What’s Wright in the World

Xin Nian Kwai Le! (Happy New Year!)

We celebrated the arrival of 2007 asleep in two of the more firm hotel beds of our experience, safe from the 20 below zero (centigrade) outdoor temperatures of the city of Harbin, in China’s cold northeast.

On the evening of December 30, after a visit to an ornate Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Harbin, we spent a chilly but wondrous two hours wandering wide-eyed through a city of ice, part of Harbin’s annual Ice Sculpture Festival. In the center is a multi-color lighted Lighthouse, standing something over ten stories tall, with a rotating beacon at the top. It is surrounded by magnificent churches with stained ice windows, temples, stairs, igloos, ice slides and statues of every conceivable size and description. A Chinese Junk watercraft, almost 50 feet in length, towered over one part of the ten-plus acre park that is the setting of the principal point of the festival. Even as we toured, workmen were busy creating snow sculptures of two traditional dragons, each some 20 feet high and 150 feet long.

All of the buildings had neon lights embedded in the ice, creating an incredible winter wonderland.

The morning of New Year’s eve found us in small busses, roofs and sides reinforced with strong steel bars, creeping slowly through the Harbin Tiger Preserve, home for over 700 (the number is correct) tiger cubs, young, mature and “senior” tigers. One of the options available to visitors to the preserve is to pay a small additional sum over the admission fee, in exchange for which the park rangers will come near the bus in a heavily caged vehicle, and throw fresh chickens to the tigers. It is a bit awesome to witness the great beasts leaping effortlessly onto the roofs of the bus and the feed truck, almost dwarfing those vehicles by their size. Interesting to watch, too, was how, once a tiger got possession of the bird, his or her claim was honored without protest by the others in the pride. In the compound were also a few lions, a beautiful pair of white Siberian tigers, panthers, leopards, and cheetahs, and, for Napoleon Dynamite devotees, even a compound for ligers. It was the experience of being within one or two feet of the massive tigers that will remain in memory. I opened the bus window to take photos of the great beasts, and quickly closed it as one of their number began a quick approach toward my face!

From the Tiger Preserve we went to a different part of the Ice Festival, where all works were carved from snow. We entered the park onto the main street of a Canadian Village, complete with store fronts, signs, and entryways. The street, and the hundreds of snow sculptures in the park, including many memorializing the advent of the lunar new year, pales, however, when compared in size to the life-size snow sculpture of Niagara Falls! We rode in a two-dog sled along the base of the falls, on the surface of a river that is now six feet of solid ice.

Our next stop was along another shore of the river, where we shivered while a couple of dozen crazy people dove into a 25 foot by 30 foot cutout in the ice of the river. We all joked nervously about how sorry we were that our swimsuits were left at home.

Pictures will be posted at www.base.com/caljimw in a gallery titled “HARBIN”

The remainder of New Year’s Eve was spent roaming the cobble-stoned and ice sculpture decorated downtown of Harbin, eating a forgettable Russian meal, and returning to our hotel board, er… bed early, choosing to forego the Hot Chocolate celebration at a nearby McDonalds, planned by some of our group, to toll in the new year. By 8:30 AM on January 1, 2007, we had said our goodbyes to our 37 traveling companions and were on our way to the Harbin airport and twelve hours of transportation (and awaiting transportation) back to our Xi’an apartment.

Last Friday at 10:00 AM, as class was about to begin, my students suddenly bolted from our 5^th floor classroom, and out onto the atrium hallway, laughing excitedly and extending their arms to catch the fall of the season’s first flakes of snow. The flurry lasted less than five minutes, and I don’t think any survived all the way to the ground. Yesterday, we had perhaps ten minutes of flurries, and finally, at 8:30 this morning, the first “real” snowfall began. As this is written, barren pomegranate tree branches and evergreen needles are getting their first light dusting, and the red and yellow winter roses outside our window are surrounded by a thin blanket of white. Quite a pretty sight!

2007 marks the Chinese lunar Year of the Pig. Those born under the sign of this auspicious animal (1923, 1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, and 1983) are reputed to be blessed with the following characteristics: “A person born this year is likely to be a good parent. He may be easy to anger, but he is intelligent, courageous, completes projects, gallant, and sincere. People born in these years are honest and straightforward. They can be relied on to see things through. They tend to be popular and make lasting friendship and are good neighbors.”
Albert Schweitzer, who dedicated himself to the principle of reverence for life, was born in the year of the pig, I was not.
2006 was a year filled with new wonders, new experiences and new friends.

Whatever comes in 2007, it should be exciting.

Enjoy!