Harbin - Zhongyang street

Zhongyang street is the main street of Harbin. It's a pedestrian shopping street, mostly clothing and Russian markets. The Russian influence is everywhere in the center of Harbin. The buildings have Russian / European style, very often names of shops are written both in Chinese and Cyrillic (making it very easy to read as you can imagine for foreigners like us). If it wasn't for all the Chinese people you could feel in Europe. Along the street there are different ice sculptures. Despite the cold a lot of people were outside walking and shopping. Most likely doing they Chinese New Year shopping, in a similar way we do the last week-end before Christmas.
Now I would like to share 2 key learnings from Harbin:
1) if you stop moving you will freeze. It is very important to keep on moving or enter in a shop every 15min to warm up. This gives you the opportunity to explore the different Russian shops selling imported Russian products such as chocolate (who would want to buy Russian chocolate, I still wonder?), Matryoshka (the Russian dolls), different army outfits, candies and some weird things like dried frogs or deer penis (apparently typical Chinese remedy for a lot of issues. I will let you investigate further if you want to know more).
2) ice is slippery. It may sound obvious but when you're not used to walk in the snow or on ice, it leads yo to some scary unbalanced steps or even falls. Luckily when this happens usually a couple of Chinese men run to come and help you back on your feet, and that's very nice. Now I still have a question I would like to share with you. We all know that when it's -15 or -20C water freezes. If you're Chinese you have a tendency to spit on a regular basis (apparently the spitting ban for the Olympics never made it to Harbin as it was non stop all around us), the saliva will end up on the ground and eventually will freeze thus being dangerous as someone may fall sliding on it. So what do you do? Quit spitting? No, you hire people to scratch / remove the frozen saliva from the ground, especially on the steps of stairs. Sometime the Chinese logic is a mystery to me...
This said here is the link to the video of Zhongyang street.