Sapporo Snow Festival

02.04.2009 - 02.07.2009

Last weekend we flew to Sapporo for the 60th annual snow festival. There were three main sections to the festival; one with ice sculptures, one with snow sculptures and another playland area. The large sculptures are made by the Japanese military and the rest are made by local groups. There were probably about 300 sculptures in all and about 5 very large ones.

This was our first time staying in a Japanese hotel. This was a business hotel and had been recently remodeled

Sapporo is known for its crab and here were some in a little pond outside of a restaurant.

Here is one of the ice sculptures. Those are real fish and crab inside. (dead of course)

This was a little train that you could ride that still ran on coal. They stopped it every other time around to put in a tiny piece of coal.

These next few pictures are of the very large sculptures. Quinn estimates one at over 60 feet. They had performers and shows on the larger sculptures. There were performances throughout the day.

We also went to the playland area but it was more set up for families. They had raft rides pulled by snowmobiles and giant slides made out of snow. I made my first snowman!

That night we ate at Ramen Alley. This is a little alleyway with about 15 or so Ramen noodle shops lining it. Here is a picture of everyone taking a picture. All famous sites in Japan are photographed about 1 million times per day.

Here they are cooking scallops inside of a shell on the grill. It looked really neat. We were too full to try one.

We went back to see the ice sculptures at night and they were even better with the lights shining on them. You could see all the details and texture. Each night people are carving new sculptures. They use chisels and chainsaws.

We went to Otaru the next day. It is about a 30 minute train ride from Sapporo to Otaru. It is known for its romantic canal street which is lined with old warehouses. There are also numerous glass blowing shops and music boxes. Can anyone say, Venice in Japan? I am wearing a mask in the picture to keep my face warm. It is very common to wear a mask in Japan when you are sick to protect others from catching your cold since you are often in close quarters with many other people. There go those curteous Japanese again! The reason we took this picture is because they built little teepee type structures around a lot of the trees and bushes in Sapporo. I wanted to see if anyone had any idea why they would do this. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Here we are on the romantic canal street.

We ate lunch in a really cool old warehouse. We had a crab lunch to celebrate Quinn's new job.

You may have heard of a Bento lunch before. Bento means boxed lunch in Japanese. Inside of the trainstation there was a department store with TONS of stands selling perfect little meals with tiny samplings of everything. You can get a little of the idea here. We spent 30 minutes walking around looking at all the food. That will give you an idea of how much there was!

Marketing in Japan is amazing. All of these people are waiting in line for a special type of carmel that I think is only sold in Hokaido. These little shops were all around the city and there were always people in line. There were security people holding up signs explaining at what times they would be restocking the shelves and people would get in lines hours ahead of time to be able to buy the carmels. There were even longer lines in the airport for these carmels. We were lucky enough to find a stand after passing through security to buy some of the carmels. I bet other people were made when they saw no line after the security check point. 10 tiny carmels for 9 dollars. They were good but I am glad I didn't wait in line.