Seeing Harbin Ice Festival (and how to get there by subway)

My big reason for going to Harbin in Heilongjiang province was the “Ice Festival.” I had thought it was one exposition of ice sculptures. It turns out the image that I had in my mind was the “Harbin Ice and Snow World” (哈尔滨冰雪大世界) in Chinese, just one expo happening at this time.

Another expo is the “Sun Island International Snow Sculpture Art Expo” (太阳岛国际雪雕艺术博览会) 。 The two are actually very close to one another, just a subway station away, and both on the same Sun Island 太阳岛 in the Songhua River, between Songbei district and the city center.

The Sun Island subway station, one stop away from People’s Square station south of the river, is right next to the Sun Island International Snow Sculpture Art Expo.

There wasn’t any line to get in. In fact, the ticket sellers told me that the condition of the sculptures weren’t that great. They were melting, and the definition of details wasn’t so sharp anymore. I hesitated for a moment, but then thought, what’s the likelihood of me coming all the way back to Harbin any time soon? I might as well still see them now! Still, I did appreciate the honesty of the staff in the ticket booth!

I went in, and I thought the sculptures still looked fine!

Here is one of the “smaller” sculptures.

And here’s a bigger-scale one.

World monuments…

You can see a person here, for scale!

You can take a little trolley around, but there aren’t so many stops, and anyway, there are things to see along the way.

After I was done, I went back to the subway station.

The Sun Island International Snow Sculpture Art Expo is at the Sun Island stop, and just one stop over is the Ice and Snow World with its own stop too.

Now here there were a lot of people!

The sculptures here are made with ice!

And nighttime is when to come here. The lights turn on at dusk, and transform the space into a colorful playground.

There were rides like the ferris wheel, go-kart racing, and giant slides, but I think a lot of these required pre-registration or queuing, so I didn’t go on any rides.