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The two week Spring Festival season has offered a great chance for overseas students in Beijing to savor China's traditional culture.
Greg McCarthy from the United States is a master's degree student of international politics in the Beijing Language and Culture University. He has just returned to the capital from the annual ice and snow festival in Harbin in Northeast China.
McCarthy says the ice lanterns were amazing. He really admires the people who spent a long time in the freezing cold to sculpt such exquisite works of art.
With the outdoor temperatures reaching minus 20 degrees Celsius, Harbin, the capital of Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, is one of China's coldest cities.
More than 2,000 ice sculptures are on display this year in Harbin's Zhao-lin Park, where visitors can also take part in skating and other fun activities and tasting traditional Chinese food and snacks.
Invented by farmers and fishermen across the freezing plain in northwest China, ice lanterns represent the spartan life of ancient Chinese people.
By chiseling out a hole in an ice block, ancient people hid oil lamps in ice cubes to shield the flame in the windy night.
These days, the folk art has been developed into a lavish cultural event which attracts tens of millions of visitors to Harbin every year.
For the majority of the university's 300 foreign students who didn't make it to Harbin, an excursion to Long-qing Gorge in Yan-qing County in a suburb of Beijing, also shed light on China's ice lantern culture.
More news about the Spring Festival celebrations around the world: The London Eye, a landmark of London, has for the first time, transformed its blue lights into red and gold on the lunar New Year's Eve.
Traditional Chinese performances attracted a large crowd who were mostly Chinese.
The performances included singing, Kungfu or Chinese martial art shows and lion-and-dragon dances.
Local children from an international school dressed in bright costumes sang a traditional Chinese New Year song to entertain the crowd.
A series of other activities, including a New Year parade, acrobatics shows, Peking Opera performances, and Chinese traditional stilt dancing were also featured in other parts of London including the West End and Chinatown for the 15 day celebration which ended last week.
