Beijing - Happy New Year in Harbing!

This year, I had the opportunity to spend New Year’s in China. Robyn and I left Tainan on Friday night. We took the High Speed Train to Taipei to make sure we had plenty of time to make our flight.

After an eventful journey where Robyn spilled her dinner on her new coat, we arrived at the hotel, where I Skyped with my dad and Robyn informed me that my accent gets thicker when I am talking to “home”.

Saturday morning, we headed to the airport, boarded an airplane and flew off into the sun! We arrived in China, retrieved our backpacks, and headed to our hotels. This was when we realized it was COLD! Like really cold. That night we went and met our friend, Carmen and her friend Tammy. After doing some fun shopping in the hutong neighborhood, we went to a little restaurant and hung out.

On Sunday, we met up with Tammy and went to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. The Forbidden City was so strange, because it was incredibly large, but so little of it was indoors. It is hard to imagine people living there. It was also extremely cold. Tiananmen Square was awe inspiring. It was so big, but it was easy to visualize large numbers of people being forced to stand in lines while Chairman Mao spoke to them.

 

Unfortunately at this point my camera lens broke so I didn’t get many more good photos for a few days.

That night, we met up with another of Carmen’s coworkers and caught the train to Harbin. We took a sleeper train, so there was a small room with bunk beds. Robyn and I were in a room with a cute little old couple.

We arrived in Harbin and went to find our hostel. Harbin was FREEZING. I’m talking -33 C freezing.

While in Harbin, we basically shuffled through the snow from coffee shop to coffee shop. I did buy a Russian nesting doll since we were so close to Russia. We also discovered that our eyelashes froze and melted every time we came in and out of a building, therefore ruining any mascara we had on. That night, we went to the official Ice Sculpture Festival which was really interesting. There were so many cool snow sculptures and ice sculptures, including Disney princesses and castles made from blocks of ice.

Since it was New Year’s Eve, we went to a local pub and had fish and chips for dinner while we rang in the new year!

The next day, we did more snow shuffling to coffee shops before catching our train back to Beijing. This time, we had to take the “hard sleepers which meant there were six beds in a compartment with no door which meant no privacy. The lights were also turned off so we played word games by the light of a flashlight.

When we arrived back in Beijing, Robyn and I went to our hotel where Robyn proceeded to sleep for several hours. I, on the other hand, went shopping! I went and found a new camera lens and went to several shops that were in my tour book that looked cool.

After Robyn woke up, we did a rushed tour of the Summer Palace. It was so cold, but very beautiful. We got there late, so we didn’t get to see all of it before it closed! We made it an early night since we were so exhausted.