Sapporo Snow Festival Day 1

Instead of writing about how we traveled to Sapporo, I created this graphic to depict the details.

After a nap, dinner, and donning our jackets we headed out to see the ice sculptures that were just around the corner from our hotel. The only ice sculptures, I think, I've ever seen have been on cruises. They're nice but these blew them out of the water, well freezer, umm not sure where I'm going with this, either way they were amazing.

Yes that is fish frozen in the ice.
The ice sculptures were displayed/created in the middle of the road for four blocks.
                        The girls in the light tunnel                    Big Sapporo beer

Owl native to Hokkaido
Old Man and the Sea, not really

Creating an ice canvas for the artist

After a long day of traveling, a good dinner and some awesome ice sculptures, we hit the sack. Check back soon for day two.
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Preparation for the 62nd Sapporo Snow Festival
One of the many large snow sculptures
Finally after five months of planning and waiting, it was time for the 62nd  Sapporo Snow Festival.  Sapporo is located on second largest island of Japan, Hokkaido,  has an average annual snowfall of about 200" and is nearly at sea level. Before you ask, yes, this is the same Sapporo as the Sapporo beer. According to the Sapporo Snow Festival website, "the first Sapporo Snow Festival was held in Odori Park in 1950, with only six snow statues made by local high school students. Since then the Snow Festival has constantly expanded, gaining worldwide recognition. In 1955, five years after the first Snow Festival, the Self Defense Force joined in and built the very first massive snow sculpture, for which the Snow Festival has become famous." During the snow festival there is also an international snow sculpture contest (pictures), and an ice sculpture festival.

Making of a Snow Sculpture. You can see more pictures here.
We learned about the snow festival very quickly when we came to Japan. It is one of those Japan bucket-list items that appears in every guide book about Japan. From the pictures and reading about it we knew that we wanted to see it. We also knew that it would be very busy and potentially very expensive, so we needed to plan ahead, way ahead. In September we booked a room at the Tokyu Inn with no clue how much the airline tickets would be. It wasn't a problem because the hotel didn't require any kind of deposit nor would they charge us for cancelling. We knew that the cheapest flights to Sapporo would be through SkyMark (Japan's SouthWest) but we could only book the flights two months in advance. SkyMark offers one-way flights for ¥5,800 (~$70) but they only offer five of them and the next pricing tier is ¥9,800 (~$120). Chelsae and I learned this the hard way when we flew to Okinawa. This time around we knew we all had to be on our computers at 9:30 a.m. on December 7th ready to buy our tickets. Of course to purchase your ticket you have to fill out the usual personal information across a couple of webpages and can take a few minutes. The problem was we wouldn't have "minutes" to do this. To give us a fighting chance I used a Firefox add-on to write a macro that would fill out all the information and proceed through the webpages in a matter of seconds. 

Apparently others had this exact idea, at least the part about logging on at 9:30 a.m., because the website loaded as if on a dial-up connection. Once loaded we saw the flight we wanted was already sold out, so we frantically discussed which flight to get next. We decided on the earlier one and then clicked play on the macro. Seconds later, Seth and I had our cheap flight but the girls didn't make it, that sounds familiar. They ended up getting the second tier tickets but at least we got two cheap tickets. Three days later we repeated this process but we bought tickets to fly back into Ibaraki's small airport. Ibaraki wasn't really a choice at first because there was no public transportation to get there, but the price to fly back to Haneda/Tokyo was doubled. At that price we could rent a car to get back to Tsukuba and still save money. Being a much smaller airport, all four of us easily reserved the cheap seats. We also decided to pay for these with Yen at a 7-Eleven instead of using our US credit cards. This type of transaction is another interesting thing about Japan. I printed out my confirmation papers and took to the 7-Eleven. After some confused looks from Apu, I paid my Yen and he stamped my receipt. So let me get this straight, I have to keep this 2" x 4" receipt with a red stamp for two months and present it at the airport to fly home. Well I hope this works.

To be continued.....
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We want to keep the blog in chronological order but we are posting out of order, sorry. The "newest" is Long Ride to Lakeside Pool.

Thanks for stopping by.
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