at Harbin - A dream come true

No cost to dream

To make it into reality it was not that expensive.

Once when I was searching for artificial snow for a kids festival, Google popped many images. One image stuck my eyes.  A palace made of ice, and many more sculptures made of ice. I got curious to know how they make this.  How can u build a palace with ice... 

What will happen when the temperature changes. Will it melt?. More than that making of ice palace made me curious. To get all this answers I need to visit the place, searched for more details - it is Harbin, china. 

Harbin is located in Northeast China and receives cold winter wind from Siberia.  The temperature will fall down as low as -35 during winter.

The annual Harbin International Ice and snow sculpture festival takes place with a theme and it’s the largest ice and snow festival in the world. Festival starts on 5^th of January every year and continues for a month.

Fortunately my work took me to china.  My work was at Yiwu where the world’s largest whole sale market is. The temperature was -1. The cold weather reminds me of Harbin ice festival which starts every January first week. 

It’s a gift in life to have friends who trust you and your words unconditionally.  

I made my mind to visit Harbin. I was more curious about the making of structures than to see the completed work.

Before presenting to Mr. Binu and Mr Givi, who was with me on this business trip.   I checked the accessibility to Harbin from Yiwu.  It takes 7 hours and  weather condition is -25 to -30 wow!!  an additional Rs. 30000 each will take care of travel and 3 days stay at Harbin.

I tried to Google some images to show my friends…oops Google and Gmail is banned in

china.  Baidu.com  came to our rescue . (before traveling to china make it a point to take all the print outs from your mail, if you have Hotmail kindly forward it to that – yahoo , Google and Gmail not accessible)  Took some time to get familiar with Baidu.com as its Chinese.  Showed few pictures to my friends and presented my plan about Harbin.   

The only question they asked me is “are you serious, will you cancel the plan once fixed” I said “no, I stick to my plan”. within 15 minutes Binu booked our tickets and accommodation .

The day has come to leave to Harbin.  Don’t know why my heart is beating so fast. I am sure I am scared of landing down at -30 temperature. But my long standing wish, my dream is going to come true. A guy living in Kochi dreaming about Harbin few years before and the dream coming to reality with additional expenses of Rs 30000/- this is what called “gift of god”

Landed Harbin airport around 4.00pm. Believe me I checked my watch again to make sure

its 4.00pm.  It was dark with heavy snow fall. The neon lights around the airport give a golden shade to the snow. All the cars parked were covered with snow. Took my gloves out to take some photos in my mobile, couldn’t resist laughing seeing Mr.Givi struggling to pull

the bags from snow. Oh Shit…..my hand burned due to chillness. Took some pic and in few seconds my hand went back to the gloves.

Have seen snow during my visits to Europe but this was amazing experience in Harbin. I have seen black roads with white dividing lines in India, first time saw white roads. The driver was very careful in driving . About an hour we reached “Hotel ibis” just in front of Sophia Church and few yards away from center street. For me every thing looks

golden….but in my dream it was white…for sure I would have dreamt during a power cut time. Here the entire place was lit up with yellow neon lamps.

Just dumped the luggage’s in our room and rushed to Sophia Church out of excitement, after one hour of outing and dinner we managed to reach the hotel room. The discussions where only about the experience in Harbin.

Next day charted our itinerary  :

Yabuli International Ski Resort

Sun Island

Songhua River

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­And also to see the Making of snow world………. Though I was excited to visit the snow world I couldn’t stand there for more hours as it was freezing cold with all ice blocks around, it was like you nearing a ball of fire.

A dream come true………decided to dream again to visit the same place with my family next year.  

10 tips before visiting Harbin:

1.    Maximum warm clothes may be 3 sets of thermal wear

2.    Good quality jackets

3.    Good quality boots

4.    Good quality Thermal socks

5.    Good quality gloves – leather

6.    Ear plug

7.    Google, Gmail and Yahoo will not work

8.    Take all print outs of places to visit and documents

9.    Wifi available in almost all the places