26th Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival

The 26th China Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival kicked off on 5th Jan, 2010and will last for about one month. The festival is divided into five major parts; namely ice and snow arts, ice and snow culture, ice and snow tourism, ice and snow sports and ice and snow business and trade. Over a hundred events will be held during the festival. The festival is cooperating with internationally renowned brands in order to create a Disneyland made entirely out of ice and snow. There will also be an Ice and Snow World that will be built into a Hollywood ice and snow paradise. Moreover, competitors from different countries and regions will be taking part in the snow and ice sculpting competition as well as winter swimming competitions, thus making the festival more internationalized.
































Photos by REUTERS and AP via telegraph

Happy New Year to All the Readers

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to. ~Bill Vaughn

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No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. ~Charles Lamb

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Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. ~Hal Borland

The merry year is born
Like the bright berry from the naked thorn.
~Hartley Coleridge

New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights. ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

The Old Year has gone. Let the dead past bury its own dead. The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time. All hail the duties and possibilities of the coming twelve months! ~Edward Payson Powell

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right. ~Oprah Winfrey

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850