How to Succeed in Communist China: My last adventure in the great white north

On my second-to-last weekend in China, thanks Joy's uncharacteristic planning ahead, a group of friends and I took a trip up to the frozen northeast to go skiing. I decided to tack on a trip to Harbin as well to see the oft-described ice festival. In short, it was fun and cold. Full gallery of pictures here.

The ice festival

Riding ice bicycles in Harbin

I spent only about six hours in Harbin. I basically got in, bought my train ticket back to Changchun, then wandered around the city for a while trying to figure out how to get to the ice festival. I eventually took a cab, which is not easy to find when it's freezing cold during rush hour, and arrived at the ice festival on the edge of the city. Tickets were heart-stoppingly expensive; it cost more to see the ice festival than to get into Zhangjiajie. The ice buildings were pretty cool, but honestly I feel like you get a pretty good sense of what it's like from pictures. So even though I'm happy I finally went, I would say it's probably not worth going to see on it's own.

The next part of the trip was quite the adventure. I took a three hour train to Changchun, capital of Jilin Province, where I had to hang out for about four hours in the middle of the night (spent sleeping in the train station and in a KFC) before catching a two hour bus to Jilin City. From there I had to take a cab to meet Joy, Jeff and Will who had got into town a bit earlier that morning so we could all take the resort bus out to the ski hill.

Beidahu, the resort we were at, was surprisingly awesome. It was snowing when we got there on Saturday morning, so the snow was really fresh and actually quite deep in places. Also, it's not just some bunny hill will ancient lifts. The resort hosted the Asian Winter Games in 2007, so they have real high speed chairs and steep long runs. In fact, most of the mountain was fairly difficult. The place was busy-there were lots of Russians on vacation for the Orthodox New Year-but there were barely any lines at the lifts. Most of the Chinese people there were decent technical skiers, but unlike at resorts in the States there were no crazy extreme skiers. But still people were really into it. Often on the lifts I'd hear people talking about places they'd been skiing in North America, comparing Snowbird to Whistler and saying how they really wanted to go to Jackson Hole.