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| One of the many large snow sculptures |
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.....
8:00 AM |
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