Into a taxi, traveling on a business card and a prayer to try and find the dumpling place our mates in Beijing had told us, was a must eat in Harbin. For some reason, both of us had visions of a quaint Chinese style snowy village, instead Harbin is a massive metropolis with around 9 million people, it’s twice the size of Melbourne and yet another random Chinese town you’ve probably never heard of where an absolute shitload of people live.
Harbin is well and truly into the swing of things with the Ice Festival, there are heaps of ice Pac Men and “I Love You” signs spread throughout the city, and with the mercury nudging -20 at 10am in the morning, it’s not going to melt in a hurry.
I Love You Too, Harbin
We found the breakfast place, which wasn’t open, but they let us in so we could wait, unfortunately this turned out to be a 40 minute wait, where we witnessed the most half assed cleaning I have seen here to date. It consisted of two phases. Phase one consisted of a guy wandering around smoking and spitting on the floor, phase two consisted of same bloke pushing around two wet mops, job done!
Breakfast of Champions
After a breakfast of Jiaozi, vegetable soup and tea, who’s quality and tastiness was in stark contrast to the quality of cleaning, we jumped into another taxi and headed downtown to Zhongyang Main St, also known as Kitaiskaya St, due to Harbin’s heavy Russian influence.
More Russian than Borscht!
Zhongyang Main St, is a mashup of Russian and European architectural styles, it’s full of shopping malls, baroque buildings, byzantine facades, Russian bakeries and at this time of year ice sculptures.
We saw a wedding. Harbin is a very popular place to get married.
Harbin Wedding
Along with some nutcase, that I busted taking photo’s of me. Obviously, my rugged good looks are still visible, even under all these clothes.
Take my photo, I dare you
Harbin even has a JeansWest, but I fear their current business model may need some tweaking.
JeansWest Summer Sale....in Winter
We spent about 4 hours downtown, and then repaired to the Shangri-la’s ice bar for a few hot chocolates and my new favorite Chinese beer. Harbin Beer. God bless those Ruskies!
Harbin Lager....it's got the flavour
Tanya indulged in a few show tunes on the Piano.
Sing us the Song, you're the Piano woMAN
