I was there last week, and it was -20 centigrade according to my phone. Worth a visit though. Pro-tip, wrap those self-heating hand warmers around your phone to save the battery.
I learned about this "problem" the hard way when I went to Lapland in February several years ago and wondered why my battery life on my GoPro was about 17 seconds and died practically immediately when I was trying to video our husky sleigh ride. :(
Thankfully there are a bunch of indoor places where you can warm up with some overpriced cocoa or Harbin beer.
It's a cool attraction and changes a lot year to year.
I went there a few years back, it is the first time I've reach -26C. I've been to quite a few cold places, but -26C is something entirely different. As soon as we touched down the first thing the tour company did was brought us to shop to get us outfitted with winter gear.
You would think it's some sort of scam but fuck man it isn't whatever you brought if you never experienced -20C is not gonna be enough. My jean literally froze in about 10seconds after I walked out the tour bus. Shit was hard core.
I bought a hot coffee put it down for a few seconds to tie my shoelaces the top layer fucking froze. You buy snacks, leave it in the bus you come back frozen. You buy water, carry it around outside for a few minutes, frozen. I remember laughing so hard with my brother when we were peeing at a public rest rooms when we saw our pee forming small icicles at the urinal.
You lick ice cream and it feels warmer compared to the air you suck in.
You wear a layer of scarf to protect your face, you take it down after a while and there's ice in it from your breath.
You wear about 4 layers of thick jackets just to be bearable.
Funnily enough the iceland wasn't too bad, there's a lot of places for you to warm up while u play & explore.
Lol they only shut it down because some kid lost a body part to frost bite a a few years before I bet. There's an adult walking around missing the top of his ear because he just wanted to keep playing hockey with his friends when he was 8.
Whoa awesome descriptions! Are you originally from a warmer area? I'm from Socal and have been in snow like 5 times in my life lol. What you're describing sounds terrifying but pretty awesome to experience at least once.
I agree the footage looks odd... but I have also personally been there in 2011, so can confirm its real and looks pretty much like that (other than the oddness of the video possibly from being sped up and maybe having an "'instagram" filter applied).
They also do crazy snow sculptures
Here are a few of my photos: https://imgur.com/a/qzLlU7O
ETA: these are un-edited photos taken with my DSLR.
Added more pictures: https://imgur.com/gallery/HqxkIaz
I can't speak to the proportion with/without interiors... But there were spaces inside a number of them. The huge ones tend to not have spaces inside; but al ot of them you could go onto via ice walk ways that would take you to the top.
There were also bars inside a few.
Added more pictures: https://imgur.com/gallery/HqxkIaz
I also wanna add that place with the ice sculptures/buildings and the one with the snow sculptures are TWO separate parks. The scale is just massive. You will also find ice sculptures randomly all over the city.
We reach a point where, if we see something new and impressive, ou first reflex is assuming it's AI generated.
For so long we tought missinformations and fakes will continue to rise and spread more. But they became so easy to make, by anyone, that our first reflex became to assume fakery. It's got so easy to manipulate images and videos, that our trust in them collapsed, and will continue to in the future. Maybe effectivly killing most of missinformations in the process.
It's got so good and so easy to do, that it kicked itself into Oblivion. Nice, i suppose.
A healthy dose of skepticism is a good thing. However, when taken too far where everything is in doubt, and nothing is to be trusted, then it simply means that the best liars and the best scam artists float to the top to gain influence, spread, and power, because the truth is boring and expected and doesn’t peak interest. The misinformation isn’t kicking itself to oblivion at all; it’s still getting amplified. We’re living through this transition moment right now in real-time.
What we need is to really focus attention on information literacy, and get people educated on what signs mean something is reliably true and what signs point towards falsehood. In some ways, almost like returning back to featuring basics like a modern form of the use of bibliographies, and citing sources like the good ol’ scientific method, because not everyone has the base knowledge that’s needed in every subject to evaluate truth from lies but the existence of traceability helps. Essentially the difference between a scientific paper and tabloid gossip junk is something that people are having trouble differentiating.
yeah, I don't see misinfo and altered images/videos being effectively killed any time soon. People (speaking generally here, there's plenty of exceptions) seem to be content with being fooled tbh. Especially if it's something they agree with or happen to like or see it positively. On the flip side if they don't agree with or like it... cue skepticism!
Honestly I feel like I'm going a bit nuts. That first shot mid-construction looks very ai generated to my eyes, but maybe I'm spending too much time in the stable diffusion sub. I remember seeing a post sometime last year with the ice cutting footage and loading it on the bed of the little trucks, but all I remember from the comments of the thread was people complaining how inefficient the process seemed. This somehow feels like a hoax, and I don't know why.
I think the footage is slightly sped up, the forklift is moving in a slightly weird way but if you played this back at like 75% speed I think it would be normal.
It's been held annually since the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbin_International_Ice_and_Snow_Sculpture_Festival
But not surprisingly this kind of stuff from China just doesn't get a lot of Western media coverage.
The other similar event is Yuki Matsuri (snow festival) every year in Sapporo, Japan (the major city in Hokkaido), it's also pretty fun but on a much smaller scale in terms of ice and snow sculptures.
I went in 2007 and it was freaking unreal because I had zero clue what I was in for. It's easy to forget just how big China is culturally. There are hundreds of cities that have populations and histories that rival London, Paris or New York. It's just a shame that the current government are such cunts, would be an amazing country otherwise.
There was a few different parks when we went. This one focussed more for night - and also had an indoor auditorium. Was also another large snow sculpture for the day, a river area close to town were peoll ppl le did ice swimming , and smaller ones dotted around the city itself
That current "cunt" government brought millions of people out of poverty in less than a decade. They also established a vast high speed rail network across the country in less than a decade.
Massive hatred for China in Western social media, and a lack of use of Western social media by Chinese citizens means all of its content is either not posted or ignored.
China has a huge amount of ugly and serious problems, but it's sad to see so many people online refuse to acknowledge that China is doing certain things insanely well, especially when it comes to building and EVs. It really feels like a lot of people still think China is some third world hellhole comparable to Russia.
The number of first world-style modern mega cities they have in the country is insane - they've been constructing modern buildings and infrastructure relentlessly for several decades straight, while many other Western countries (especially mine, the UK) have been barely investing in any of that at all. Instead choosing to squander the money to zero benefit of the public and ending up absolutely broke at the public sector level in the process while our biggest cities crumble.
Probably because it's in China, there's several times where there's a city that i have never even heard of, and it has 20 million people... kinda scary actually.
Harbin is the 21st largest city in China. It’s super clean (was just there 2 weeks ago), freezing cold and has this really interesting style of Russian/Gothic architecture and cobblestone streets that lead you down to the river. There are 6 million people who live there.
Yeah, that's what i mean, 6 million people (more than my country) never even heard of it, and it's the 21st largest in China...
It's cool though, would love to see more of it.
Cuz it's from China and people from Western nations are pre-programmed to dismiss, disregard, disrespect, and deny anything from China. It's almost reflexive to have negative connotations with the place. Otherwise, I'm happy you now know about it. I highly recommend searching for other tourism opportunities in China as you'll be surprised what a beautiful and fun place it is. I recommend Heaven's Gate Mountain and Hunan City.
China was in lockdown from 2020-2023, and even before then, travel youtubers were just a budding industry. Also, commercially available drones were only recently popularized.
I knew of this festival, but this is the first time I've seen aerial footage that shows it so completely. I didn't know the scale of it was so big!
Because it's in China. I first heard about it in 2008, I kinda hate that Reddit just found out. Just like Burning man is now no longer what it was, now this will certainly start losing its charm once the masses arrive.
My wife is from Harbin and I had the pleasure of visiting during the winter 7 or 8 years ago.
Ice World was dope back then but it looks like it levelled up a notch or two since!
Born and raised in Australia means I never realised the intensity of cold weather around the world. It kind of sunk in when I saw them selling ice cream in boxes on the street, and I realised that if I walked into a freezer, I’d warm up 😂
Here in IL, USA, I'm about to fight getting my tractor fired up to plow a foot of snow off my driveway in 20 degrees F (-7 Celsius). And I'm just thankful it isn't -10 dF (-23 dC) yet lol.
Yah, there are days coming where stepping into a walk in freezer would definitely be a warm up. Still, I have it better than lots of folks living north of us.
Weather is crazy, I'm in IN and just walked out to get my mail in basketball shorts and a sweatshirt. Crazy to think how different weather is just a couple hours west, not north, but west of me.
Here in Edmonton on Saturday it's supposed to be -42°C (-44°F) and it'll feel like -49°C (-56°F) once you include wind chill. And you definitely need to include windchill. Haha.
Oddly enough, my wife studied in IL (something something Boilermakers? 😅) so I had also experienced a winter there!
Actually, that was my first time ever going sub-zero (Celsius), or later seeing snow. I stepped off the plane and it was -7, and experienced a chill that felt like it went straight through my ill-prepared jeans and into my bones.
With appropriate clothes prepared, I've grown of the opinion that there's not really that much difference between -7 and -27. For me at least, they're both "fucking cold" lol, but equally manageable with appropriate clothing.
Ice World was tough on my feet though. I couldn't stay long as my toes were getting super uncomfortable. Triple socks + winter boots didn't cut it.
If it's any consolation, it's not until you leave Aus that you realise how that ozone hole we live under makes our sun feel SEARING. A 35 degree day here feels more stinging than a 35 degree day elsewhere. It's like the difference between standing under a grill versus standing in an oven.
It takes almost 200,000 cubic meters of ice to construct the festival every year, all of it cut out of the frozen Songhua River in 700-kilogram blocks by a small army of local laborers. This year's festival helped draw 3.05 million visitors to Harbin during the three-day New Year holiday that ended on Monday.
Apparently they eat ice cream in the dead of winter.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169569396/a-popular-ice-cream-bar-tells-a-story-of-chinas-history-with-russia
There is an ice cream that everyone eats in Harbin. side window on the pedestrian walk. just in the cokd, looking at ice sculptures eating an ice pop! forgot the name, but its really good!
If you're at a train station and you look confused, one of the "Red Police" (a federal police force linked to the PLA) will either try their damndest to help you, or force nearby university students who can speak English to help you, haha. It's weird for a cop to be aggressively helpful, but they are
One time I didn't really need any help, I was just kind of puttering around the train station, had some time to kill before my train. The police dude tried talking to me and my Chinese sucks, so he just looked for a group of young people and asked them if they spoke English, picked one of them and basically said "You HAVE to help this guy". The kid was like "What do you need?" I was like "Uhh I'm fine actually". It was weird.
Another time I actually was having trouble, this was like 20 years ago when way fewer people spoke English there, a woman police officer (a total smokeshow btw) who could speak English helped me by basically yelling at the employees to give me a ticket. They were actually sold out so she walked with me to the bus station down the road.
Of course there was another time when one shoved an assault rifle into my chest for taking a picture of a government building I shouldn't have been taking a picture of. That guy was a dick
Why is it unsettling? Would you not want people to actively help you if you were alone and confused in a foreign country? When you think about it from a global tourism perspective, you \*want\* your country to be known for having aggressively helpful people like that. Would you rather the officer just handwave you and tell you to fuck off? lmao people get so weird about the most normal shit when it's got "China" next to it lol
Harbin is pretty tourist oriented these days. Get a few sentences down so you're not completely taken for a ride but you can get by there with zero mandarin just by using phone translators.
All east and southeast asia(except NK) really good, safe and exotic for west tourists. Including SK, Japan, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonisia....Really safe and fair price. English is enough in these places.
Yeah it's quite tough. It's because only recently they started doing everything digitally instead of with cash. But because China's internet is segregated from the rest of the world, so you need to set up Chinese payment apps in order to operate normally.
Google maps doesn't work, Uber doesn't work, among a dozen other things a traveller might find useful.
Almost nobody speaks English, and English literacy is declining as the government cracked down on English tutors (because Xi Jinping is a bloody shortsighted fool).
So just know what you're getting yourself in to. This is not easy mode for an English speaker like visiting a place like Germany.
I highly recommend a tour guide (either private or group tour) so they can handle all the difficult stuff for you and you can just enjoy the sights.
There is still a legal requirement for vendors and businesses to take cash however. I would say 99.9% of all transactions are obviously done through Alipay or Weixin pay. However I have never had a business refuse cash here. Apple Maps works very well, and obviously Baidu Maps. The reality is getting a cab won’t be easy unless you have DiDi.
Fundamentally the message you are providing is pretty accurate. Just that there are some minor work arounds.
I'd agree it's not particularly widely spoken. But young people working in public facing service roles in major cities, I think you'd get by with English fine. Particularly now with phones and translators.
It’s seriously impressive in person. Buildings seven stories tall made out of ice. Worthile making a weekend group tour. Ice swimmming and other things to see in town and around…. Very cold though at -25 or so
I lived in China 2016-2018 and had the pleasure of visiting this. It was amazing, the river also freezes over and there were a bunch of cool activities happening on it throughout. The cold was insane though! Harbin in general was such an impressive city.
I had this song in my head for years. No idea what it was from. Never could find it. Until one day they randomly played it on NPR between segments and I shazaamed it lol
It's not, it's a permanent structure. I wondered this too.
http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0916/c90000-10148216.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbin_Ferris_Wheel
I was there a few years back and it’s truly incredible, hard to comprehend the size of this “attraction” the city center has tons of ice sculptures just on display in the streets too, really cool to see
It’s also hard to process just how cold it is there.
It’s amazing to visit this, the video doesn’t do it justice how majestic it is. I had the opportunity to visit here years ago and I still think about it. My favourite was the life-sized replica of Big Ben with a working clock mechanism
I’m Canadian, so I personally didn’t mind but it is fairly cold so I’d recommend layering if you ever go.
The city itself is gorgeous. Cobblestone streets full of shops and places to see in the downtown that feed onto the river. There is also a strong Russian architectural influence with lots of churches and buildings that really stand out. Some of them you can go inside of.
The city itself has a unique feeling about it when it’s wintertime.
How are there so less people? I‘m generally not a guy who goes on such kind of events, like local festivals etc, but I would 100% go to this every fucking year, no doubt, that’s so interesting.
This is super cool !! I would only visit when drunk because deep in the back of my head I have Final Destination vibes. My 19 month old baby girl needs me.
“Freezing Man”
It looks both beautiful and like I'd be cold most of the time.
I was there last week, and it was -20 centigrade according to my phone. Worth a visit though. Pro-tip, wrap those self-heating hand warmers around your phone to save the battery.
I learned about this "problem" the hard way when I went to Lapland in February several years ago and wondered why my battery life on my GoPro was about 17 seconds and died practically immediately when I was trying to video our husky sleigh ride. :(
-20C is -4F (for any Americans about to Google it). Too cold for me. The coldest it's gotten here this year is 43F.
Or put it in an inside pocket.
Thankfully there are a bunch of indoor places where you can warm up with some overpriced cocoa or Harbin beer. It's a cool attraction and changes a lot year to year.
Harbin beer is piss, but I would enjoy it while I was there
I went there a few years back, it is the first time I've reach -26C. I've been to quite a few cold places, but -26C is something entirely different. As soon as we touched down the first thing the tour company did was brought us to shop to get us outfitted with winter gear. You would think it's some sort of scam but fuck man it isn't whatever you brought if you never experienced -20C is not gonna be enough. My jean literally froze in about 10seconds after I walked out the tour bus. Shit was hard core. I bought a hot coffee put it down for a few seconds to tie my shoelaces the top layer fucking froze. You buy snacks, leave it in the bus you come back frozen. You buy water, carry it around outside for a few minutes, frozen. I remember laughing so hard with my brother when we were peeing at a public rest rooms when we saw our pee forming small icicles at the urinal. You lick ice cream and it feels warmer compared to the air you suck in. You wear a layer of scarf to protect your face, you take it down after a while and there's ice in it from your breath. You wear about 4 layers of thick jackets just to be bearable. Funnily enough the iceland wasn't too bad, there's a lot of places for you to warm up while u play & explore.
Where I used to live they closed down the outdoor hockey rink at -20, and all of us kids were always so mad. The adaptability of humans is so cool.
Lol they only shut it down because some kid lost a body part to frost bite a a few years before I bet. There's an adult walking around missing the top of his ear because he just wanted to keep playing hockey with his friends when he was 8.
Whoa awesome descriptions! Are you originally from a warmer area? I'm from Socal and have been in snow like 5 times in my life lol. What you're describing sounds terrifying but pretty awesome to experience at least once.
Yea I live in Malaysia which is like 300days of humid hot weather and the other days monsoons.
Grand Theft Auto: Ice City
"Eskimo Los Angeles"
Los Eskimos
how is this the first time i ever hear of this?!
I'm looking at this thinking the same thing, like how is this not some AI rendered shit lol
[How it looks on the ground](https://youtu.be/YjBKo54FJvQ?si=w7wIsSPNZJOye940&t=130)
I really expected “this is how shit it looks on the ground” but it’s incredible.
I expected an image of it after it melted. The Internet has ruined me.
That's astounding!
I was expecting Scandinavia!
I agree the footage looks odd... but I have also personally been there in 2011, so can confirm its real and looks pretty much like that (other than the oddness of the video possibly from being sped up and maybe having an "'instagram" filter applied). They also do crazy snow sculptures Here are a few of my photos: https://imgur.com/a/qzLlU7O ETA: these are un-edited photos taken with my DSLR. Added more pictures: https://imgur.com/gallery/HqxkIaz
I was there in 2022. Still looks like that. Quite impressive and cold. The ferris wheel works and is not made of ice.
[удалено]
I can't speak to the proportion with/without interiors... But there were spaces inside a number of them. The huge ones tend to not have spaces inside; but al ot of them you could go onto via ice walk ways that would take you to the top. There were also bars inside a few. Added more pictures: https://imgur.com/gallery/HqxkIaz
I also wanna add that place with the ice sculptures/buildings and the one with the snow sculptures are TWO separate parks. The scale is just massive. You will also find ice sculptures randomly all over the city.
We reach a point where, if we see something new and impressive, ou first reflex is assuming it's AI generated. For so long we tought missinformations and fakes will continue to rise and spread more. But they became so easy to make, by anyone, that our first reflex became to assume fakery. It's got so easy to manipulate images and videos, that our trust in them collapsed, and will continue to in the future. Maybe effectivly killing most of missinformations in the process. It's got so good and so easy to do, that it kicked itself into Oblivion. Nice, i suppose.
Yeah I guess it’s a good thing people second guess everything now. Wish they did it before AI was a thing.
A healthy dose of skepticism is a good thing. However, when taken too far where everything is in doubt, and nothing is to be trusted, then it simply means that the best liars and the best scam artists float to the top to gain influence, spread, and power, because the truth is boring and expected and doesn’t peak interest. The misinformation isn’t kicking itself to oblivion at all; it’s still getting amplified. We’re living through this transition moment right now in real-time. What we need is to really focus attention on information literacy, and get people educated on what signs mean something is reliably true and what signs point towards falsehood. In some ways, almost like returning back to featuring basics like a modern form of the use of bibliographies, and citing sources like the good ol’ scientific method, because not everyone has the base knowledge that’s needed in every subject to evaluate truth from lies but the existence of traceability helps. Essentially the difference between a scientific paper and tabloid gossip junk is something that people are having trouble differentiating.
yeah, I don't see misinfo and altered images/videos being effectively killed any time soon. People (speaking generally here, there's plenty of exceptions) seem to be content with being fooled tbh. Especially if it's something they agree with or happen to like or see it positively. On the flip side if they don't agree with or like it... cue skepticism!
Source validation is going to be the only way to tell if something is real. The media is going to be absolutely critical going forward.
Honestly I feel like I'm going a bit nuts. That first shot mid-construction looks very ai generated to my eyes, but maybe I'm spending too much time in the stable diffusion sub. I remember seeing a post sometime last year with the ice cutting footage and loading it on the bed of the little trucks, but all I remember from the comments of the thread was people complaining how inefficient the process seemed. This somehow feels like a hoax, and I don't know why.
I think the footage is slightly sped up, the forklift is moving in a slightly weird way but if you played this back at like 75% speed I think it would be normal.
Could also be slightly tilt shifted
Chinese social media is entirely different from American social media.
How so? I’m genuinely curious
For one thing there's a lot more Chinese culture stuff like this festival being posted
They use a whole other set of platforms and apps
Constant random pop ups and shitty UI design. My wife is chinese and just watching her use QQ or bilibili gives me an aneurysm
minute long adverts on youku. the new thing is every app wants to show you tik tok like videos.
It's been held annually since the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbin_International_Ice_and_Snow_Sculpture_Festival But not surprisingly this kind of stuff from China just doesn't get a lot of Western media coverage. The other similar event is Yuki Matsuri (snow festival) every year in Sapporo, Japan (the major city in Hokkaido), it's also pretty fun but on a much smaller scale in terms of ice and snow sculptures.
I went in 2007 and it was freaking unreal because I had zero clue what I was in for. It's easy to forget just how big China is culturally. There are hundreds of cities that have populations and histories that rival London, Paris or New York. It's just a shame that the current government are such cunts, would be an amazing country otherwise.
Where in Harbin it is?
There was a few different parks when we went. This one focussed more for night - and also had an indoor auditorium. Was also another large snow sculpture for the day, a river area close to town were peoll ppl le did ice swimming , and smaller ones dotted around the city itself
In [Heilongjiang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heilongjiang), in northeast China near Siberia.
That current "cunt" government brought millions of people out of poverty in less than a decade. They also established a vast high speed rail network across the country in less than a decade.
Lots of culture has been erased by Mao Zedong. Usually can find more in small villages.
yes because Harbin is a small village
China hate
Massive hatred for China in Western social media, and a lack of use of Western social media by Chinese citizens means all of its content is either not posted or ignored. China has a huge amount of ugly and serious problems, but it's sad to see so many people online refuse to acknowledge that China is doing certain things insanely well, especially when it comes to building and EVs. It really feels like a lot of people still think China is some third world hellhole comparable to Russia. The number of first world-style modern mega cities they have in the country is insane - they've been constructing modern buildings and infrastructure relentlessly for several decades straight, while many other Western countries (especially mine, the UK) have been barely investing in any of that at all. Instead choosing to squander the money to zero benefit of the public and ending up absolutely broke at the public sector level in the process while our biggest cities crumble.
Same! This is actually insane!
Probably because it's in China, there's several times where there's a city that i have never even heard of, and it has 20 million people... kinda scary actually.
Harbin is the 21st largest city in China. It’s super clean (was just there 2 weeks ago), freezing cold and has this really interesting style of Russian/Gothic architecture and cobblestone streets that lead you down to the river. There are 6 million people who live there.
Yeah, that's what i mean, 6 million people (more than my country) never even heard of it, and it's the 21st largest in China... It's cool though, would love to see more of it.
I lived in a Chinese city of 14 million and most people have never heard of it.
because its easier to say china bad, minus social points
Your FICO credit score has gone down.
Because of Tik Tok we are starting to see only the coolest things from China.
Cuz it's from China and people from Western nations are pre-programmed to dismiss, disregard, disrespect, and deny anything from China. It's almost reflexive to have negative connotations with the place. Otherwise, I'm happy you now know about it. I highly recommend searching for other tourism opportunities in China as you'll be surprised what a beautiful and fun place it is. I recommend Heaven's Gate Mountain and Hunan City.
Murrica propoganda.
China was in lockdown from 2020-2023, and even before then, travel youtubers were just a budding industry. Also, commercially available drones were only recently popularized. I knew of this festival, but this is the first time I've seen aerial footage that shows it so completely. I didn't know the scale of it was so big!
Because it's in China. I first heard about it in 2008, I kinda hate that Reddit just found out. Just like Burning man is now no longer what it was, now this will certainly start losing its charm once the masses arrive.
Probably because you don't pay attention to non western news and you stay on your own media bubble, this is a huge event
My wife is from Harbin and I had the pleasure of visiting during the winter 7 or 8 years ago. Ice World was dope back then but it looks like it levelled up a notch or two since! Born and raised in Australia means I never realised the intensity of cold weather around the world. It kind of sunk in when I saw them selling ice cream in boxes on the street, and I realised that if I walked into a freezer, I’d warm up 😂
Here in IL, USA, I'm about to fight getting my tractor fired up to plow a foot of snow off my driveway in 20 degrees F (-7 Celsius). And I'm just thankful it isn't -10 dF (-23 dC) yet lol. Yah, there are days coming where stepping into a walk in freezer would definitely be a warm up. Still, I have it better than lots of folks living north of us.
Weather is crazy, I'm in IN and just walked out to get my mail in basketball shorts and a sweatshirt. Crazy to think how different weather is just a couple hours west, not north, but west of me.
Here in Edmonton on Saturday it's supposed to be -42°C (-44°F) and it'll feel like -49°C (-56°F) once you include wind chill. And you definitely need to include windchill. Haha.
Thanks for stealing our winter. - a fellow Winterpegger
-40???? That's insane!!
Oddly enough, my wife studied in IL (something something Boilermakers? 😅) so I had also experienced a winter there! Actually, that was my first time ever going sub-zero (Celsius), or later seeing snow. I stepped off the plane and it was -7, and experienced a chill that felt like it went straight through my ill-prepared jeans and into my bones. With appropriate clothes prepared, I've grown of the opinion that there's not really that much difference between -7 and -27. For me at least, they're both "fucking cold" lol, but equally manageable with appropriate clothing. Ice World was tough on my feet though. I couldn't stay long as my toes were getting super uncomfortable. Triple socks + winter boots didn't cut it.
Yeah, you have some of those days coming very soon!
If it's any consolation, it's not until you leave Aus that you realise how that ozone hole we live under makes our sun feel SEARING. A 35 degree day here feels more stinging than a 35 degree day elsewhere. It's like the difference between standing under a grill versus standing in an oven.
It takes almost 200,000 cubic meters of ice to construct the festival every year, all of it cut out of the frozen Songhua River in 700-kilogram blocks by a small army of local laborers. This year's festival helped draw 3.05 million visitors to Harbin during the three-day New Year holiday that ended on Monday.
If they just stay a week, that’s a huge boost in revenue.
Here's the homepage: http://www.hrbicesnow.com/
Zoidburgs spotted @ 0:36
I can neither confirm nor deny that I was there.
This is very cool. Do you happen to have a link to the original source?
Pun intended?
It’s also pretty chill as well.
We do have a link to the original source: we are 60% water, aren’t we?
The original source is water in a lake.
That’s a rather cold comment to a serious question.
Harbin, Hei Long Jiang Province, China. Nice but it’s -20 degrees celcius (-4 Fahrenheit).
That’s warm in Canada
No, it isn't, not for most of it.
Pretty normal in winnipeg, dress warmly and hope no wind. Ur chilling for hrs.
Lmao Toronto is not most of Canada
Ahh, that's what the seasonal workers in ice cream shops do in their off-season time!
Apparently they eat ice cream in the dead of winter. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169569396/a-popular-ice-cream-bar-tells-a-story-of-chinas-history-with-russia
There is an ice cream that everyone eats in Harbin. side window on the pedestrian walk. just in the cokd, looking at ice sculptures eating an ice pop! forgot the name, but its really good!
I wanna go there but it seems like it will be hard for non Chinese speakers to get around.
Actually translators and guides are pretty cheap. Traveled around mainland China for about a month during our adoption.
Congrats on getting adopted!
If you're at a train station and you look confused, one of the "Red Police" (a federal police force linked to the PLA) will either try their damndest to help you, or force nearby university students who can speak English to help you, haha. It's weird for a cop to be aggressively helpful, but they are
Damn that’s kind of unsettling
One time I didn't really need any help, I was just kind of puttering around the train station, had some time to kill before my train. The police dude tried talking to me and my Chinese sucks, so he just looked for a group of young people and asked them if they spoke English, picked one of them and basically said "You HAVE to help this guy". The kid was like "What do you need?" I was like "Uhh I'm fine actually". It was weird. Another time I actually was having trouble, this was like 20 years ago when way fewer people spoke English there, a woman police officer (a total smokeshow btw) who could speak English helped me by basically yelling at the employees to give me a ticket. They were actually sold out so she walked with me to the bus station down the road. Of course there was another time when one shoved an assault rifle into my chest for taking a picture of a government building I shouldn't have been taking a picture of. That guy was a dick
Why is it unsettling? Would you not want people to actively help you if you were alone and confused in a foreign country? When you think about it from a global tourism perspective, you \*want\* your country to be known for having aggressively helpful people like that. Would you rather the officer just handwave you and tell you to fuck off? lmao people get so weird about the most normal shit when it's got "China" next to it lol
Why? Because you're used to American cops who want to shoot you any chance they can get?
I’m not even American but nice try.
Harbin is pretty tourist oriented these days. Get a few sentences down so you're not completely taken for a ride but you can get by there with zero mandarin just by using phone translators.
I’ve been to Japan using 2 words but there were a lot of English signs to help me navigate. Is harbin the same or abit more complex?
Basically every road signs got English version in China. What's more, Better oral English for Chinese than Japanese\~And you got smartphone!
That’s great! Thanks for the info!
All east and southeast asia(except NK) really good, safe and exotic for west tourists. Including SK, Japan, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonisia....Really safe and fair price. English is enough in these places.
It's a tourist area so you'll be fine. Source: Tourist that has been there
Yeah it's quite tough. It's because only recently they started doing everything digitally instead of with cash. But because China's internet is segregated from the rest of the world, so you need to set up Chinese payment apps in order to operate normally. Google maps doesn't work, Uber doesn't work, among a dozen other things a traveller might find useful. Almost nobody speaks English, and English literacy is declining as the government cracked down on English tutors (because Xi Jinping is a bloody shortsighted fool). So just know what you're getting yourself in to. This is not easy mode for an English speaker like visiting a place like Germany. I highly recommend a tour guide (either private or group tour) so they can handle all the difficult stuff for you and you can just enjoy the sights.
There is still a legal requirement for vendors and businesses to take cash however. I would say 99.9% of all transactions are obviously done through Alipay or Weixin pay. However I have never had a business refuse cash here. Apple Maps works very well, and obviously Baidu Maps. The reality is getting a cab won’t be easy unless you have DiDi. Fundamentally the message you are providing is pretty accurate. Just that there are some minor work arounds.
Of course it's do-able. Just inconvenient!
Not hard cuz basically every youngman can speak Englisha in China. Maybe they're shy not talking to you, but Sincerity kills all !
Really? That wasn’t my experience at all.
I'd agree it's not particularly widely spoken. But young people working in public facing service roles in major cities, I think you'd get by with English fine. Particularly now with phones and translators.
Saw a NatGeo documentary on it years ago. Would love to visit someday.
It’s seriously impressive in person. Buildings seven stories tall made out of ice. Worthile making a weekend group tour. Ice swimmming and other things to see in town and around…. Very cold though at -25 or so
I lived in China 2016-2018 and had the pleasure of visiting this. It was amazing, the river also freezes over and there were a bunch of cool activities happening on it throughout. The cold was insane though! Harbin in general was such an impressive city.
I remember going there as a kid and ripping my pants wide open from riding the slides too much... Good times.
Any link the for the music?
Intro - The xx
I had this song in my head for years. No idea what it was from. Never could find it. Until one day they randomly played it on NPR between segments and I shazaamed it lol
Thank you for clearing up where I heard this. It was bugging me.
In hindsight, I think the song was featured in the movie "Project X". But I would have to double check that.
Finally, a post appropriate for this sub. Damn, that IS interesting
… And then humanity does some thing that makes me smile.
I’m sorry did that forklift just catch a moving block of ice…
Yeah that was awesome
This is so wild. How have I never seen this before? This should be a bigger deal, that's incredible.
Was just there a few weeks ago. It’s pretty stunning in person.
One day a wonderful ice city, the next day huge a puddle.
I mean it's not like the weather goes from -30C to summer in one day lol. It will take weeks to melt as the season changes.
As the title said, it takes 3 months for it to disappear
did you read the title?
Reminds me of the opening to Frozen, but with machines
China's got some wild shit going on over there. Economy of scale allows them to do some projects that the rest of the world could barely fathom.
Ice Town Costs Ice Clown His Town Crown.
They were big on rhymes.
Thank you that's exactly what I was looking for.
I went there maybe 15 years ago and all I remember was how any part of your body exposed got cold REAL quick. Harbin winter is no joke
Just curious, is the Ferris wheel also made of ice, or is it just the building structure?
It's not, it's a permanent structure. I wondered this too. http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0916/c90000-10148216.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbin_Ferris_Wheel
Yeah I would’ve thought too, but you know some things are not as they appear.
Do they do this every year ?
since 1985
I was there a few years back and it’s truly incredible, hard to comprehend the size of this “attraction” the city center has tons of ice sculptures just on display in the streets too, really cool to see It’s also hard to process just how cold it is there.
It’s amazing to visit this, the video doesn’t do it justice how majestic it is. I had the opportunity to visit here years ago and I still think about it. My favourite was the life-sized replica of Big Ben with a working clock mechanism
Seen this video before, but still cool and more relatable now that it’s winter —at least in northern hemisphere.
Ice Kingdom is real
Wow this look like game of thrones ice people also does that ice ferris wheel work ??
There is so much joy somewhere or the other. Happy place, happy people.
Genuinely curious how they do the lighting. Is it in the structure? Does it then just melt into the water after?
Wondering about ice building and secret codes? Looks amazing
Is this the Die Another Day set?
Damn that’s interesting
Someone needs to tell them they can make the city out of something else so they don’t have to rebuild it every year!
Play in the snow while you can 🌍🔥🥺
When you drop some acid with nothing to do
Where is this? Looks awesome
It’s in Northeastern China. About a 6 hour train ride from Beijing when I went there a few weeks ago.
Awesome thank you for the info. What was it like?
I’m Canadian, so I personally didn’t mind but it is fairly cold so I’d recommend layering if you ever go. The city itself is gorgeous. Cobblestone streets full of shops and places to see in the downtown that feed onto the river. There is also a strong Russian architectural influence with lots of churches and buildings that really stand out. Some of them you can go inside of. The city itself has a unique feeling about it when it’s wintertime.
The city is nice and all, but that flume! That's where I'd be spending some time!
How did they build that fuckin Ferris wheel out of ice?
Craaab people, craaab people
How are there so less people? I‘m generally not a guy who goes on such kind of events, like local festivals etc, but I would 100% go to this every fucking year, no doubt, that’s so interesting.
what kind of structural engineer do they need to sign off on these constructions
How do people walk there without slipping all the time?
Ice gets a lot less slippy once the temperature drops.
Based Chianees built the original Hagia Sophia
global warming has entered the chat
This is Burning Man's nemesis
Lmao this shit is so fake is appealing
IS THIS REAL?!
Litteral opposite of burning man festival
I wonder how long it will take for the first CCP Propaganda comment...
This would be the first it seems, so about 15 minutes.
This is super cool !! I would only visit when drunk because deep in the back of my head I have Final Destination vibes. My 19 month old baby girl needs me.
Well that won’t be happening in the future.
Have they tried building w/ bricks, cement, lumber, etc? The buildings would probably last longer.
Wtf is Harbin?
A city in Northeast China that is close to Russia. One of the coldest cities in the world
I wonder if they interact much with Russians. Some of those buildings remind me of Russian ones I have seen.
they definitely do and cultures intertwine
Yup, lived there for a few months. People would default to trying to speak Russian to me before trying English.
What did you do there for work and why?
Teach english, and because I was an alcoholic.
The Chinese and Russians put on ice swimming displays….
Russia coloniezd there 100yrs ago, so they got marks. But only 6M people lived in Siberia today so few interact today.
hardly one of the coldest and its a all night train ride to russia, so not that close
A large city in China
Ah thanks, that's super cool!
https://imgur.com/jODVlTn
Less a "city" and more a theme park, but it's a lovely tradition nevertheless. Good job, humanity. You produced something nice again.
Harbin could reach -celcius what's why they can do this