Harbin Trip Moments: A Tale of Two Extremes in Minus Thirty Degrees

When the reindeer sleigh, its eyelashes frosted, passed over the snow-covered mushroom houses, I bit into a frozen pear in a fairytale world of -28 degrees Celsius. As the candied hawthorn fireworks exploded in the night sky of Snow Town, I never imagined that three days later I would stand like a frozen candied hawthorn in front of the giant ice castle at the Harbin Ice and Snow World for two whole hours. Coming to Harbin for the Spring Festival, embracing the cold, was truly a unique experience! The joy of New Year's Eve in Snow Town was heartwarming. The iron pot stew at our host Lao Zhang's guesthouse was still bubbling when we, bundled up like dumplings, rushed into the snow. Snowmobiles carved silver snake-like tracks in the virgin forest, and the snow kicked up by our skis landed on our goggles. Even frozen mascara became performance art worthy of a Trip Moments post. On New Year's Eve, more than thirty people crowded into the guesthouse courtyard to set off Gatling fireworks. The firelight reflected off the icicles hanging from the eaves, as if the Milky Way had been shattered and scattered across the snow. Our visit to the Harbin Ice and Snow World on the second day of the new year gave us a harsh reality check. The afternoon queue was as long as a Siberian cold front, and the 500-meter ice slide line crawled slowly in -32 degrees Celsius. Every three steps, we had to stamp our feet to prevent frostbite. Suddenly, a woman in a mink coat in front of us screamed – her eyelashes had frozen to her scarf. We were like lemmings trapped in an ice maze. The legendary 500-meter super-long ice slide shimmered with an alluring blue light in the setting sun. The icicles hanging from the queue railings were more suffocating than a crowded train station during the Spring Festival travel rush. We followed the crowd, inching towards the slide at a speed of 0.8 meters per minute. An elderly man in a Lei Feng hat suddenly pulled out a self-heating hot pot from his pocket. The rising steam triggered a collective gulp from the entire line – possibly the first instance in human history of a collective conditioned reflex formed in extreme cold. The most magical experience was the ice DJ stage. At 8pm, lasers danced on the ice stage, and the crowd below surged like a boiling pot of dumplings. Five of us adults, hand in hand, formed a human chain and charged forward. Just as we squeezed into the third layer of the crowd, we were swept back by the wave of revelers. As a girl's rabbit ear headband poked into my nostril, a Northeastern man's exclamation pierced through the deafening electronic music: "We're not dancing, we're fighting for our lives!" Looking back at this glazed world as we left the park in the early morning, the ice sculptures were breathtakingly beautiful in the neon lights. A friend rubbed his frost-reddened nose and chuckled, "We've warmed the Harbin Ice and Snow World with our body heat." As the taxi drove past the frosty Songhua River, I suddenly remembered what Lao Zhang had said that night in Snow Town: "Traveling in the north is 30% sightseeing and 70% cultivating the mind." The lingering chill in my down jacket was, in its own way, a scorching life experience.