Harbin

Kris Arnold and I flew up to Harbin, near the Russian border, to see their annual Snow and Ice Festival. We quickly realized that if people had a second language, it was Russian, not English.
At the airport, we were trying unsuccessfully to find the right bus to take into the city, when we met Richard, our new hero (Richard the Rescuer). It turned out he was a Chinese student at Qingdao University who spoke good English and had a 10-hr layover. He helped us navigate from shuttle bus to city bus to our hotel, so  we adopted him and paid his way to the Festival.  This is a picture of the three of us on a horse drawn cart looking at the sights. Most of the clothes we are wearing were on loan from friends who knew how bitterly cold it would be, although Richard doesn't seem very concerned about the -14 deg weather.

 We saw the huge snow sculptures during the day. Then Richard had to leave us to make the return trip to the airport.

Recognize these characters?

This blog is fighting me and won't let me add any more pictures at the end, so these night pics are out of order.
The views at night are fantastic, with the life-size ice buildings lit up from inside. We were so glad we finally made it here!

Looking our from another carriage ride

So many spectacular sights!

 When our hands or toes got too cold we went inside to see an ice skating and acrobatics show.

 Another time we went into McDonald's for a hamburger.

 Neither Richard or Kris would go down the ice slide with me.

Here I come!

Ramming the person in from of me. Oops!

Dali/Kunming

Here's a menu we enjoyed reading posted outside one restaurant:

 My personal favorite is Characteristics of Meat!
Which one do you pick? Hairtail, anyone?














 Our last night in Dali about 10 of us went looking for American food. Remember there are no fast food restaurants in this town, not even a McDonald's. But we found a restaurant that advertised hamburgers. Hurray! But the guy must have only had one burner because the burgers came out two at a time and it took about 10 minutes for each set. And one set came with no hamburger patties. It still took another 10 min to bring them back with the meat. We were really laughing at that. It took about an hour and a half to get us all fed. We were sitting on the porch and it was cold. We took turns sitting by the brazier. On the way back to the hotel we found a Belgian waffle place. We still had to sit outside, and sit at tiny  tables, but it was worth it. They were delicious! A scoop of ice cream, a scoop of whipped cream and maple syrup. Mmmm!

A few of the sights that night:

These are some of the fields we flew over the next day on our way to Kunming. I recognized the fields, but I couldn't figure out what rows of white were - miles and miles of them. As we got closer I could see they were greenhouses. Thousands and thousands of them. This is an amazing agricultural area.

 Kunming lies at 2000', has almost 8 mil people, with 2 mil cars and 1.8 mil electric bikes.  Such a different feel than Dali.  They have 900 car registrations a day! We had lunch and then visited some this town's Buddhist temples. After the magnificent ones we saw in Dali, these just looked small and dingy. They were old and just not as well cared for.

We did see some interesting sculptures:

In the museum were some heavy, 6' long weapons. You'd have to be pretty buff to wield these:

There was also a beautiful garden area:

 

And these two little cuties hoping to get their picture taken: