I’m in Harbin with my one of my room-mates, Guillermo, for the ice festival.

It’s cold here, there was frost on the inside of the train window.

Near the newer western station, there’s an outdoor ice rink.

Harbin was built by Russia as a railway hub for the Chinese Eastern Railway, and an important crossing point over the Songhua river. There is a lot of Russian influence, which you can see in places like the St Sophia Cathedral.

On the other side of St Sophia Square is a playground.

The square is decorated with these columns with frescos of knights in armour.

A few streets up from the central station is a Soviet monument, dated 3rd September 1945.

My tube scarf froze over and my face went numb. I can’t feel my cheeks, a bit concerning, I need to warm up.

We visited the October 10 Revolutionary Martyrs Memorial Hall, dedicated to the Chinese underground resistance during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria.

This museum building used to be a Japanese police station, and, they used to torture prisoners in the basement. The prisons in the basement are still there, and on one side of the wall there are black and white photos of people being tortured. It’s an uncomfortable experience, these kinds of war museums tend not to hold back when demonstrating the worst excesses of the Japanese occupation.

Ice festival

Historical education out of the way, time to move on to the festival.

At the entrance of the festival grounds was this large ice piano.

Walking further on to these pagodas (the temple of heaven?) surrounded by a colourful ice rink.

There was a small replica of the kremlin.

You could walk on the walls, and slide down, great fun!

In the distance is a tall multicoloured tower.

I’m using slow film, I have a tripod and I’m doing my best to properly expose these shots as it gets darker.

I’m wearing gloves within padded mittens, every time I take my hands out of my mittens to handle my camera, my fingers go numb and it takes a good few minutes to warm them up again.

I’m surprised at how well my camera is holding up, my phone is struggling at this temperature. Some people have wrapped their phones in a kind of white putty, I’m not sure how it helps but seems intended to keep batteries within their operating temperature.

This has to be one of the coldest environments I’ve ever been in. I’m well prepared, but even wrapped up in multiple layers of thermals, and a heavy overcoat, I can still feel it.

Guillermo has problems with his feet, I’ve given him my wooly socks but he’s got no boots, just shoes. He complains that his toes have gone numb, his glasses freeze over constantly. He’s obviously struggling, shuffling around half-blind; thankfully there’s a warm cabin which you can just sit in in case you get too cold.

We also went to Harbin Museum.

This museum is great, full of Soviet art, and a lot bigger than I was expecting.

This is ‘Uprising’ by Григорий Grigory Данилович Danilovich Ястребенецкий Yastrebenetsky (1966).

I could have spent much more time in the museum, but the sun was going down, time to move on. I tried to see if there were any ice sculptures in the other public park in the city, and there were but they were still being constructed. We were too early.

We walked further up, to Stalin Park¹, and the river.

The river has completely frozen over, there’s a little fair, and you can see some cars parked on the ice.