night photography – Andrea Mai

In December, I took a two-week trip to China. We traveled to the North Eastern region of China. In the next month or so, I’m going to be posting photos from my trip on this blog and Instagram @andreamaicreative. I post here every Sunday, so you can follow my journey to China.

I’m not going to be showing my photo collections in any particular order, so this se of photos are actually from the middle of the trip. We went to the frozen city of Harbin, the most north eastern main city, close to the border of Russia. What happens with many bordering cities is that they influence each other, as people from both sides of the border migrate and bring their culture. Harbins architecture that is influence by Russia. During the winter, it reaches to temperatures like minus 30. It was -26 degrees Celsius when we were there. It gets extremely cold at night, so if you ever go there, pack many layer; you’ll need three layers of pants, at least! I think this is the coldest I have ever felt in my life, despite living in Canada. This would be the kind of weather they get in Quebec City. The top photo is from the snow sculpture exhibition in Taiyangdao Park.

At night, the city lights up and everything is very pretty. This is Saint Sophia Cathedral. The moon happened to be visible in the clear night sky.

This is Zhongyang Street, this is the main street for shopping. This street is closed off from cars, so you can wander the streets freely. Here you can get many local Chinese products, as well as Russian products, such as chocolates and vodka.

Here is the famous “popsicle” shop. Despite how cold it is, they serve these milky popsicles here. At first I was somewhat put off by the idea of eating a popsicle in the cold, but I was pleasantly surprised. It became one of the most enjoyable moments on the trip.

Beside the popsicle shop, there was a night market selling street food and dried goods. And next to that, there was an ice castle being constructed!

If you walk to the end of Zhongyang Street, you will reach the river and the Flood Control Success Memorial. The monument lights up at night and you can view the frozen river where people go ice skating. I even saw people flying drones over the river!