You can find many more pictures from Harbin’s Ice Festival on Flickr. People with real cameras and tripods took some excellent pictures and posted them. They can be found at http://flickr.com/photos/tags/harbin/

After resting for a while again, Audrey didn’t want to go out anymore, so Dan and I went out for dinner without her. We went to ‘hoe hai’, which is a row of bars on this frozen lake thing. When we got out of the cab, about half a dozen people wanted to take us to the ‘ladybar’ or to a ‘woman massage’ and it didn’t stop there. Every other person on the walkway asked us one of those two questions. We walked up and down the row looking for someplace to eat and eat we did. I tried some lemon chicken, which is way different here than back at home. Here it was little tiny pieces of chopped up, probably grilled chicken all mixed up in the lemon sauce, and it was quite tasty. We also tried some ‘ya xia pa’, which is the chin and neck of a duck. Dan said it was one of his favorite dishes in china, but this place didn’t make it very good, and it was too spicy. Outside on the boardwalk there were a lot of these little kiosks, glass on all sides that looked like a display box for some jewelry, inside were half a dozen bottles of Absolute Vodka. These kiosks were repeated every 100 meters or so, it was kind of bizarre.

We have a few hours to kill before our 12 hour overnight train ride back to Shanghai so we found another internet cafe. This place again wont let me plug in my own computer so I’m stuck with not being able to add any new pictures or anything Ive already typed offline. Today we went to the Great Wall. I’ll tell you a lot more about it in about 24 hours as I’ll have all night to write about it on my laptop on the train. But in a few words, it was huge, cold and very steep. the steps were very uneven at times and people tried to sell all kinds of Chinese crap on it for way too much money. We took a bus there with some little tour group because it was way cheaper.

As for the time difference between china and California, china is GMT+8
You can call me after 4:30pm PST, which will be 9:30am for me. All of china is the same time zone.

after trying a few places we finally found a place that would let me plug in my laptop to upload these pictures and post the blog entry below.. enjoy.