Ice Eyes

At sunset, we landed at Zhaolin Park to view the Harbin Ice Lantern Show. Here artisans use ice blocks to create amazing works including a 120-foot tall replica of a basilica, a 5-story Chinese pagoda and a Cinderella castle with an ice slide. In North America or Europe, this park would be ‘insurance-liabilitied’ out of existence as ice stairways, walkways and bridges crisscross the park (I fell twice). The setting sun lit up the crystalline ice sculptures and as dusk turned to dark, colored fluorescent lights installed inside the ice blocks turned the whole park into a shimmering rainbow. Their beauty “makes people intoxicated and reluctant [sic] to leave,” according to a plaque at the entrance of the park

My friends and I had as much fun as possible in -35 degree weather climbing, sliding and wandering through the park. After two hours, I could barely keep my eyes open for the ice cubes that formed on my lashes and I couldn’t feel several of my most important and useful appendages. So I did what any self-respecting young American would do – I took refuge in a local bar.

The next day my 5 travel mates and I decided to rent a van and driver for the whole day, costing about $20. Of course among 6 people there were bound to be some disagreements on destinations and agenda so some politicking was in order. On one end of the spectrum was your narrator. I insisted heading out into the countryside to see the former Japanese Unit 731 Germ and Biological Warfare Research Base. On the other end of the spectrum were two young ladies from California who insisted on traveling to the lamp store district to look for lighting fixtures. I have no idea why, but fair is fair.

The Germ Warfare Base was eye-opening. In a campaign similar to the experiments of Josef Mengele, the invading Japanese army carried out research on live Chinese and foreign soldiers and civilians in a series of horrific experiments that included injecting various viruses and inducing frostbite. One town was exposed to the bubonic plague and observed as the townsfolk slowly died off. Many of the display captions had a bitter overtone toward the Americans, as part of the Armistice with Japan allegedly included turning over the results of these experiments to the US Army – allowing some of the base leaders to go untried and unpunished for their war crimes. Other exhibits included US biological warfare bomb casings dropped on North Korea during the Korean War. Oddly enough most of the tourists at the museum were Americans or Koreans.

We left the museum educated and ready to rouse our driver from his slumber. The lamp stores were thoroughly uninteresting (but I may be biased). We ended the day across the Songhua River at a multi-acre amusement park made completely of ice. We arrived at this park as the sun was setting, but as soon as the sun did set, the temperature dropped to many degrees below ridiculously cold and the wind picked up. We all froze while traversing the distance from the van to the ticket booth (about 100 feet) and decided a couple of pictures and a short walk around the perimeter would have to suffice.

When I started this trip to northeast China I had grandiose plans of traveling to about 5 cities including the palace of the Puppet Emperor Pu Yi (the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty and the subject of the movie The Last Emperor), a small town named Dandong on the North Korean border, and Dalian, a colonial city on the ocean. If you ever come to China, you should learn this expression: “Mei you.” It is pronounced like mayo in the sentence, “Roast beef on wheat, and hold the mayo.” It means, “I don’t have,” and it was the answer to every request for train or bus tickets around northern China. I should have known better since I was traveling during the busiest time of the year, Chinese New Year. Picture this: Twice the population of the United States – and I mean everyone, the young the old and everyone in between – getting on a train, plane, boat or bus and going somewhere. And a week after these people arrive at their destination, they get back on the train, plane, boat or bus and go back. According to the local papers, an estimated 430 million people travel during the week-long festival. And we were right in the middle of it

From Harbin, I was able to score 6 tickets to Changchun, notable mostly for Pu Yi’s palace and one of the two Volkswagen factories in China. Volkswagen has about a 50% market share of all cars in China, and nearly all of the taxis in the major cities are VWs. Of course I insisted on seeing the insides of both.

Entrance to the imperial palace was easy – all it required was the purchase of a $5 ticket. Getting into the VW factory was considerably more difficult, but a combination of my companions’ long batting (albeit frozen) eyelashes, German craftiness and a little luck found us smack in the middle of the production line by 2 PM.