From Xian me and Katie had a 30 hour seat north up to Harbin, where we met Ellie. Harbin is in the northeast China,in the south of Heilongjiang Province. Close to the borders of Russia and Mongolia, influences from these countries can clearly be seen in Harbin, with many of it's buildings having Russian architecture. Sometimes I looked around, and if it wasn't for the Chinese on all the signs, I could have easily been standing on a street in Eastern Europe.

Harbin was amazing! It was definitely one of my top places during traveling. It was rather chilly, -30 at some points, but once we'd wrapped up in our many many layers, it wasn't to bad, your face kinda froze, but it didn't feel as cold as you'd expect. Being so cold, the river had frozen over so there was lots of little activities going on. We did one where you were given what was pretty much a seat on Blades and then given some ski sticks to slide your seat around on the ice. It seemed to very popular with everyone, from the little kids to the big kids!

In the winter, Harbin becomes one of China's main attractions, with it's annual Ice Festival. The city streets are lined with ice walls and many carvings, from dear in the plants, to archways on the roundabouts each with a different mythical creature. There were 3 parks making up the ice festival, however they were all quite expensive, so we went to the mane one, Ice and Snow world. The sculptures were incredible, they had life size buildings lit up with changing coloured lights, huge snow carvings of Buddha's, famous characters and films ... pirates of the Caribbean, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh ... The park also had smaller more detailed ice carvings of animals, dragons and mythical creatures. To top of the park they had giant ice slides which you took sledges down, fastest sledge ride i'v been down, into a snow mass at the bottom to stop, as well as big snow hills to tube down. 

Whilst in Harbin we visited the Siberian Tiger Park, the tigers were lovely. I just wanted to hug them they looked so fluffy, probably not a good idea though. We did get quite close to them, the first part of the park was a bus through some enclosures so some of the tigers came right up to the window. Unfortunately the driver seemed in a bit of a rush, so when ever a tiger got close that was it the bus was off again. The second part of the park was following a walkway which took us over and through enclosures, giving us as much time as we wanted to look at the tigers and get our pictures.

With Harbin's Russian influences, comes Russian Vodka. We figured we were trying as much as the culture as possible, so headed of to a Russian bar. We found out at this point that it wasn't just the ice sculptures that were all lit up, but also some of the taxis ... we were picked up by a taxi all done out in flashing lights, fake fur seat covers and music blaring from its pimped up speakers. Great way to get into the mood for a night out.

On our last night in Harbin we had a bit of a disaster, Ellie opened the taxi door out onto the road (which you can't normally do in taxis, the left door's normally locked) and another car smashed right into it. It's wing mirror was no more and it had a rather large dent into its bonnet. The taxis door was bashed out of shape and there was no closing it. Luckily we had quite a few translators with other travelers from the hostel and the hostel owners. After a few hours we got away with giving the taxi driver £80 towards the damage, no where near as bad as what it could have worked out at luckily. Oops!!!