Sapporo Yuki Matsuri 2008

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performers

ice lights

What a weekend! So much happened and so many pictures were taken, well into 200 of them. I will do my best though!

So On Saturday my co and I left Sendai at 11:30 on the sleeper train and headed into Hakodate. The sleeper train was pretty nice. You get your own little bunk in a small compartment of 4 bunks; 2 on top and 2 on bottom.I had a top bunk for both trips. The train gives you a really thick blanket, pillow, hanger, and yukata to sleep in. My co and I headed straight to bed and tried to sleep through the bumping and moving train. I got lucky and ended up sleeping for about 5 hours but my co wasn't as lucky. We arrived in Hakodate @ 6:30am on Sunday and headed straight to get a limited express ticket to Sapporo. The train to Sapporo took about 3 hours and we caught a little sleep and arrived in Sapporo at about 10am. The Sapporo station was really hopping with other visitors to the festival and to Sapporo itself. We found a coin locker to dump our stuff in and then headed out to see the festival!

The Yuki Matsuri has 3 different areas: Odori Park, Susukino, and Satoland. Each place has different things to you can do there. Odori Park is right down the street from Sapporo Station so we headed up there and started down the long like of giant snow art. The Snow festival has a lot of sponsorships and is helpful for upcoming movies or favorite Japanese characters or shows. Our first stop was to the Freedom site. Freedom is a recent favorite anime series and was situated in a rather kiddy part. There was a giant slide with huge lines of kids and a small train that you could ride around, like in Silver Spoons. It was so much fun to watch all the parents taking pictures or video of their kids going up and down the slide. As we continued walking down the park we found some great sculptures that included Al Gore, Thomas the Train, The comedian that goes "sonna no kankenai" (my students say it all the time), Hello Kitty, the Mr. Doughnuts animal, and many of others that are all in my pictures. On most of the larger sculptures we saw performers or sponsors talking with the crowd. There was a huge Egypt sculpture and a sculpture, my favorite, that had two children with the world between them that was surrounded by famous places and monuments. There was a smaller sculpture of Inuyama Castle and a little ski expo to watch. We then found the international competition and walked around and read all the plaques. There were a lot of amazing entries and the one I thought should have won was from Malaysia. It's of a native woman carrying her baby on her back and on the other side is 2 giant flowers. It was so detailed that I was amazed that it didn't win. The USA put in a jazz musician in memorial to New Orleans. They were all amazing. We rounded out the park and headed back towards the food stands and got a quick lunch of street food and then stumbled across the bus to Satoland.

Satoland is the kids area and about 20 minutes from the main sites. There is a giant snow slide, maze, snowman building, and plenty of tubes being pulled by snowmobiles. It was great fun! We walked around and then headed into the park and decided what we would wait in line for and what we needed to get done. So we went straight to the snowman building area, after trying to figure out where to get our stuff, started on our Amity snowman, a proud American snowman with three parts, eyes, a small nose and a mouth. He was very proud looking while he was standing with the other hundreds of snowmen. We then headed into the maze and purposely tried to get ourselves lost so make it last longer. I was shorter than the walls. We headed up into this giant snow house and took pictures above everybody and then headed back to Sapporo station to get some lunch.

Sapporo is famous for ramen and crab so we headed to a ramen shop in the station and got some amazing ramen. I am not a ramen fam myself but that ramen was really good. I will be getting more of it whenever I can. After lunch we headed back out to the festival and went to Susukino. Susukino is where all the ice sculptures are. We saw awesome animals and a small ice skating rink that are all situated in front of Sapporo Tower. There was a piano player who would start playing and then the lights would follow along and light up all the ice. It was beautiful and so much fun! After Susukino we headed back to the station and headed out to Otaru where our hostel was. (this is continued in the next blog)

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