Harbin day 1

 The kids are way behind on their blog posts and even I'm pretty far behind so I'm going to lump all of Harbin into just one or two posts. The first morning in Harbin was well below zero even when we finally went out. I think it was something like 23 below that morning and never got above 10 even in mid afternoon.  I have been wearing the following; balaclava and Melanzana hat, t-shirt, long underwear shirt, Melanzana fleece hoody, down jacket, and gor-tex shell, long underwear, Melanzana fleece pants, gor-tex pants, two pairs of socks, boots. Margaret has at least as many layers if not more. Despite that it often feels like even an hour or two outside is torture.  First thing we did was walk down ZhongYang (Center) street. Its about 10 blocks long and its the oldest part of the city. Its an entirely pedestrian street lined with shops and restaurants. Much of the architecture is either old buildings from the days when Harbin was almost a Russian colony or new buildings designed to look like old buildings. Since it is the time of the ice festival the street was lined with small ice sculptures as well as several ice slides set up on side streets. Eventually Zhong Yang street ends at the Songhua river. The river is frozen solid and about a half a mile wide. It has people driving on it and all sort of other activities. Kids are sledding down the river bank on to the ice. People offer to take you on a dog sled or pony sled ride or drag you on inner tubes behind snow mobiles.  There were people kite surfing on the ice or playing with big kites. There was a ton of trash and a fair amount of dog shit on the ice. Probably people shit too. We found one section where the ice had been cleared off into an oval skating track with a smaller skating rink in the middle. Nick whipped out his ice skates and went skating for a while.
  After dinner we went over to the Ice Lantern festival. This is the smallest of the three (or 4 venues) for the Harbin ice festival.  It is in a very pretty city park in the center of the old part of town. We could walk there in a few minutes. The park is full of smaller ice sculptures mixed in amongst the trees and other fixtures in the park. There were a few ice slides and some moderate sized buildings along with very elaborate ice carvings like you might see at a fancy hotel. We left there around 7pm and went back to Center street for dinner. We ended up in a basement restaurant which served a mix of boiled dumplings almost like perogi's and preserved meats. We turned down the sliced pig knuckles and had sausage instead.

Nick skating on Songhua river