The AirBnb we stayed at in Walnut Creek was just a few blocks from the LDS church, so we walked over for the 9 o'clock ward in this super cool old-school building.
After church, we headed to downtown Walnut Creek to find breakfast. Lucky for us, there was a farmers market going on. Most of the booths had free samples and it was ALL AMAZING. Such fresh fruits, they put the farmers markets in New York to shame. Like, this farmer's market was professional baseball and New York's farmers markets are trying to figure out t-ball.
Needless to say, we bought some fruit. Even though we almost filled up on all the samples. It was like Costco on a Saturday afternoon, but with delicious free fruit.
This is one of the most unique and awesome things we have ever done. Definitely make plans to be in northern China in January.
This festival, along with the lantern festival (Yi Peng) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, was the main reason we came to Asia. So we had very high expectations. And our expectations were smashed. So cool. Here's a video of just one part of the festival: Ice and Snow World.
I'll try to make this guide simple and concise, because there is a LOT of info to digest.
What: Largest collection of ice and snow sculptures in the world, both in size and quantity.
When: January 5 through the end of February, although these things aren't built in a day, so you can see construction beforehand and various sculptures and buildings/castles are done in December and (weather permitting) last through March. But to be safe, go in January when everything is new and the tourists haven't broken everything yet.
Where: Here's where it gets complicated. The Ice and Snow "Festival" is a collection of lots of ice sculptures and structures strewn all over Harbin, the Songhua River, and Sun Island. Here is a map showing the top five attractions during the Ice and Snow Festival:
Click the map to enlarge it.
Ok, so your hotel is going to be somewhere near Zhongyang Street downtown (if it's not, switch it so it is). From your hotel, you should be able to walk to everything downtown. You'll need to take a bus or a taxi over to Sun Island though. A taxi will cost 30-50 yuan, depending on your negotiating skills. The bus is 2 yuan and it's a straight shot from the Flood Control Monument to Ice and Snow World or the Snow Expo.
Buses to Ice and Snow World: 88, 118, and 336
Buses to Snow Sculpture Art Expo: 29, 54, 85, 88 and 346
On the Harbin side, you can catch these buses from the main bus station on Youyi Street, a block up Zhongyang from the Flood Control Monument, in between Zhongyang and Zhaolin Park. They go every 10-15 minutes.
Note. This is Bus 88:
You can walk between Ice and Snow World and the Snow Sculpture Art Expo, but keep in mind that it's -25 degrees, so that's a long time to be exposed. A taxi between the two parks is 30 yuan (ish) because they know you're stuck so they charge more.
Which location is which?
Ice and Snow World
The main attraction that you've seen in pictures and the only thing that could make a sane person venture into -25 degree weather on purpose is Ice and Snow World. That's what the video above is. Go at night, since you'll get to see all the lights.
There are also free shows included in your admission price.
Snow Sculpture Art Expo
Whereas most of the other parks and exhibits focus mainly on ice sculptures, this park is almost entirely snow sculptures. Some are small (like 10'x10' cubes), but others are massive.
There are a few sculptures they let you interact with, but most of them are roped off to just look at.
Zhaolin Park (aka Ice Lanterns)
This is a relatively smaller park, but it's right in the center of town so it's so much easier to access. Zhaolin Park has been the location of the annual ice lantern sculpture festival for over 40 years. This has more intricate ice sculptures than any of the other parks and it was far less crowded when we went.
Songhua River (aka Winter Wonderland)
We didn't see an actual name for this area, so we nicknamed it the Songhua River Winter Wonderland. This is an area about the size of a carnival staked out ON the Songhua River. (Read: It's slippery because you're on ice.) It's a chaotic fun mess of random rides and attractions, just like an American carnival, except they're all on ice.
This is probably better experienced in a 30-second video. So here:
Zhongyang Street
This is the main street in town, and restaurants and shopping abound. Throughout the street, you can find various ice sculptures and interactive ice/snow displays (like an ice maze!).
How much is everything?
Zhongyang Street is completely free. (Yay!)
Songhua River is free to walk around, but you have to pay for each attraction (10-30 yuan, they've got a few slides, a banana boat pulled by a tractor, chairs on skis to rent, bumper bikes and cars, etc).
Zhaolin Park is 150 yuan (about US$25, I think this is slightly overpriced, but still worth seeing.)
Snow Art Expo is 240 yuan (about US$40, pretty dang cool. Mostly worth the price.)
Ice and Snow World is 300 yuan for night, which is any time after noon. (US$50 each, and worth every penny.)
So if you do all five, you're looking at a minimum $115 USD per person.
What should I wear?
Everything you own. It's cold. Think of the coldest you've ever been and then think how much colder you would have been if you were naked and completely exposed. It's a little colder than that.
Wear layers. Lots of layers. Here's what we wore:
Are there any places to get warm?
Yes. You can only stay outside for about 2 hours at a time before you need to come inside and defrost. Harbin knows that so they've provided warming stations in most touristy areas.
Ice and Snow World has the most heated buildings and rest areas, and they also have the free shows to attend which give you some entertainment while you thaw out.
The Snow Sculpture Art Expo is really spread out, so watch the map and plan accordingly.
Zhaolin Park only has one building we found, and although it was warmer than outside, we're pretty sure it was still below freezing inside. It's amenities were the worst of the three parks, but it's the smallest too so you don't need as much time to see everything.
Zhongyang Street has shops all along it for warmth.
The Songhua River has no amenities or buildings, but you're only a block from Zhongyang Street.
Anything else?
Probably, but I can't think of anything right now. Ask me in the comments below or on any of the YouTube videos on my channel and I'll tell you anything you want to know.
This was our last day in Beijing. We're actually on a sleeper train on our way to Xi'an right now, but we'll get to that later.
For our last day, we went to see something that is on almost every Beijing tourism poster or pamphlet we've seen. Probably more often than the Forbidden City.
The Temple of Heaven.
Funny enough, there is technically no actual Temple of Heaven. The picture above is the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. Here's the inside:
The whole park is called the Temple of Heaven park, but no structure within it shares that name. The park is vast, with the Hall above as the main focal point, and walkways going in each of the cardinal directions from it. Beyond those main walkways are paths through gardens and trees and open spaces.
It's really pretty and nice to enjoy a relaxing walk. Here are some pictures from around the grounds.
In an attempt to make up for yesterday, we only bought the entrance ticket this time, not the through pass. This was a huge mistake, as you can't get anywhere near the main Hall without the extra fee. Luckily, just outside the Hall are more ticket booths, and the additional fee is the same price as the through ticket minus what we already paid, and it gives you access to everything else too.
This pass also gets you into the Circular Mound Altar, which was kinda cool but packed with people and really difficult to find a decent angle to photograph it unless you have a helicopter or something.
But on our way to the Circular Mound Altar, we passed through some "street performers" in traditional costume having a grand ol' time.
They looked for people to join in but we chickened out and continued down to the altar.
We walked out through the south and caught the subway over to the CTV Building, which is one incredible piece of architecture.
We're not sure how that thing stays standing.
Then it was time to go back and grab our stuff, eat a quick dinner from 7-11, and go to the train station to catch our sleeper train to Xi'an.
Today is Sunday, so we try to not spend money at all. We bought food last night for snacks and meals and we usually plan things that don't charge admission. We succeeded with Olympic Park; failed with Beihai Park.
Beihai Park is a lake just west of the Forbidden City. There is an island in the lake and a few sites and landscaped areas surrounding it. We found out last night that there was an admission fee, but the island and several sites were additional. I thought it'd be worth it to spend the extra money to get the through ticket. I was dead wrong. So if you go to Beihai Park, just pay the regular admission.
You can access almost everything without paying extra. The island...
the village...
the parks and walkway...
and the pagodas and everything else.
The one thing you can't enter is the round city at the southern side, but that's closed now and they didn't tell us that. The white pagoda at the top if the island is solid, so you can't go in it, and the temple below it is nothing special. Trees block the view from the top, so you can't really even see the Forbidden City.
Anyway, I'm done with my rant. I'm more just upset at myself for spending the money when I knew we were trying not to, and then feeling ripped off made it worse.
But here are some other pictures from the park...
Olympic Park was cool though, and huge and surprisingly busy. We got off the subway at the south end and walked straight up through the middle. To the right is the Nest...
and to the left is the Water Cube.
There were lots of vendors selling kites and other souvenirs. The kites were unique and cool. It was one large kite at the end, but along the string were a few dozen smaller ones. You can see two in this picture.
I have been wanting to come here for years. Ever since I heard about it over a decade ago. I was beyond excited to go in, and honestly very disappointed once we got in. :(
The complex is massive. Like ridiculously big. We looked up plans and maps and self-guided walking tours through the complex, so we had a plan. But very soon after entering, we realized that our plan was worthless.
Before entering, you just file in with all the other people. You have to enter from the south, above Tiananmen Square. This is what you'll see, with a warm welcome from a giant portrait of Chairman Mao.
You pass through two giant courtyards (each capable of holding more than 10,000 people) before you even get into the actual palace that requires your ticket. Once inside, you see five magnificent marble bridges over a stream.
This is where you can cut left or right in an attempt to avoid all the groups and tourists. We followed the stream to the left first (you can see all the crowds going straight down the middle).
Going left seemed to be a good idea since we walked into this serene park with very few people in it.
But then we ran into do not enter signs everywhere.
So after looking through a not-worth-it little museum, we crossed the courtyard with the bridges and went right, hoping to circumvent the tourists that way, but we ran into the same thing (with another not-so-worth-it museum with ceramics).
It turns out that there is only one way through the palace complex, and they force everyone to take it. So you can't escape the crowds (until later, we found).
We went straight in through the main central axis. Each building has a crowd of people in front of it, all pushing and shoving trying to get up front to take a picture. Isa checked out the first, and then decided it wasn't worth it to see the others because of the people, so she waited to the side while I went in. I tried to be patient and courteous, but that isn't very effective. The problem is that once you fight your way to the front and get your picture, nobody will move to let you out. It's almost as much of a struggle to get out as it is to get in.
Once you get up close, they all pretty much look the same. Like this:
You keep heading straight back along the same central axis passing through gates and around buildings and around sacred staircases...
...until you hit the garden in the back. The garden is not as pretty as I had hoped. I was going for a tea garden on a Versailles scale. But it's rather small and square (not natural looking) and not very picturesque.
At this point, we found an alleyway that went off to the right. With no tourists. So we took it. We walked along a long corridor, peering through closed doorways to see what was hidden inside.
This led to another area that was open to the public, but since it was off the central axis, it was much less visited. There were a few exhibits (of fans, ceramics, and traditions) and cool buildings, and it was finally nice to be somewhere that 1000 other people were not.
Looking at our map of the complex, we really wanted to get to an area just east of these buildings. So we walked down some long corridors and eventually found an entrance, but it cost 10 yuan to get in (that's a little less than $2). Generally this is just a ploy to get more money out of tourists, but we went for it. And it was worth every penny.
This was what we had hoped the rest of the complex would be like. It was all open to explore, you could go wherever you wanted, and it was far less crowded.
One of the highlights of this area is the 9 dragon screen. Apparently there are only three like this in all of China.
We wandered some more through this area and then exited through the north. We found out that everyone has to enter from the south, and we realized that the reason they block everything off is to create a flow of traffic. With hundreds of thousands of people going through every day, they're doing the best they can to control it.
On the north side of the Forbidden City is a park set on a hill called Jingshan Park. We paid the 50 cents to get in and hiked to the top for cool views of the palace. Through the haze of Beijing's crazy smog, it made for some eery and cool pictures.
The park itself is kinda cool with some rockeries and cool buildings, but mainly you go up for the view. And sunset.
