roganjosh

After all that travelling around to get to Sapporo it was nice to spend a couple of days in a city just staying put! The Yuki Matsuri (snow festival) was huge, in terms of the size of the site, the size of the sculptures and the number of people that visited. The main action was centered around Odori park; a mile long strip of mini-parks criss-crossed by the main roads through the city, and along the whole length there were snow and ice carvings. The biggest sculptures were the backdrops to stages on which bands and other performances were dwarfed by the scale models of pyramids and sphinxes, a wooly mammoth the size of a house, and several movie and game tie-ins. Probably the most impressive of all the sculptures was a model of Inuyuma castle, that took several thousand people a month to make – with most of the intricate parts being created from moulds and then hand smoothed into place.

The smaller sculptures built by teams from around the world were often equally as detailed the professional jobs, and tended to be a lot funnier. Most of the ones involving Japanese characters were simply baffling, but almost every cartoon character in the world was on display somewhere or other, from Totoro to Thomas the Tank Engine, and I was delighted when I found Domo-kun standing to attention in one of the parks.

So wandering around Odori park, and the ice carvings down the road at Susukino, is pretty much how I spent my time in Sapporo! I had meant to go off into the Hokkaido countryside or go snowboarding, but it I never got round to it. I did manage a trip to the Sapporo beer museum (where I skipped the tour and went straight for the all you can eat and drink deal in the beer garden) and an evening in a little town called Otaru who have their own mini snow festival where they light up their streets and canals with snow candles (nice place, excellent sushi!) but apart from that I was mostly snow and people watching. Actually I probably would have made the effort to go snowboarding, but on what should have been my last day in Sapporo proper I managed to fall on my arse on some ice and bruise up my wrists, to the point where picking up my rucksack was agony! I figured trying to go sliding down a slope on a piece of wood in that state was too risky, and spent an extra day hanging out in the city while my bruises sorted themselves out a bit.

A bonus of bashing myself up though was that I was in the city the day after the snow festival ended, and it was quite fun walking around watching the demolitions teams bringing their excavators in to trash these intricate displays that had taken so long to build! Still, you can’t get too attached to your snowmen – and there’s always next year!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 5:42 am and is filed under travelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.