We always want what we don’t have. This is what I realized when we were in Harbin. In the Philippines, we dream of having snow and winter but when we went there, every heated indoor place was our refuge from the extremely cold weather of the city.

To put into perspective, the moisture on the glass of our tour bus wes actually frozen. Heck, even our sipon was frozen TMI!!! so every time I would move my nose, you could feel those frozen mucus separate from the skin inside of my nose. Basta I can feel that it was frozen hahaha 

It was really cold. -26℃ is no really not your winter wonderland fantasy. There were times when our feet, nose, and face would hurt because of the weather. 

But anyway, I think it would be much better if I’ll leave it to the pictures to tell the story

Our view from our room in Shangri-la hotel, Harbin

Stalin’s Park (forgot to mention that Harbin is near the border of China and Russia so the city is very much influecned by Russian everything. 

Our tour guide actually told us that I we wanted a girl friend, she could introduce us to very pretty Russians as inter racial relationships are very talamak there:)

At St. Mary’s (?) of St. Catherine’s Cathedral. Can’t really recall the name of the place now:)

The Winter swimming contest

I don’t really know why but the press were all over this Australian guy who joined the contest.

These are just some candied frozen fruits which were soooo goood:)

and for some hot something, they were selling kamotes or sweet potatoes

After the swimming event we then went to the snow sculpture festival 

Next stop was the Siberian Tiger park

ookay, note to self: Siberian TIgers are not the white ones:)

The main event of the trip is the Ice Festival. Excuse our orange number as our tour guide insisted that we should wear it on top of our own down jackets. We did look ridiculously larger when we wore the jackets but it did became handy as the temperature drops to -32℃ that night.

P.S. the blocks of ice that we used to build these sculptures were actually from Yangtze River ( tama ba?:|)

P.S. I did not really take the best shots while we were in the Ice sculpture park because the moist on my camera lens would freeze so it was hard to wipe it off. And then there was the battery issue (Battery runs out fast in really cold temperature. When we went to the place, i had 3 bars on my battery, within less than an hour i was down to one bar) which made it really hard to take pictures there.

Then on our last day we went to the Yabuli resort to Ski. It took me a while to get used to it but we ended up going down almost half way from the top of the slope so okay na rin:) Everyone agreed that this was the most fun part of the Harbin trip, activity wise.