuild our funds and actually, you know, pay my stamps.

(Zac’s take on my attitude to money? “When you’re old, you’ll make a lovely bag lady.” Me: “I fully expect a cut of the profits on the bestselling misery memoir you write about your childhood.”)

Anywise, the prospect of school also means that now is our only available window in which to do fun stuff.

We’ve got our rent paid up for four months, our broadband paid up and installed, food in the fridge, credit on the phone, enough spare cash to keep us in food for a month, positively survivalist quantities of pot noodles in case someone somehow gets through our Hannibal Lecter-esque front door and steals said pitiful spare cash, plus travel insurance if anything catastrophic happens.

Not ideal, granted.

Yet, being not exactly frugal by nature almost pathologically optimistic (a reader described my attitude to life as Micawberish), the very second the money arrives, we’re off for a grand day out, with a nice lunch and some ice sculptures.

“I really think you should wear your fleecies under that,” I say to Zac, who is preparing to brave not only temperatures of -30 and but a bloody ice festival with only a pair of fake North Face trekking pants by way of loins girding.

“Nah,” he says. “I’ll be fine.”

“What about your down pants?” I say.

“They look ridiculous,” he says.

In this he is not wrong: the only pair of child-size down pants we could find in all of Kathmandu, they balloon in a godawful MC Hammer-esque blaze of green nylon. In China, this style of trousers are quite phenomenally uncool on anyone over seven, which is probably why they exported them to Nepal in the first place.

“Look,” I say, throwing all thoughts of fashion to the wind, and adding jeans and fake North Face ski pants to my two pairs of leggings and tights, contemplating a second pair of socks under my snowboots, and tucking a double-layer fleece under my down jacket. “It’s going to be really cold. We’re going to be out in the cold for a long time.”

“I’ll be fine,” he says.

My spawn has a macho attitude to cold. He wore a T-shirt in Beijing in January just for kicks, and ran down Zhongyang Dajie, Harbin’s pedestrianised answer to Oxford Street, in a T-shirt in -15 just to prove a point. It’s a boy thing.

“OK,” I say. “On your own head be it.”

Lunch, for the record, is rather good. Southern-style dim sum, followed by a towering ice cone of red bean and condensed milk dessert, Zac’s choice, which should, by all Western logic, be disgusting, but is actually delicious. (It’s Bi Feng Tang, if you’re in the area – I’ve started collecting Harbin restaurants here.)

I figure it would be rather magical just to walk across the Songhua River to the main ice sculpture festival, Harbin Ice & Snow World, which appears from the various patchy directions I’ve found to be just a quick stroll from Sun Island.

Ya know! Walking across a frozen river to the ice sculptures. That’s cool, right?

Sadly, it’s rather more than cool. Even as we pass the ice slides, the wind’s blowing so hard that the lanterns rattle against the ice.

On the river, the windchill is particularly savage, icy air hissing west from Siberia, and Zac has yet to adapt to black ice, which is to say he’s fallen five or six times before we even get to the river, each fall becoming progressively less entertaining.

He’s also clearly cold, but in no way intends to admit it.

I’m cold, too. Even through the snood that covers my face, the dry, icy air stings my nostrils, not with the vinegar tingle of oncoming snow, but pure, Siberian chill.

Quite funny the first time around…

We crunch our way up from the river, into a surreal vista of birches and wooden buildings that have an air of the dacha about them. (Russian railway workers built much of Harbin and many White Russians fled across the border and settled here in the aftermath of the revolution, so the city’s an insane architectural hotchpotch.)

Zac skids on steps and faceplants in a mound of dirty snow.

“I don’t even want to go to the ice sculptures!” he says. “It’s so cold I’m worried the tears in my eyes are going to freeze!”

“I told you you should have worn more layers,” I say. “Your legs must be freezing.”

“My legs are fine,” he says. “I TOLD you my legs would be fine. But I can’t put layers over my eyes. I want ski goggles!”

“Tough,” I say. “We’re going.”

I WANT to see these ice sculptures. We are having a GRAND DAY OUT. We are bloody well going to enjoy it, both of us, if it kills us, which it may well do.

Sadly, the ice sculptures are nowhere to be seen. This is the snow sculpture bit. And we I don’t want snow sculptures. We I want ICE sculptures.

There’s a guy in a car, slowly cruising through the snow and the black ice that underlies it. He wants 100 kuai to take us to the ice sculptures. (Minimum fare in a taxi in Harbin, for comparison’s sake, is 8 kuai.)

I laugh.

It’s a long way, he explains.

“They’re in Harbin, not Jilin,” I say.

We wander along, Zac stamping footprints inches deep into the fresh snow, to a guy in an official-looking coat who, I rapidly realise, when he quotes me 100 kuai for the fare, is not a policeman but wearing army surplus.

As far as I can work out, they hang out here all day looking for morons, optimally foreign morons, who’ve crossed the river thinking they can walk to the ice sculptures from here, and we are their first prey.

The minicab man cruises past again. This time he has a fare. I flag him.

We settle on a still-extortionate but not eye-bleeding 30 kuai to squeeze us in with his other fare, leaving honour satisfied on both sides. He makes a token attempt to flog us some fake tickets, but his heart’s not really in it.

And we’re there, at some rather gritty barriers, some grubby plastic insulation curtains – Harbin Snow & Ice World.

Oh.

Although the sculptures are at their best by night, I wanted to come in daylight to see how they look now.

And, well, they’re quite impressive, I think. Particularly with the horse carts and dog sleds waiting to take you around.

They’ll do, I think.

But, at the same time, I’m rather disappointed. I have expected the ice palaces to be jaw-on-the-floor wonderful — sunrise from Gokyo Ri wonderful, first sight of Everest wonderful, first sight of Petra through the Siq wonderful — and they’re just a BIT wonderful.

Not good enough, I think, brattishly. Only a small cut above the other ice sculptures you can see around town for free.

Plus, in news from the department of the bleeding obvious, we are freezing.

“Let’s go and warm up,” I say. “Let’s go to a cafe and get hot drinks and warm up until the sunset’s finished.”

We huddle by a radiator, with coffee and hot milk, and Zac removes his shoes so that he can feel his toes again.

As a mother, you’re supposed, of course, to do this sort of thing without a second thought.

But, as I remove my double fleece, a process that requires removing my 900-fill down jacket, not something that is pleasant to do, since even indoors, even by the radiator, our breath makes steam in the air, I can’t help thinking that I’d really rather he’d brought his layers. Or, for that matter, that I had. D’oh.

“No,” Zac says, as I hand him my double fleece. “Don’t do that! You’ll be cold.”

“No,” I say, through a nice-mum smile of the kind my spawn has come to find alarming, teeth firmly gritted to prevent any giveaway chattering. “I’ll be fine! I’ve got three layers under my ski pants! They’ve got ice slides here! Enormous ice slides! I want you to enjoy it! At least your core will be warm.”

“I’m not in the mood for ice slides,” Zac says. “I think I hurt my knee on the steps.”

The sun begins to set. The sky shades rapidly to navy blue. The lights go on.

And, holy cow, it’s the winter wonderland I’d dreamed of. And more…

And, as if by magic, the boy warms up, and reacquires his enthusiasm for ice slides.

I grab a shot of him with an ice palace, and we set out to explore.