And now, the moment you've all been waiting for...

Yes, it's Harbin's only claim to world fame - the incredible Ice and Snow Festival!

As an early Chinese New Year celebration, we were taken yesterday on an office jolly - a grand day out, marred only slightly by the intervening meal which was somewhat strange (sliced pig's intestines or duck's tongues, anyone?) and conducted in near silence except for endless boring toasts in which everyone thanked everyone else and looked forward to prosperous business relationships, before it descended into the kind of corporate bonding games which I rate somewhere below root canal treatment in my list of preferred activities.

But the ice and snow sculptures were just FABULOUS. And as it was 'only' minus 13°C, I didn't even feel that cold - but then again I was wearing three thermal vests, two scarves and an indeterminate number of dead sheep. Not to mention the WMEMs, of course.

Simply uploading a few pictures to this blog wouldn't do the thing justice, so if you click below you can see the whole album - just hit 'Slideshow' for the full effect once you're there. I say 'full effect' but you'll have to imagine the (loudly) piped classical music which accompanied it all. Peter and I got some funny looks when they got to 'Bolero' and we started Torvill & Deaning-it on the ice.

Anyway, it's the Snow Festival first (which had a Finnish theme, hence the strong Father Christmas and Moomin motifs), then the Ice Festival - they take place in adjoining parks next to the (frozen) Songhua River, some views of which you can also see. Hard to comprehend, I know, but all the structures which look like the Blackpool Illuminations on acid are made entirely from ice blocks, hewn from that river.

Why? Who knows. Apparently it grew out of a local tradition for making ice lanterns by hollowing out blocks of ice and putting a candle inside. I suppose someone thought, 'Ooh, it might be pretty if we joined a few of these together and put coloured lightbulbs in them', and from there - in just ten years - Harbin's Ice Festival became one of the 'big four' ice sculpture festivals worldwide (the other three being Montreal, Sapporo in northern Japan, and somewhere in Finland). Mainly due to the proximity of the Songhua and its endless supply of ice, Harbin now boasts the biggest annual ice festival in the world.

I am now more convinced than ever that it's the most bonkers place on Earth.

Enjoy our pictures.

The season of peace and glove

A belated Happy New Year to you all – and as you can see, it’s new year, new look, for From Scotland to Siberia. The previous template (chosen in some haste) was just too – well – pink, and that Georgia font, while it looked lovely in our wedding invitations, is a bit too curly for on-screen reading, so I decided to go sans serif. If anyone actually preferred the old look, please tell me, and I might think about it. Or I might just ignore you.

Anyway, you’ll be glad to know they let us back into China - although I did have Amazon’s number in my phone and primed as we came through Immigration, just in case! (See earlier post).

We managed to pass a very pleasant and restful few weeks with our families and friends in the UK, despite spending rather more time than one might wish being forced to read the Daily Express advice on how to avert the recession by not buying anything (not sure quite how that works), enduring endless discussions about the Strictly Come Dancing phone-in votes scandal (what?), sitting in doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries, having injections, and rushing around buying up the entire contents of Boots and Morrison’s, trying desperately to stock up on all the things we can’t buy in China. We bought, or were given, so much stuff that I bravely decided to forego the purchase of more Marmite, resolving instead to eke out my remaining third of a jar until the next visit home. In the end we had to buy another suitcase so I could have carried it after all. It’s a tragedy.

But not as tragic as the tale which I’m about to tell you, concerning the World’s Most Expensive Mittens.

I purchased the WMEMs back in August at Blues the Ski Shop in Edinburgh. I don’t mind giving the shop a wee bit of free publicity there, as they are easily the best stocked, most helpful and definitely the most polite of all the ski- and outdoor shops in the city – and believe me, after last week, I know what I’m talking about.

Prior to moving out here, we had been given a ‘cold weather clothing allowance’ with which to buy outdoor wear suitable for Harbin in winter, and knowing not much about that kind of thing, we went to said shop and told them we were moving to ‘somewhere cold’.

‘How cold?’ asked the nice laddie. ‘Are we talking Alps? Rockies?’

‘Try Himalayas’, we replied. ‘Or Siberia’.

‘How cold does it get?’ he enquired.

‘Ooh, minus 35-ish’, we said.

He promptly ushered us towards a special section labelled ‘Mega Expensive Clothing For Lunatics’ (well, it may as well have been) and proceeded to give us the low-down on coats with ceramic bead inserts, thermals spun from the wool of specially reared and individually named sheep whose progress you could follow on a website (seriously), and last but not least the benefits of down-filled ski mittens. Basically the moral of the story in all cases seemed to be: modern artificial fibres may now be very advanced and capable of withstanding great extremes of weather, but at the end of the day, nothing – apologies to the vegetarians amongst you but this is the word of an expert here – nothing beats natural materials when it comes to keeping out the cold.

Now it has to be said that I do tend to suffer with cold hands and feet, and we’d been warned that ordinary fleece, woollen or even leather gloves simply wouldn’t cut it in Harbin, so getting a good pair was high on my priority list. I tried on a few of the less fancy pairs in the shop but wasn’t satisfied with the fit. ‘OK’, I said in the end. ‘Show me your down-filled mittens. Do your worst.’

Well, it was love at first sight. They were cream-coloured on the back, quilted, with a black leather palm and a fleecy lining. They came down over the wrist like a gauntlet and could be tightened or loosened by means of a velcro strap at the base of the hand. When I put my hand inside, my whole body felt warm, and they fitted like a – well, you know, a thing that fits very well.

They were £55. For a pair of mittens. But I just couldn’t resist.

It was late November before I had a chance to give the WMEMs their inaugural outing. The temperature had dropped to about minus 12 by day, minus 20 by night, but my hands were fabulously toasty. Outside, I couldn’t feel a thing (or, indeed, do anything either, as they tended to lend a sort of toy-soldier effect to one’s hand movements and make it impossible to open doors or pick things up – but hey, I was warm!). Indoors, even in a car, I had to remove them immediately or I’d have spontaneously combusted. The cream colour had already proved to be hopelessly impractical in a soot-stained city like Harbin, but I kept sponging them gently since they professed to be dry-clean only.

As it happened, I didn’t actually go out much during December, so I’d probably worn them on no more than about four occasions when it was time to fly home for Christmas. I reckoned I wouldn’t need them in the UK, and certainly not in Shanghai where we spent a few days at either end of the holiday (though in practice it turned out to be chillier in both places last week than we’d anticipated), and so contemplated leaving them behind, but remembering that we’d be arriving back into Harbin on a January night at temperatures of minus 25, I decided to take them with me.

I wore them as we left the house, then took them off for the car journey to the airport, taking care to put them on the floor with my handbag and not on my lap so that I wouldn’t forget they were there when I stood up. I carried them into the airport, and then, in the check-in queue, frustrated by having too many things to carry, I hurriedly shoved them into the backpack which I was using as hand luggage.

And that was the last I saw of them. Or I should say, of one of them. Peter was getting something else out of the backpack that night at the hotel in Shanghai when he said, ‘Oh, one of your gloves is here.’

‘They’re both there’, said I.

‘No’, he said. He searched the bag. I searched the bag. We searched our other bags. There was, most definitely and most, most tragically, only one WMEM.

I’m not ashamed to say I cried. (It’d been a long day.) I am, however, slightly ashamed by my Paris Hilton-like behaviour which followed.

Knowing I’d had them at Harbin airport, I got Peter to phone Kevin, who dutifully phoned the airport and harangued the lost property department, left luggage and the head of cleaning regarding the loss of the ‘very special and expensive’ glove which his boss’s wife had obviously dropped there. The next day I made him phone them again and do the same thing. But all to no avail.

The next day, we flew to Edinburgh, where I had resolved that at all costs I MUST replace the WMEMs with EXACTLY the same ones. Never mind that we had used up our cold weather clothing allowance. Never mind that I could probably buy something very similar in China and claim the money back. I had to have them, and I had to have them NOW (or at least before that flight back to Harbin).

Sadly there wasn’t time before Christmas, so it was last week, early in January, when I eventually went back to Blues and talked to another helpful young man. No, they didn’t have those, but they had the same make in white for £70. Even I baulked at this. Or these, which were not quite as good but very similar, and which felt actually a bit less toy-soldierish and were only £40, but they didn’t have my size. They could try their Glasgow branch? No, I said, I’m leaving the country tomorrow. He suggested a couple of other shops.

I then spent two afternoons trudging up and down the central shopping streets of Edinburgh in search of down-filled ski mittens. No one had them. ‘People don’t really use down much these days’, the uber-cool dude in the snowboard shop informed me, condescendingly. ‘Down tends to be a bit too warm for skiing’, grunted a very surly Northern Irish guy in another shop. ‘Did I say I wanted them for skiing?’, I barked back in intense irritation, being by now in at least my seventh shop. By then they didn’t even have to be the same ones, but I was unshakeable on the down. Thermal micro mega-warm ultra-therm-tech go snow-proof hyper-fab heat-shield super techno fleece just WOULD NOT BE WARM ENOUGH.

Finally, crushed and defeated, I bought a pair of ordinary thermal gloves in Milletts for £12. It was the coldest day in the UK for – ooh, some number of years – check the papers. ‘Do you want to wear them now?’ asked the nice young lad. ‘Most people are, today.’

‘No thanks,’ I replied, ‘I’m going somewhere MUCH colder than here.’ ‘There’s nowhere colder than here,’ he said glumly. I couldn’t help but disabuse him. He apologised.

There was just one slim hope left. On our return to China, I kept the single glove in my hand luggage to show to the lost property people at Harbin airport, just in case they had found the other one and had kept it for me for all these weeks. Our flight into Harbin on Saturday night was delayed, and our poor sweet driver, Mr Li, had been waiting patiently for us for an hour. Despite this, I still insisted on keeping him hanging on further while I found out where the lost property office was. This took some time, as the first six people we asked didn’t speak English, and when Peter found the appropriate word in his phrase book and showed it to them, they kept trying to usher us through the security gates and couldn’t understand that we had just arrived on a plane.

In the end we phoned Kevin again and got him to explain that I was looking for a glove I’d lost on the 17th December. When prompted, I waved the remaining WMEM at them. Eventually the message got through and they went to check, but came back shaking their heads. Alas, all hope was lost. I sat, grieving, with my poor lonely WMEM and contemplated hanging it on the wall as a trophy, while wondering how on earth I would be able to go the Harbin Ice Festival in inferior gloves. It was a sad night.

…..

Last night, Peter went to the supermarket, and took my (now empty) backpack – which I had carried the length and breadth of Britain for three weeks, and unpacked and re-packed at least four times in the process - to carry home the shopping.

He had finished unpacking it when he said, ‘Hang on, there’s something heavy in the bottom’.

‘No there’s not’, I said. ‘I emptied it.’

‘I’m telling you, there is!’, he insisted, and reached down and pulled out a slab of cheese which he’d just bought. ‘I think there’s a secret pocket at the back here’, he said. ‘And – oh! –

HERE’S YOUR OTHER GLOVE!’

So much to blog, so little time

With our festive jaunt home to Blighty hurtling rapidly towards us, there seem to be a million things – well, at least three – each of which I could have written a whole article about but simply don’t have time. There follows, therefore, a smorgasbord of observations about this crazy world in which we find ourselves, which if I don’t get them down now are in danger of falling into the vast black hole that I once laughingly called my memory, never to be seen again.

So. Last week we had to call Building Management out again, when another dodgy bulb tripped all our fuses for the second time. It seems that they’d been trying to get in to see us for several weeks to check our water meter, but every time they came to the door we didn’t understand what they wanted so they hadn’t been able to gain access. We don’t like to call poor Kevin too often.

Anyway it appears that our water meter is low on money. The landlord says he will come ‘sometime’ and put some more money on it. He is unable to tell us when ‘sometime’ will be, despite the fact that we’re going away tomorrow for three weeks, but until then we are ‘not to worry’. This is typical of the Chinese total inability to plan anything in advance. They simply do not, will not, or cannot do it. On the day before our party, at about 4.30pm, Kevin sidled up to Peter looking a bit embarrassed and said sheepishly that ‘the girls’ had asked him to find out if we would have the party that night instead, as it suited them better! Attempting to order diaries and calendars as New Year gifts for his customers, Peter has been frustrated by the lack of any with space to write down appointments. When Kevin saw Peter’s own (British) diary he was baffled. ‘But why would you want to write down what you’re doing in the future?’, he enquired. ‘Chinese people do not do that. Sometimes they think about tomorrow. Or maybe, sometimes, the next day.’

Often Peter arrives at work in the morning to be told he has a meeting with an important client in half an hour’s time, which has just been arranged. They arrive to find about 10 local dignatories, bureau heads, factory bosses and the like who have all assembled at what appears to be a moment’s notice. After the meeting, they progress to an apparently equally impromptu but sumptuous lunch of unidentifiable but delicious dishes, be it at the most expensive restaurant in Harbin or a transport caff in a dodgy rural town (where all conversation stops and all heads turn as Peter walks in). Much ‘Gan bei!’ and general hilarity ensues, even when the interpreter has to leave early, leaving him alone with a group of monolingual Chinese bigwigs. Business here is strongly based on the principle of ‘guan xi’ which translates as ‘business relationship’ but basically seems to mean ‘getting people to trust you by getting drunk with them outside work before anyone signs anything’. No wonder he’s enjoying his job!

Some of the places he’s visited on these jaunts have been eye-openers. Parts of Harbin itself are quite poor, but outside the city it’s another world. Last week he went to Acheng, which he described as ‘like Castleford or Pontefract in the 1970s’ (not, I gather, a recommendation) but which still boasted huge wide streets, impressive amounts of public artworks, and the entrance to the town was guarded by a huge arch, fabulously decorated in vibrant colours. In another place, they had to drive through a market, squeezing between stalls where people were selling frozen meat and fish - frozen by the air temperature, that is; no need for freezers here! They had almost reached the end when a vehicle appeared, blocking their way. With no way to turn round, Mr Li, our ultra-resourceful and ever-smiling driver, reversed the entire length of the market, back between the stalls down the narrow, winding lane, with frozen fish being flung back and forth and a guy on a tricycle behind him, who would only reverse a few yards at a time until Mr Li got out and remonstrated firmly with him. The whole process took about an hour.

Needless to say, the weather fazes the locals not one jot. Peter’s first farm visit took place on the first day that the temperature dropped to minus 11°. Everyone happily tramped about in the snow and ice looking at maize pellets or whatever. In the UK such an event would have been cancelled on the spot. (Though of course this does presuppose that it would have been planned in advance!). But then they were all no doubt wearing the ubiquitous, the redoubtable, the indispensible - Harbin Thermals.

Thermals. God how they love them. Especially longjohns. You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief after they were able to get them on when it got vaguely cold at the start of November. Of course some people hedge their bets and never take them off all year round. We even saw brides wearing them under their wedding dresses on a hot day in May (truly). There are shops selling nothing but. I’m not saying you don’t need them of course – the wind doesn’t half bite through your trousers when you go out otherwise – but the problem is that if you go out, generally you’re going TO somewhere, like the shops, or a restaurant. And the shops and restaurants are BOILING, which makes the wearing of thermals quite unbearable indoors.

At Harbin airport they have countered this problem by supplying little changing booths near the baggage reclaim (with signs in Chinese, English and Russian), for the purposes of changing into your longjohns after arriving from somewhere hot. How brilliant an idea is that? Now if the shopping centres and supermarkets did that, it would be ok. But as it is, you have to put your thermals on immediately before leaving the house and then make a run for it (seeing as it’s constantly 27°C in our flat – and I mean constantly). Then by the time you’ve arrived at your destination and are just about feeling a bit chilly and glad you put them on, you’re back indoors into a super-heated place with huge padded curtains over the doors for insulation, and pouring sweat while carrying your coat around. Something’s not right there. No wonder the locals acclimatise so well to their thermals that they’re terrified to take them off.

But otherwise they’re remarkably well-adapted to the weather. When it snows – which is disappointingly not that often, actually – an army of men with broomsticks materialises from nowhere, and with rapid efficiency they clear the snow from the roads and pavements within what seems like minutes. There’s none of the head-scratching and wondering what this white stuff can be that’s falling out of the sky, which accompanies the UK’s every annual snowfall. Once that’s done, being a very dry climate, there’s no slush to contend with, just icy patches here and there. Still, we do find it quite funny that people are sending us Christmas cards with snow-scenes on and writing things like ‘Bet your weather’s very different to this!!’ inside. Er, no, it’s not. It might be 27°C in our flat, but in the unheated utility room/balcony, a 3-litre bottle of water turned to a solid block of ice overnight.

And talking of solid blocks of ice, preparations for the famous Harbin ice festival would appear to be underway! Yes it seems this is one thing they CAN plan in advance for! So by way of Christmas greetings to you all, here are some pics of the embryonic ice sculptures – or more like ice constructions – which are shooting up around Peter’s office and our flat.

Tomorrow we’re off to Shanghai for the company expats’ Christmas lunch - at the Hilton, no less, where we get to behave like old colonials for a day – and then home for the festive season. So I’ll say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all, and see you in three weeks.