Travel in Harbin

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Travel in Harbin

Harbin (哈尔滨) is a sub-provincial city and the capital of the Heilongjiang Province in Northeast China. It lies on the southern bank of the Songhua River. Harbin is ranked as the tenth largest city in China, serving as a key political, economic, scientific, cultural and communications center of Northeastern China.

Harbin is originally a Manchu word meaning "a place for drying fishing nets". Harbin bears the nicknames "The Pearl on the swan's neck" because the shape of Heilongjiang resembles a swan, and "Oriental Moscow" or "Oriental Paris" for the architecture in the city. Harbin is also known as "Ice City" for its long and cold winter. This city is most famous for its beautiful display of ice sculptures in the winter.

Get to Harbin

By Air
Located 33 kilometers (20.5 miles) northwest of Harbin City, Harbin airport is the second largest airport in northeastern China at present. Formally called Harbin Taiping International Airport (HRB), it caters for approximate 50 domestic and international routes. More than 30 tourist destinations within China are catered for, including Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao, Shenzhen, Xian and Hong Kong, etc. Cities within America, Russia, Korea, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia can also be reached by scheduled flights. In September 2006, six new international airline routes opened, to Frankfurt, London, Vancouver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York via transfers in Beijing, and, with the exception of San Francisco, all are scheduled daily flights.

There are two routes covered by shuttle busses enabling visitors to get to the airport from the downtown center. The first departs from No.99, Zhongshan Road from 6:00 to 18:00, leaving two and a half hours prior to the flight departures. The other rout can be boarded at No.30, Xinyang Road between 10:30 and 12:00, with the fee for both routs being CNY20 per person. The shuttle busses' departure time from the airport to downtown Harbin is based upon the arrival time of flights. Alternatively, you can take a taxi to or from the airport for about CNY60.
Inquiring Number: 0451-82894220 (airport)

By Train
Harbin has two railway stations; Harbin Railway Station, located at No.1, Tielu Jie, Nangang District was originally Songjiang Railway Station, and was built by the USSR, it now plays a vital role as a transfer station. The other is the Harbin Eastern Railway Station which is the terminus for trains both departing, and arriving in Harbin. Here, you can take trains to Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Jinan, etc.
Inquiring Number: 0451-86420115 (railway station)

Tips: Harbin Railway Station allows visitors to buy tickets up to 7 days prior to departure, or alternatively, you can conveniently book tickets at any star rated hotel which offers a ticket-booking service.

By Long-distance Bus
The long-distance buses are mainly offered by Nangang Bus Station with most of the bus routes covering the rest of Heilongjiang Province. Destinations available via the inter-provincial long-distance bus services are Shenyang within Liaoning Province and Changchun within Jilin Province. This year, a new route from Harbin to Vladivostok in Russia was opened with the daily journey by luxury bus will take twelve hours.

By Sea
occupying an advantageous geographical position, the Port of Harbin is listed as one of the eight important inland harbors of China. However, ships only can reach some parts of northeast China from April through to the early November

Attractions in Harbin

Sun Island Park (太阳岛公园)
The Sun Island Park (Taiyang Dao) consists of one big island and some smaller islands in the Songhua River, which meander through the north of Harbin.
This natural island is the biggest recreational center in Harbin and as such can be highly popular in the summer months and during the ice festival.
The island covers a total area of 3,800 hectares of leisure resources, including the interesting Siberian Tiger Park.

Ice and Snow festival

Harbin is one of the sources of ice and snow culture in the world. Geographically, it is located in Northeast China under the direct influence of the cold winter wind from Siberia. The average temperature in summer is 21.2 degrees Celsius, −16.8 degrees Celsius in winter. It can be as cold as −38.1 degrees Celsius in winter.

The "Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival" is one of the world's four largest ice and snow festivals, along with Japan's Sapporo Snow Festival, Canada's Quebec City Winter Carnival, and Norway's Ski Festival.

Every November, the city of Harbin sends teams of ice artisans to the United States to promote their unique art form. It takes more than 100 artisans to create ICE!, the annual display of indoor Christmas-themed ice carvings in Nashville, Tennessee; Kissimmee, Florida; and Grapevine, Texas.

Russian Culture Influenction
Called the Oriental St. Petersburg(东方圣彼得堡), Harbin is one of China's most beautiful cities. The city is well-known for its unique, Russian and European-influenced architecture.

Zhong Yang Street (Central Street, also known as Kitaiskaia St.), one of the main business streets in Harbin, is a perfect remnant of the bustling international business activities at the turn of the 20th century. The 1.4-km long street is a veritable museum of European architectural styles: Baroque and Byzantine façades, little Russian bakeries, French fashion houses, American eateries, and Japanese restaurants.

The Russian Orthodox church, St. Sophia Cathedral (索非亚大教堂), is also located in this central district of Daoli (道里). St. Sophia took nine years to build and was completed in 1932. It has now been made into a museum as a showcase of the multi-cultural architecture of Harbin.

Food
The cooking culture of Harbin diet may well be rich and colorful, there is sediment of the cooking culture of Jing Yuan Dynasty through the ages, there are wild foods of local characteristic delicacy from mountain too, there are results from modern plural cultural exchanges, these have formed unique culture of food and beverage in Harbin, as the flavor of Harbin, its characteristic can summarize as "appear beautiful in being sincere, contain quintessence in being rough ". the famous special restaurant of Harbin are the floor of Futai, Beilaishun, Jiangnanchun, Sigma restaurant, Fucheng fat beef hot pot city, Laodu-one dumpling hall, eastern dumpling king, Wuji sauced bone stew restaurant, etc.

The introduces of some special features snack
Harbin big bread (大咧巴)
Called Palestine also, known as a special skill of Harbin, it is the unique flavor food in Harbin. The large such bread is round, it is weigh 2.5 kilograms, taste is special and fragrant, and have traditional European flavors. The big bread after making, the crust is burnt and fragile, the interior flesh is soft, perfume is unique, should preserve, it is the all-ages instant food.

Crisp of Heli (酥合利)
It belongs to bread kind of foods. It is not only crisp, fragrant, sweet and delicious, but also nutritious, easy to digest, it is patient's ideal food of stomach trouble. In addition, because it lacks water, is suitable for preserving, should not be rotten, it is the food which tourists like carrying on business.

Laoding Feng cake (老鼎丰点心)
It is the famous cake of Harbin. The moon cake is the most famous, loose and favorable, fine and smooth soft, smell unique, and the characteristic of putting pensioning for a long time but perfume particularly.

The deer's tail of clear soup (鹿尾汤)
The main materials are deer's muscle, deer's tail, and deer's meat. It is always been the famous and precious cooked food in the feast, especially the soup dish taking the deer's tail and cooking is famous and more precious. Deer's tail can invigorate the kidney, strengthen Yang, relax the muscles and stimulate the blood circulation, nourish efficiency is winter best tonic. Its characteristic is firing with the deer's tail which housed,. It is white tail and clear soup, the venison is crisp and fragrant, flavor and delicious.

Jingzi brand pine nut litter stomach
(京字牌松仁小肚)

Meat products of Zhengyang floor of Harbin is unique flavor. Mainly render palatable with the fragrance of the pine nut, the color is overflowing in fragrance after cutting, fertile but not oiliness. Because of using the mug bean starch, therefore the transparency is good, delicate and whippy; it is thin and not breaking to pieces.

Crystal sugar snow (雪花糖)
The frog is the field chicken, by the reputation is one of Heilongjiang "four rare things" Its most precious part is the frog oil. This vegetable takes the clam gentleman frog oil as main material. Take the frog oil with the hot water, cooks with the crystal sugar boils, and auxiliary cooks with the green plum. The product luster bright, sweet but the delicate fragrance, has the phlegm reduction to cool down the merit.

Shopping
Aside from Zhongyang Street(中央大街), the biggest commercial street is Guogeli Street, where the government has recently organized several streets around themes. There is a street for children (clothing and toys), women (clothing), and, bizarrely, Indians. The Indian street features some saris, but little else from the Indian subcontinent is evident here. The Churin Department Store (秋林百货), located in an immense green baroque-style building on the north side of Dong Dazhi Street (opposite the main post office), was once one of the largest department stores in East Asia. The first floor is where you'll find Harbin's best dalieba-- heavy circular loaves of crusty bread -- and Russian-style red sausage(红肠),which you can take for a picnic in the nearby Children's Park. A few blocks west, at the intersection of Dong Dazhi Street (东大直街) and Hongjun Street (红军街), is the Hongbo Shichang (鸿博市场) one of the largest underground markets in the Northeast. The market is set up inside an old air-raid shelter, located underneath the former site of the St. Nicholas Church (destroyed by Red Guards in the 1960s), and offers everything from fur hats to black-market video games.

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Last Updated on Thursday, 20 November 2008 18:28

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