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The Harbin Ice Festival,
Harbin, China

What do you do with too much snow? A lot of people just shovel it out of the way and cuss at it a lot. But when it gets too much to even do that, you have to get creative.

The temperature in Harbin, China reaches forty below zero, both Fahrenheit and centigrade, and stays below freezing nearly half the year. The city is actually further north than notoriously cold Vladivostok, Russia, just 300 miles away.

The castle

The main castle which overlooks the entire festival grounds.

Building the castle.

The castle is not really as large as it looks from the distance.

The sculptor

But when you're carrying huge blocks of snow up a hill, stacking them up to amazing heights and sculpting them with a small, flat blade as you go, it can seem gigantic.

A less regal, but larger sculpture

There are some very large and complex sculptures of other buildings.

Details

Details

The bas relief sculptures are magnificant in and of themselves, but they can't steal the show from the perfect bas relief of the building's brickwork, that is perfect in size and shape, yet each brick has its own individual surface texture.

More whimsical

Whimsical

Other sculptures are more whimsical in nature, but no less awesome.

The festival at night

The festival at night

Most of the sculptures are built with colored lights inside (usually flourescent, to avoid melting the ice with the heat), making the sculptures at night seem like a fairyland.

Ice slide for the children

Many of the sculptures are for children and will have things like dragons or race tracks with ice slides for the children to play on.

These are all sculpted from blocks of snow and ice, piled high using cranes and other heavy equipment. The parts of the sculptures which should be clear, such as the windows in the buildings, are made of the purest ice, usually cut from rivers in order to avoid the bubbles which always occur in normal ice blocks. They are sculpted by some of the world's finest sculptors, and there is competition every year for the honor of being selected for the job.

The festival dates back to 1963 and is one of the four largest ice and snow festivals, along with along with Japan’s Sapporo Snow Festival, Canada’s Quebec City Winter Carnival, and Norway’s Ski Festival. Snow and ice sculpture in Harbin dates back to Manchu times, but the first organized show was held in 1963, and the annual festival itself only started in 1985. Since then, the festival has grown into a massive event, bringing in over a million tourists from all over the world every winter.

FEEDBACK MAP

Feedback map

To learn more about the Harbin Ice Festival, take a look at the following web sites:

Totally Cool Pix
The Huffington Post
Wikipedia
Mr. Andre's Website
Boston.com (has a good video of the nighttime activities)