…And the world would be a much sadder place without Doctor Evil.

Meanwhile, I have been overcome by the irresistible urge to lick a telephone pole. Indeed, I have survived seven days in the perpetually subzero temperatures of the Northeast without losing any extremities, with the strangeness of people in tour groups (like the mother and daughter who bought 230 bucks worth of chestnuts and five pairs of foam-soled furry purple boots), and the horror of public squat toilets. I reckon that’s good enough.

Day 1: Stepping off the plane in Harbin was like stepping into a meat freezer. It really is freaking freezing outside, dropping to about -25°C at night, and thirteen layers of clothing really are necessary. But don’t believe all those horror stories about instant frostbite and your ears falling off without you noticing – I have yet to see an earless, noseless local wandering the streets.

Harbin is really pretty. In some parts, the western-style façades, the bell-shaped roofs, the Russian on the shop signs and the accordion music makes it seem as if you’re walking through Old Moscow. At night (which is really more like mid-afternoon, the sun sets at about four-thirty) all the shops and ice sculptures by the roadside are lit up and it’s as if the old-school streetlamps (you know the type, sturdy wrought iron split like cherries into two lights at the top, last seen in Europe about a hundred years ago) are still burning kerosene. The only thing that was missing was a fresh snowfall, but our tour guide (twenty-eight years old, unmarried to the point of desperate, the poor girl, practically willing to marry any Honky bachelor she can get her hands on) said that it hadn’t snowed since Christmas Eve. All the leftover sludge has solidified into ice and these boots really weren’t made for walking – on slippery surfaces. Bugger.

Day 2: We were browsing a reasonably upmarket department store half an hour before closing time. The bottom storey sold nothing but boots – all lined with fur and fleece on the inside. (And thus we solve the mystery of why Northern women can wear normal leather pumps and heels in -20°C temperatures without freezing to death). We entered the supermarket section upstairs but quickly tired of it – Colgate looks the same in any country. But as soon as we tried to leave from where we entered we were pulled back by the security guard and informed that we were only allowed to leave via the checkouts. Fair enough, we thought, maybe it’s a security thing and they need us to go through the sensors on the other side. And then we started walking. And walking. And walking. It was worse than going through the Ikea maze, just to get out of a simple supermarket, I do not lie. It took us fully eight minutes, and probably 2ks of walking, to get to the checkouts, which were, infuriatingly, directly opposite the entrance and contained no security sensors whatsoever. Right on the dot of eight o’ clock, closing time, a shrill alarm rang and all the shop assistants literally ran out of the place, in a straight line one after the other, like the building was on fire. By the time we’d escaped the supermarket maze they’d turned off the escalators and all the lights. The bottom storey was completely deserted and all the shoes had already been packed away. If we’d been a minute or two slower they would have locked the doors. This is indeed an unsettling phenomenon – why do these people hate their jobs so much?

Day 3: We drove for so long that by the time we arrived at our destination for lunch, it was two hours before sunset. The village (population: 500), simply called Snowtown for reasons that will soon become obvious, is another level of gorgeousness altogether. It really is completely covered in about a metre of untrodden snow, piled up at the sides of the walkways and weighing down the tiles on the roofs. We took a horse-drawn sleigh ride through the winter wonderland everyone’s been dreaming of. It was just like one of those thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles of endless mountains covered by snow-capped pines that no one can ever complete because all the pieces look exactly the same. And the sun was setting and the wind was lifting drifts of snow into the air and… only the most ineloquent, unpretentious word can describe it: wow.

At night I nearly froze my face off after making the mistake of accompanying DD outdoors with his video camera and standing in one place for fifteen minutes while he filmed a single house for the entire period of time (boys and their toys, I swear). But the fireworks were awesome – the young people in Snowtown basically have no other form of amusement so the stalls loaded with a veritable army stockpile of fireworks occupy five blocks along the main street.

One thing that erred on the side of dodgy was the accommodation. In the North, it’s so cold all year round that the people don’t sleep on normal beds; they sleep on ‘kangs’, big stone blocks heated by a coal fire burning underneath, big enough to fit the whole extended family. Now that was all fine and good until they informed us that they’d arranged for five or six people to a kang – and this was after we’d paid 4500 Yuan each for rooms with separate toilets! To top it all off, they expected all 22 of us to share one dingy squat toilet with no hot water, and if you needed to go, you had to take someone else with you because the door required bodily force to be opened from the inside. A lot of people got really pissed off so they eventually moved us to a proper hotel with hot water and beds. Turns out the hotel’s actually an athlete’s village for the Chinese army athletes utilising the ski slopes a few hundred metres away, v. v. exclusive and never opened to the public. So it was all good – we had a decent place to sleep, a place to shower, and I could smile at all the young, nubile athlete boys out my door (YES people, the unthinkable has finally happened – I shall concede that Asian guys are not that bad after all. But only the ones with their natural hair colour. Although some of the others aren’t that bad at all. Oh god. All my standards are being lowered. Somebody slap me, hard, if I start going out with a weedy, personality-less Star Trek weirdo mouth-breather with peach fuzz, bleached hair and a rat’s tail.)

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