Global Crossroads Study Abroad Blog

Last week on Thursday, Michael and I took a very hot and uncomfortable sleeper train to the northern city of Harbin for a weekend getaway.  Harbin is home to one of the world’s largest and most famous snow and ice festivals, which was the main motivation for us to go, however we quickly discovered that the city has much much more to offer than just subzero temperatures.  This is a city of remarkable cultural heritage is also home to a haunting remnant of Japanese occupation, religious venues of all kinds, and more than a few big, hungry cats!

In 1898, the Chinese and Russian governments agreed to begin construction on the Chinese Eastern Railway, connecting Harbin to Vladivostok.  As a result, several generations of Russians occupied Harbin until the mid 1960s.  During this time period, Harbin also served as a safe place for White Russians and, interestingly, Russian and European Jews fleeing persecution.  During the 1920s, it is estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 Russians and around 20,000 Jews inhabited the city, bringing with them Western commerce and industry.  Michael and I chose to stay in a heritage hotel on Zhongyangdajie, or Central Street, a remnant of the bustling international business activities from the turn of the 20th century.

We began our first day by walking down Central Street to the banks of Songhua River.  The architecture was amazing.  Many of the buildings are still the originals from when Harbin was a Russian enclave, and many of the new buildings are even constructed in the old style.  We stopped for lunch at Tatoc, a Russian restaurant where we enjoyed the best mashed potatoes in all of China!  At the end of Central Street where it meets the banks of Songhua River stands the Harbin Floor Control Memorial Tower, an awkward monument to those who died in a massive flood in 1957.  Ironically, a flood in 1998 actually broke the monument’s record, so a second water level marker was posted onto the tower long after the fact.

On the banks of the entirely frozen Songhua River, we found our first remenants of the snow and ice festival.  The festival “officially” starts around January 5th and runs for a month, but lucky for us, it’s not like any of the ice had started melting!  All of the ice festival sites were still open for business, but most of them had virtually no people at them!  That was such a treat for us to romp around all the ice castles without having to push our way through seas of bodies.  The river front was literally the only place that was hopping.  They were renting out skates and snowmobiles and selling this awesome cotton candy!

With the river frozen solid, we were able to walk the entire 0.5 miles across to Sun Island, which was where the majority of the snow sculptures were located.  Because Michael had originally intended to only study one semester at Beida, his student ID had consequently expired THE DAY BEFORE, and the lovely lady behind the desk wasn’t about to let us off that easy of course and insisted we pay the regular price of $38 USD, double the student price.  Another one of my pet peeves about this place…  We elected not to go as Sun Island wasn’t the main area of the ice festival anyway, so we took an absolutely terrifying cable car ride back across the river to the city.  It was super high up and windy, swinging over an ominous frozen river.  I almost couldn’t look!  When we jumped out of the car on the other side, I spotted only the most epic tournament of retiree ping pong I’ve ever seen.  I convinced Michael to take on a grandpa while I chatted about the taste of sweetcorn in the US versus in China with his wife.  Definitely one of the highlights of our trip!

On the way back to our hotel, we ventured down another street that used to be a central Russian and Jewish area of Harbin.  We passed an old, abandoned Turkish mosque, and two beautiful synagogues, one that has now been converted into a hostel, and the other into a museum full of photographs depicting the old Russian and Jewish Harbin.  It was amazing to look at those photos of old China, with white people dressed in their Sunday best strolling down the cobblestoned Central Streets on the way to a piano performance at the theater or a potluck at the synagogue.  This was all before Communism even.  It was all so hard to imagine, but I just wanted to transport myself back in time and see what it was like when 20,000 Jews were living there.  The last Jewish member of Harbin died in 1985, though many of the descendants come to Harbin from all over the world each year to seek their roots and pay homage to their ancestors at the Jewish cemetery.

Finally in the evening we made are way to the Snow and Ice World, really the center of all ice festival activities.  It was absolutely breathtaking.  Michael and I were running around the virtually tourist-less place like kids in a candy store, and we had to do everything!  They had huge castles of all shapes and sizes, some even copies of Chinese pagodas and temples.  The coolest snow sculptures were definitely two gigantic Bodhisattvas, complete with lilting Buddhist music and incense for sale.  Many of the ice sculptures had ice slides running off of them, the biggest and scariest of which Michael and I both endeavored, only to find that it was absolutely impossible to slow ourselves down.  About mid-slide I decided that I was going to die.  At the bottom we both slammed into a large pile of fluffy snow, which was only only Michael is nearly twice my size, thus going about twice and fast, and hitting the snow twice as hard!  He was absolutely COVERED in snow.  They also had skating, skiing, a terrifying zip line, even ice bumper cars, and, our favorite, ice bicycles!  We were on them forever.  Minnesota just has to get some of these!  I also got my picture on a yak’s back.  Such a once in a lifetime experience.

The next day we got up to head outside the city a little ways to the Siberian Tiger Park.  This is the largest Siberian tiger breeding program in the world, and the facilities currently house around 500 tigers with only 100 visible to tourists.  It also has a small number of jaguars, cheetahs, leopards, white Bengal tigers, lions, white lions, and even a liger, of which there are less than ten in the world!  At the beginning, we got in a bus to ride safari-style from enclosure to enclosure.  Tigers would sometimes even approach the van and roar!  It was just awesome.

We then got out of the van to walk on an enclosed walkway above a pen housing probably twenty or so tigers.  Naturally there was a lady standing there selling live chickens, pheasants, and pieces of cut of meat.  Apparently if we had prepaid like $400 USD at the beginning, they would have brought out a live cox.  I really just can’t even write about that, so I’ll let the photos and video do the talking:

That night rather than braving the cold and going to Stalin Park to see a few ice lanterns, we headed instead to the international food market, bought a bag of Cheetos and a bottle of champagne, and brought them back to our hotel, where we sat in bed, drank out of our bathroom glasses, and watched Burn Notice.  What can I say?

The next morning we boarded a public bus bound for the suburbs.  We were the only white people on it of course, which, as usual, elicited a plethora of stares and whispers of laowai, a slang term for foreigners, from the daily commuters.  We took the bus outside the city for about an hour or so to a suburb to explore Unit 731, a Japanese germ warfare experimentation base turned museum left over from Japanese occupation, which was oddly nestled between a new housing development and an elementary school.  The whole thing was just spooky and obviously sickening.  Chinese, Koreans, Mongolians, and, it is rumored, a few American airmen, all prisoners of war, were subject to vivisection without anesthesia, inoculation with syphilis and gonorrhea, exposure to anthrax and the plague, hung upside down or immersed into ice water until death, injections of animal blood and urine, and some were even spun to death in centrifuges or used as targets for test grenades.  Back in Mr. Cwod’s class in high school, I had done a report on Dr. Mengele of the Holocaust, who performed many of the same experiments.  What I found most interesting about this museum was that a series of 100,000 pages of documents held by the U.S. government were declassified in 2007, many of which detail the “research” and reports on that research performed at that facility.  Many of the reports had in-depth descriptions and discussions of the results of each test, some with diagrams of the effects on the body.  Where Mengele tortured under the phony misnomer of “research,” the Japanese had actually written up a significant amount on their findings, which may lead one to presume they had intentions to use these killing techniques in the future.

Upon leaving the museum, in true Steve Krause’s daughter fashion, I was craving a coke, so we walked around for quite a bit before finding a KFC.  We were in a suburb of Harbin, which means no white people ever.  Most tourists don’t venture out to 731 mostly because they don’t know about it, but also because it’s hard to get to.  The KFC wasn’t exactly right next door to it either, so it’s pretty safe to say that we were maybe the only foreigners to venture inside in, say, a few months.  The restaurant, fully of about a hundred people or so, hushed as we walked in, an excited teenybopper shyly shouting out a “hello!” in our direction.  I approached the counter where the cashier stood with her chin up and shoulder back, exclaiming with oozing pride, “Welcome to KFC, this is our complete menu!”  I ordered in Chinese and then completely regretted it.  Getting to say that one thing in English was probably the most exciting thing to happen to her at work in perhaps months, and I had to cut the fun short…

We finished off our trip by venturing to the beautiful St. Sofia church for a photo opp before meeting my friend Parry from Eden Prairie at Harbin’s Institute of Technology for dinner.  I had met up with him two weeks ago while he was in Beijing for his orientation before he set off for Harbin, where he is participating in a prestigious language program in which, if he is caught speaking English three times, he’s put back on a plane to the United States.  We had dinner in Chinese obviously.  It’s been really cool to see Parry here.  We didn’t really even know each other in high school until he showed up at my grad party, tagging along with a friend, and yet now we’re both here in China, conversing entirely in Chinese.  Life is just really random sometimes.  I hope I get to see him more in the future.

This was another amazing trip, and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity and especially glad to have shared it with Michael!  Even though I’m kind of at my wit’s end with China at the moment (believe it or not!), I’m glad that I still have the enthusiasm for exploration in me to turn off Hulu, put down the Pocky, and get up and do something with my life.  Thanks for joining me on another travel adventure!

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