OMG snow... festival!! (image intensive)

Despite being stuck at home for a whole week due to the flu, I managed to make my way to Sapporo for the annual Snow Festival. I'll be damned if I let a piddling major respiratory infection get in the way of a five hundred buck plane ticket to Hokkaido. :/

First up, Fukushima Airport isn't a massively impressive place, but it serves its purpose. Most of the airlines there have automated check in terminals so it speeds things up a lot when you have no check-in baggage. There are no identity checks either, which worries me a little, but that's another story. The international terminal of the airport serves destinations such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Seoul, while the domestic terminal does flights to various other prefectures *except* Tokyo (d'oh!). I shouldn't complain though, it's really convenient to be living right within driving distance of a gateway to the rest of the country, and since there's a large (and free) parking lot on the premises it means I can go away as often as I can afford it. Here's a random shot of a figurine of the prefectural mascot I found at the gate. Up until now, I still can't figure out what it's supposed to be. O.o

The airport also produces its own free in-house magazine, called the Fukushima Airport Press, abbreviated to:

Kinda appropriate for the level of pride the town has in having the prefectural airport within its boundaries. XD

Sapporo is a huge city. It was nice to walk about in a place filled with tall office blocks and big name department stores on every corner for a change. Nice, until you realize that the soft snow that covers everything compacts into very slippery ice once everyone walks on it. The local councils are decent folks though, and provide bags of sand everywhere for pedestrians to cover the ice with, in the interest of safety and prevention of lawsuits.

A bit like one of those newspaper dispensers you see in New York, except these don't take money. ^^ The drawback of the sand of course is that it makes the pavements really muddy once the snow starts melting, so you end up with grubby shoes and trouser legs at the end of the day. The extra traction is welcome though; I reckon my knee would have been more buggered than it would have been if I had to slip and slide all the way through 3 days in the city.

Anyway, on to the festival. The main bit is held in the city's park, Oodoori Koen, a long expanse of recreational space in the middle of the urban sprawl stretching 12 blocks. Here, teams of people put together gigantic snow sculptures, some 5 storeys tall. The detail and scale of these things are quite impressive, from international landscapes to fantasy scenes. Here's the proof:

This one of Inuyama Castle in particular claimed to have needed a team of 3800 people and about 360 dump trucks of snow, 2200 tons in all to make. It boggles the mind. At night, the sculptures were backlit with shades of blue and green. Quite pretty actually. I would have taken all the pics at night except my camera falls flat at low light. I did manage to take pics of this model of the old Sapporo train station:

And the snow castle from before:

There were smaller models as well, including international entries:

This entry from Thailand took top honours. I wonder how they did it though... it looks as if it shouldn't hold up, but it does. Others included random mascot characters, a vending machine, a giant geta and a rather ironic (or fitting, if you think about it) one of Al Gore's head. My favourite one was this one though:

30th anniversary this year!

Another, smaller part of the festival is the ice sculpture display in the entertainment district of Susukino in downtown Sapporo. I'm told that this year they extended the display area another couple of blocks, ringing in a bumper crop of ice statues. Here are a few of the more impressive ones:

Those are real fish frozen into the ice, by the way.

Sponsors were abundant, using the event to promote their goods. The Bailey's ice bar was one of them, serving up shots of hot Irish cream from this joint:

I appreciate the giant bottle of Bailey's, and the extra large bottle of Chamisul as well. Mmmmm....

Lemon soju, anyone? ^^

Quite poetic really. It must have taken days, possibly weeks to make these displays, and once they're out there on the streets, they'll slowly melt away and be subject to airborne attacks from the local pigeons. Actually, come to think of it, right thinking birds would probably have flown south. The clean up must be something to reckon with anyway, considering the amount of runoff from all that melting show and ice. Thank goodness for sewerage and stormwater engineering!