Winter in Dalian

Skiing, Sliding, Ice Skating and much more

This winter season, it was the first time for us to stay in Dalian. In past years, we used to travel back home to Germany to see our family and go skiing in the alps. This year, as you all know…well COVID kind of got in the way.

Dalian isn’t the typical city you would think of for winter sports. It is usually very dry in winter with little snow. On the other hand, temperatures drop to as much as -20 degrees centigrade or more, also for a long time. That’s perfect conditions for ice skating.

Even though we did not have proper equipment, we had a lot of fun skating on many small frozen lakes.

Another fun thing was „broom ball“, a very funny variant of ice hockey. You basically hit a ball with a broom and everyone is trying to move on the ice with „normal“ shoes instead of skates. It was enormous fun and we can only recommend it to anyone, anywhere.

Dalian Happy Snow World

Dalian Happy Snow World is quite near to the airport and should be easy to find. You will find everything you need in regard of equipment there. From ski to snowboards, helmets, boots you get everything there. The equipment is quite good, only top brand equipment (Völkl, Atomic, Burton etc.). We paid around 500 RMB for a whole day ticket including rental fee for everything, for 2 persons total.

There are 3 tracks, a beginner, intermediate and pro track. The beginner track is almost flat, but i guess that’s what you are looking for as a beginner. The pro track was OK, long enough and fast. It’s about 600m long, i cannot really tell the vertical height difference.

Pictures above: A funny thing we saw first here in China, kind of „buffers“ for your back and knees in form of stuffed animals. They come in all kind, Pikachu, pandas, turtles, pigs. A practical thing for sure!

Another fun thing to do is…not so obvious…throwing boiling water into the air, which, if it is cold enough (lower -17 centigrade) somehow directly converts to water vapor (its called Mpemba effect, feel free to look it up). I have to say i wasn’t too amazed to take pictures 8am in the morning on a weekend at -20 degrees, but it returned some nice pictures and my wife being happy 🙂

Below: My wife build a bed for the poor farm dog Bo who had to stay out in the cold. He didn’t like it at first, but then seemed to feel cozy in his new home. Those two pictures are so cute, i had to post them.