There’s always that sense of togetherness which food brings to family and friends. And it’s even better when it involves yummy BBQ and Satay! I attempted to cook the satay over the coals for a short while, fanning and turning it, but I found it a lot faster and easier to do it on Cooking Mama using the wii =P
I tried to decorate the ou zhu mi (hokkien) like coffee but… As you can see, it just wasn’t smooth enough to have the coconut sit solidly. Mum also made LongDong for dinner… like rice cubes in vegetable curry.
Baby Chris was showered with so much attention the whole time and I’m sure he loved it =) He’s a lot more alert now; looking around at bright lights, listening out for strange sounds, wriggling and kicking, but he still doesn’t do too much except cry and secrete bodily fluids…
I initially wanted to stay in Harbin for about five days so we can see the Ice Festival, Snow World, Tiger Park etc etc and just take our own sweet time with the place. But because it was so troublesome to get our hands on the train tickets, we figured the length of our stay will depend on the availability on our train ticket back to Beijing.
In the end we decided not to stay so long because the cold was really getting to us, plus there was a bit of tension during our whole trip since it didn’t exactly start off on the right foot. So the next day we planned to go to the Tiger Park in the morning and then see the Harbin Ice Festival in the late afternoon and evening. Our friends who visited Harbin the week before advised us that it was best to go during that time so that we can see the ice sculptures during daylight as well as lit up at night.
They also warned us with stories about frozen eye lashes and how the vapours of our breath would freeze once it left our body! And so I was thankful that the temperature in Harbin when we were there was ‘warmer’ going as low as -25C. I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to wear my contacts - no one wants to have their contacts frozen onto their eyeball!! At -20C I found that although my breath did freeze a little on my scarf, it didn’t freeze on my eyelashes which in turn meant my contacts were safely moist on my eyes =)
I was actually quite excited to go to Tiger Park to see the endangered species and just to get a chance to be up close to them. We caught our breaths as we stumbled out of the taxi – we still weren’t used to Harbin taxi drivers speeding on ice slick roads!
The Tiger Park was quite depressing and uneventful after the first few tiger sightings, instead I couldn’t help but think of how bored out of their minds these tigers were… The enclosure isn’t tiny but I can’t say that it’s that big either. I was a bit disappointed that the only white tigers I saw were a couple of cubs in a tiny enclosure…
Although going to the Tiger Park was quite easy, coming back however is a bit trickier because it’s pretty far from the city – which is understandable in case one escapes or something… This means that the taxi drivers are not so easily found to get a lift back. We ended up hitching a ride with some other Chinese local to get us dropped off at the Harbin Ice Festival!
The Harbin Ice Festival is definitely right up there with Zhongyang Jie of places you just have to visit when you’re in Harbin. I would have liked to stay there a bit longer, I don’t think I had the chance to look at everything or even had enough time to appreciate everything. Had I been wearing the appropriate clothes for freezing climates, I might have even gone down on their ice slide, gone curling or one of their other activities they had.
Nonetheless, the two coffee/milo/hot chocolate/soup breaks did nothing to keep our fingers, toes and ears from going painfully numb. Speaking of breaks, in the center of the biggest tent was a tiny enclosure with a couple of tigers in it…. Talk about mood killer!
Anyway, I’ll let the Video and photos speak for themselves… The photos are on my Facebook album =)
When I was going through my Manga phase, gobbling up all the Manga I could get my hands on, I stumbled across Hanazakari no Kimitachi E (For You in Full Blossom) or better known as Hana Kimi by Hisaya Nakajo. And I have to say that this Manga is definitely still one of my favourites because I can’t resist these romantic comedy storylines full of fluff and the beautiful artwork. I suppose it’s because this is such a typical Japanese story, so much like a fairytale and full of things we deem not possible.
I didn’t like Sano at first, the main male character, because of his lack of emotions and expression. But in reality, that’s exactly how some people are… all emo and that, and it just makes it even sweeter to see Mizuki bring his personality out. Nakatsu is another character I grew to like, he’s a complete opposite to Sano. Where Sano is calm, cool and collected, Nakatsu is full of energy and emotion and comical expressions.
So when I stumbled across the Taiwan drama version of Hana Kimi when I was shopping in Dalian, I just couldn’t resist – I had to buy it.
The good thing about the Taiwan drama is that they follow the manga pretty accurately, I really hate it when movies based on novels or what not are completely killed because they’ve made so many changes to the storyline. I’m a strong believer that the novel is better than the movie because a novel gives readers so much detail which you can’t find in a 1-2hour movie.
Obviously the original Hana Kimi story was changed – they cut the 23 volume Manga down to around about the first 9-10 volumes. I found the drama to be a a little too condense….If they didn’t change and cut the storyline with the photographer, I think it would have clarified it a lot more. Without the extra information, viewers would think that the photographer was just thrown in for the hell of extending the series…
Although Hana Kimi it’s a fairy good fluffy drama, I personally found it a bit TOO unrealistic to be a Live Action Drama. It’s one thing to have a fairytale on paper but another thing to have it played out on screen. BUT I still found it as great entertainment, I liked the cast (mainly Ella - Mizuki, Chun - Sano and Jiro - Nakatsu) and it’s good for me to practise my Chinese =P
Watching drama series or movies in Mandarin is classified as Studying!
I’ve been thoroughly distracted from blogging for a while, one of the excuses is the Food Fair held at Fremantle for the Burma Cyclone victims. It was on the Sunday (yesterday) and thankfully the weather was perfect! I was a bit worried because a few days earlier the weather was terrible with the wind blowing around fences, uprooting trees, causing power cuts and throwing debris all over the roads.
As per usual, mum took up the roll of manning the ice kachang machine. Since it’s a charity event, I think it’s the first time I’ve paid for an ice kachang! It’s funny because I still have moments where I convert to RMB and just about faint at how much I’m paying for food here… $8 for a dosai seems decent but 52RMB is totally killing me! I could eat for a whole week with that money in China!! Anyhow, it’s all good because it’s for a good cause =)
We didn’t get there until two in the afternoon, and we found that a lot of the stalls had sold out of their popular dishes =( The lines at the satay and dosai stalls were massively long so I was pretty lucky that I got my hands on some of their food without waiting too long (knowing people in the line always helps =P).
The event seems to be successful considering a lot of the stalls sold out on food, the turn out was really good since the weather was so nice, and it had a pretty good atmosphere too… Well, that was before the sun started to set and the wind started feeling a little too chilly… Overall, it was a great food fair =) I wish Perth would have more throughout the year!
Today is my nephew (cousin’s son), Christopher’s full moon! And to celebrate, we ate lots of food (including the traditional red dyed eggs) and played games =) I can’t wait until Chris gets big enough to play with, all he seems to do at the moment is sleep, cry and secrete bodily fluids….
To continue one from Harbin Ice Festival Part 1, we finally arrived in Harbin and arrived at the hotel around 5am. The hotel was thankfully close by to the train station and there was no trouble getting a taxi at that time in the morning.
However, I still had a bit of trouble with booking our hotel because:
I couldn’t tell them when we were arriving (we didn’t have train tickets at that time)
I couldn’t tell them how long we were staying (I wasn’t sure what day we could get train tickets back to Beijing)
There’s actually TWO JinJiang Hotels in Harbin
I simply just couldn’t understand them…. oh the shame!
So arriving at 5am, we had to wake up the receptionist and she told us that we can’t check in until 7am when some of their patrons checked out. Being as tired as we were, we slept in the lobby which was freezing cold even though the doors were closed.
Thank goodness the Harbin JinJiang Hotel at Sophia Plaza had a really good manager on staff, she was extremely helpful and could understand our broken Mandarin. The best thing about Harbin is that their spoken Mandarin is the easiest to understand, even the locals agree =)
The manager helped us organise our room, she helped with the breakfast tickets and she even helped us buy our return train tickets when another staff member told us to go call them ourselves! (Plus it only took her 5mins to do)
So we went into our rooms, passed out and woke up sometime near noon… we didn’t exactly have much sleep on the painfully long and uncomfortable journey to Harbin. The good thing is that we did our research and we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to see and where the tourist spots all were.
With a spring back into our steps, we headed off in the direction of the St Sofia Orthodox Church. The St Sophia Church itself seemed to be a little smaller than I had imagined it, probably because of all the giant buildings surrounding it. I was most surprised by the birds still hanging around the church, I thought they would have flown to warmer climates or froze to death by now…
Once we had our share of photos, we found our way to Zhongyang Dajie (Central Ave) which is well known for the beautiful Russian architecture. There were ice sculptures spaced out all down the cobble stone road, and the whole street made me feel like I was in a dream when the lights turned on. Absolutely breath-taking.
Below is a short clip I took just as the sun was setting and the buildings started to light up
As it got darker, we found ourselves extremely thankful for the many shopping complexes available to shelter us from the cold. In fact, if we weren’t running around outside in the freezing cold, we would be sweating it off in the well heated shopping complexes and stores.
After a final round of hot coffee and Russian imported chocolate (which by the was is more expensive at the Ice Bar), we started off back to the hotel. On our way back, we even stumbled across some slides made of ice and a Christmas tree they forgot to take down =)
Below is a short clip I took of St. Sophia Church that night as we walked back to the hotel.
I tried to decorate the ou zhu mi (hokkien) like coffee but… As you can see, it just wasn’t smooth enough to have the coconut sit solidly. Mum also made LongDong for dinner… like rice cubes in vegetable curry.
Baby Chris was showered with so much attention the whole time and I’m sure he loved it =) He’s a lot more alert now; looking around at bright lights, listening out for strange sounds, wriggling and kicking, but he still doesn’t do too much except cry and secrete bodily fluids…
