Harbin and Christmas

The month of December started off very different to any other month as it was so cold we struggled to do everyday things such as go to the shops. This change hit us really quick as the temperature dropped at the snap of a finger here. 12 of us scholars realised we had to adapt quick as we had arranged to go to Harbin for 4 days. It gets to -30 there!! To get to Harbin we had to take an 12 hour sleeper train, this may sound bad but after taking a 20 hour train with hard seats it felt like a luxury.

The first day in Harbin we visited the Russian village, because Harbin is situated so close to Russia many Russian immigrants came to Harbin. This means the architecture and the cuisine is very influenced by Russia. Volga Manor, a Russian park, was amazing - it was filled with white fluffy snow and breathtaking buildings.

While at the village we went on a snow slide where we went on donuts and slid down a snow slope, this was a very different way to see the park! After this we went for lunch where we got to try some of the local food such as duck blood. On the second day we started with going to Stalin Park which has a massive lake in it that is so frozen you can walk all over it! One of the stalls here were selling fried insects, this made very curious as I knew eating insects is not uncommon in China.

Towards the end of the day we went to the ice festival, this is the main reason Harbin is so well known. The ice festival draws in tons of tourist every year as they make ice sculptures of landmarks from around the world. This includes the Colosseum and the Disney castle.

After our Harbin trip we had another busy week ahead of ourselves as we had Christmas and New Year. For Christmas we had all arranged to take part in a secret Santa, this ended up being a lot of fun and ended up making the whole day feel a lot more Christmassy. For our Christmas dinner we all decided to decorate our common area and eat all together. In China Christmas is just a commercial holiday so there wasn’t anywhere to order Christmas dinner so I had to settle for the next best thing, McDonald’s.

It was really nice to spend Christmas around everyone as it made everyone forget about missing Christmas in Scotland. Next up was New Year, which was a lot weirder to celebrate in China as they actually celebrate the Chinese New Year on a separate date. This meant that to everyone around us this night was just a normal one, but we tried our best to make a big deal of it. We ended up doing a similar thing to Christmas and all meeting up in the common area with our takeout food. Later on we did some quizzes based on Scotland, geography etc. After this we all waited for the clock to strike 12 and stood by the window to wait for the fireworks at the TV tower.

Sadly they did not appear but all in all it was a good night and definitely made it feel like a New Year. Being in a country which is so different to your home does highlight the differences in culture and that just because an event is big in your own country doesn’t mean it will be big in China. I think this is why Chinese culture is so interesting as it is so different to anything you could find in Europe!