Harbin’s Sun Island Snow Sculptures // 哈尔滨的太阳岛

On our third and last day in Harbin, we went to check out the large snow sculptures at TaiYangDao, also known as Sun Island. It was the ideal day to go with sunny blue skies and tolerable temperatures! We hadn’t seen many snow sculptures at this point, so we were really excited to see what was in store.

Overall, it was a really impressive park with hundreds of snow sculptures. The ones you see above are smaller sculptures that contestants had created to be entered into some sort of contest. There were so many and all unique, obviously representing the artist’s own creative ideas and designs. My favorite snow sculpture was the one pictured below. It was literally a giant castle/wonderland made out of snow. There is some notable Russian influence which I thought was pretty neat. Like, how do you even begin to create something this BIG?! It looks huge in the photo but I was still a good distance away, too.

After we finished with the park, we headed back to the hotel to get our things and then caught a cab to the airport to prepare for our flight back to Shanghai. We were pretty exhausted from all the activities and run around, but we definitely soaked up as much as we could while we were in Harbin. Each evening we explored the surrounding areas for some good local food to try (which was only sometimes good… but always interesting). The most exciting aspect of all was navigating an unfamiliar city and learning more than we had ever known about Harbin. The sculptures were like nothing we had ever seen before. Truly a once in a lifetime experience! However, next time we decided our bodies would probably prefer to visit Harbin during the Summer… and ironically, the next day I realized I had a rather mean sunglasses tan from all the reflected sun we caught at the Sun Island. Oops…