Festival Photos of Quebec Winter Carnival 2007

The Quebec Winter Carnival - A Festival of Heritage and Family Fun

The most colourful part of the Carnival is the brightly lit night parades. Every year some half a million spectators bundle up and line the snowy streets of the city. The parades feature fantastic floats, marching bands and many clowns. Even though it was freezing cold - about six degrees below zero - the night that I watched the parade, I could not believe my eyes when a band of young ladies marched by dressed in kilts.

To the Québécois, Carnaval is more than an annual celebration. It’s a state of mind, a place where for ten days every February, they glorify winter. It's a place where people's imaginations take over, where adults can feel like kids again. For the Québécois, winter is a time for rejoicing and what better way to do that than to join them in celebrating Carnaval.

Great photos from the Ivrea Carnival 2007 and Orange Fight

ITALY Ivrea Carnival, Piedmont - another colourful carnival, but with a different ending as the whole town partakes in a monstrous orange fight.
































The most ancient Carnival in the world is a unique event that takes place in the Medieval town of Ivrea, near Turin in Piedmont. During Carnival, Ivrea is illuminated with lights and colours and the air is saturated with intense penetrating perfumes of oranges. It is a festivity of ancient origins (end of 12th century) which recalls, among other things, the rebellion of Ivrea against the Ranieri tyranny, symbolized by the famous Battle of the Oranges.

The Carnival of Ivrea is the only Carnival in the world which has a real plot and tells a story in which the protagonists are not carnival characters, but ideal figures, the symbols of anarchic values and actors of ancient events.

Even if the original core of the legend has been gradually adapted over the years to the requirements of the various periods, there remain two main trends of events which make up the plot. The first goes back to the Middle Ages, when Federico Barbarossa installed the tyrant Raineri di Biandrate as lord of the town. For a long time the violence and abuse of power exasperated the people, who in 1194 rose up and destroyed the tyrant’s castle, the symbol of oppression. The same fate was reserved to another despot in 1266, the Marquis Gugliemo of Monferrato.

Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival

Officially, the festival starts from January 5th and lasts one month. However often the exhibitions open earlier and last longer, weather permitting. Ice sculpture decoration ranges from the modern technology of lasers to traditional ice lanterns. There are ice lantern park touring activities held in many parks in the city. Winter activities in the festival include Yabuli alpine skiing, winter-swimming in Songhua River, and the ice-lantern exhibition in Zhaolin Garden. Snow carving and ice and snow recreations are world famous.
The Harbin festival is one of the world's four largest ice and snow festivals, along with Japan's Sapporo Snow Festival, Canada's Quebec City Winter Carnival, and Norway's Ski Festival.