64th Annual Sapporo Snow Festival

At the Sapporo Brewery!

Ok, before I get into the good stuff, I just want to say that when I started this blog as Damian and I were about to begin this adventure, I thought "Beth & Damian Take on Japan" was a great name for a blog! In hindsight maybe it should have been called "Beth Conquers Japan and Damian Visits Once in Awhile." As many of you already know, Damian unexpectedly deployed a few weeks ago and at this point we are not really sure for how long, and yes I am well aware that he just got back! Anyway, Damian and I had put the Sapporo Snow Festival on our Japan Bucket List before we even got here and booked it a few months ago...I was luckily able to change the ticket at the last minute and bring my friend Laura instead.

Before I tell you all about the Snow Festival in all it's awesomeness, a quick geography lesson for those of you who are not as familiar with Japan as I have become! I live in Yokosuka which is on the mainland island of Japan called Honshu (han-shoe). The northern island of Japan is called Hokkaido (ho-ki-do) and is where Sapporo is located. We flew out of Tokyo and it was a 90 minute flight! Not too bad! It was a little chilly in Yokosuka when we left, but when we touched down in Sapporo it was snow covered and much colder! We went with a tour organized by the travel company on the base and there were 3 buses full! There were some things planned for us and other time was free time to explore on our own. The trip was 3 days and 2 nights. The Sapporo Snow Festival is one of Japan's largest winter events and each year about 2 million people from all over the world come to see the snow and ice sculptures that line the main street in Sapporo City for 7 days. The first Snow Festival was in 1950 with just a few sculptures made by local high school students. Now some of the sculptures are so large it takes over a month to build them with teams of people. It is truly a winter wonderland! Sapporo was put on the map in 1972 when the Olympics were held there. Sapporo is famous for it's beer, ramen, and the Snow Festival!

Lake Shikotsu

After arriving and having some lunch (noodles of course), we got on the bus and headed towards Lake Shikotsu which is located on the south-west part of Hokkaido. It is the 2nd deepest lake in Japan and the 8th largest lake by area! At the deepest part it is almost 1200 feet deep! *Random fact alert: It is the #1 water quality coldest unfrozen lake! Wrap your head around that fact!!! We went to this lake to attend the Shikotsu Lake Ice Festival! The lake was beautiful and the sun was shining and the reflection of the mountains was absolutely gorgeous! The sun being out definitely helped to keep the chill off! I was still all bundled up, snow pants, boots, scarf, gloves, I was not messing around with cold weather on this trip!

Yennies!!!

One of the many ice slides

At the Shikotsu Lake Ice Festival they had a huge area with "buildings" made of ice- sort of like caves that you could walk through and climb on. One of the coolest ones was a giant cave that is also covered in evergreen and then more ice. Upon walking into the cave it smelled like Christmas! They also had random areas with fish frozen into giant blocks of ice. It was all really cool. The ice is all made with the water from the lake! They also had a little ice rink and slides made from ice for the kids (and fun adults too)... I couldn't resist a good ice slide and I couldn't believe how fast I went with my snow pants on! when you get to the bottom you sort of skid to a stop on the snow covered ground. One of the caves also had Yen coins that people had put into the ice, which was really neat and looked so pretty. At night they light up all the ice caves, but we only stayed a little while as we had lots more to see!

All you can eat...

...and drink!

After checking into the hotel and settling in for a few minutes we headed as a group to the Sapporo Beer Garden for 90 minutes of all you can eat and drink fun! It was BBQ style so of course I planned ahead and ate a little something before we got there. At our table was a huge plate of lamb, huge plate of beef, and large plate of seafood (Damian would have loved it)! Oh and a large plate of cabbage and bean sprouts and some rice. You cook everything right in front of you- the only thing was that is was a giant room full of people cooking meat so they give you plastic bags to put your jacket and purse into so it doesn't smell. My hair smelled like BBQ meat for 3 days after this night! Luckily, my friend Laura does eat meat so she was able to put a little dent into all this food at our table! Oh and on top of the all you can eat meat it was also all you can drink... and not just beer. They had chu-hi's, whiskey, beer, and other random beverages! We started with chu-hi's (plum and lemon) and then onto beer (since it was a beer garden). It was pretty fun... 90 minutes went pretty fast after the first few chu-hi's! That night we walked through some of the Snow Festival to see it all lit up, but planned to return the next day to see the rest!

The Clock Tower

Government Building in back

The next day we took off exploring. The first stop was the Clock Tower which is a National Important Cultural Property of Japan. Built in 1878, it was  originally constructed as a military drill hall for Sapporo Agricultural College. The Agricultural College was a major event in those days for Sapporo which only had a population of about 3000. William Smith Clark the President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, was hired by the Japanese government to help get this school up and running. The students were first sent to Tokyo to learn English since all the courses were taught in English by the faculty from Massachusetts. It was one of the first schools of higher education in Japan. The Agricultural College was the beginning of the growth of Sapporo and it's development as a center of modern Japanese culture! The Japanese volunteer spoke great English and gave us a personal tour and history of the building as he walked through with us... pretty awesome private tour! When we were first walking towards the tower I said to Laura that it looked like it belonged in New England- I had no idea about the history and how important Massachusetts played in the development of this area of Japan! Pretty cool! The tour guide from the Clock Tower suggested we stop by the old Government Building in Sapporo which was only a few blocks away... it was an old brick building and beautiful with all the snow all around. This building is also a National Important Cultural Property!

Snow Miku!!! 

Later that day we explored more of the main Snow Festival and also the Susukino Ice Festival which was a few blocks away! One of the coolest parts was the snowboard and ski area right in the middle of the festival. It was made using scaffolding and LOTS of snow! It was right in between the city streets and a few times a day they had people snowboarding down and doing tricks and competing! It was pretty amazing! The picture on the left is so dark because it was snowing so hard when I took it! They played music and had announcers for the snowboarders too! It was neat to stand there and watch them- some of them were really good! Snow Miku is this anime character that is all over the place in Sapporo. I liked her... in her regular non-snow form she has long crazy blue hair, big blue eyes, and she wears short skirts and high boots... quite an interesting character if you ask me! The biggest snow sculpture of the whole festival was this one with a Japanese character in Hawaii! This was a big deal because Hawaiin Airlines now has a direct flight from the airport up there to Hawaii so this sculpture was showing the new relationship! It was enormous as you can see in the picture below! It snowed so hard that day that a lot of the sculptures were getting snow on them and looking different and not as "polished" as they had just the night before! The festival also had lot of yummy snacks to get along the way... some of the things we had were chocolate covered bananas, hot chocolate, hot kahlua, ice cream, sweet potato fries, and some more hot chocolate!

At night the sculptures are all lit up and some of them do amazing light shows on the actual sculptures! I took videos but am having a hard time uploading them here... sorry! They also had stages on many of the larger sculptures and had live entertainment throughout the day and night. We saw some random Japanese pop bands, we were able to catch the Army band from Camp Zama (located close by to us in Japan) who were really great and entertaining, and also some Japanese game! Laura and I found ourselves watching some Japanese game where they say some words and then you hold up a flag in each hand and depending on what they say (colors and up/down) you move the flags up or down... well... neither Laura or myself are that great with our Japanese but somehow ended up sitting on the stage playing in this little game show! Needless to say we were eliminated in round 1 since we just couldn't keep up with what they were saying... it was hilarious!!!

USS George Washington

The sailors from the Misawa base here in northern Japan made a snow sculpture of the USS George Washington! Whoop whoop! The sailors were standing around guarding their beautiful work of art so I told them Damian was on the ship and they cleared off some of the snow for a picture! They did a really great job on it! There were a bunch of smaller snow sculptures from all over the world, Thailand, Iceland, Finland, and one from Sapporo's sister city, Portland, Oregon!!!! There were lots of Japanese anime and cartoon characters that we are not too familiar with... except for Hello Kitty! There was also owls, snakes, penguins, dolphins, elephants, and other designs! A lot of the historical buildings in Sapporo were sculpted and I can't even begin to imagine the planning that goes into building one of these with the very intricate detail.

Sapporo is famous for having amazing ramen and on our final day we went in search of "Ramen Alley" a tiny little alley with a bunch of little ramen restaurants that seat maybe 10 people. It was pretty awesome actually! We found it by some miracle- if we blinked we may have walked by this alley on the street! We went into a tiny little ramen shop and it was sooooo incredibly oishii! The noodles are just perfect and the veggies! The whole thing is like a masterpiece! Laura and I ate noodles every single day if not twice a day on our trip! Our flight got delayed on the way home due to the amount of snow we got while we were there, but we made it back to base around midnight. A very busy trip, but we saw a ton! Stay tuned for the next adventure...

Japanese Word of the Day:
Samui (sa-moo-ee): Cold