We are on the Chinese Siberian Russian border in Harbin for the annual Ice and Snow Festival. It is a subzero winter wonderland with ice sculptures greeting you as you exit the airport to ice slides outside the hotel.
In our family there is nothing in our life experience or DNA to cope with this level of cold. We live in Hawaii- so there’s no real practice there.
We have tried our best to buy every warm article of clothing and body warmer we can find. I counted 6 layers on my body yesterday.
Lat night we visited Zhaolin Park where we were able to spend a couple of hours managing until Avinash started complaining that his toes were numb. Like finding and oasis in the desert we found a welcoming glowing yellow food hut. We just needed out of the cold. We’d buy whatever they had just to get in.
As soon as we stepped over the threshold Avinash started crying because he was so cold. The next thing I knew Avinash was whisked out of my arms and had his gloves and socks stripped off and was put in front of the radiator before we could even process what was happening.
I also started hearing the onslaught of Chinese reprimanding directed towards me. It really never ended in the hour plus that we were there. From what we could make out it ranged from “doesn’t it get cold where you live?!?!?!” to ” you call these socks!?!?”
A chronicle of our trips around the world
