Sapporo Yuki Masturi - Hokkaido Feb 2012

Well it’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog, but I have been saving up for something BIG to write about... and here it is!!

Sapporo Yuki Matsuri is an annual event that happens in Hokkaido (the North part of Japan) for a week in February. I was lucky enough this year to join an exclusive group of JETs (who I like to call, ‘the cool kids’!) that headed up to the festival on Thursday 9^th to return back to Tokushima on Sunday 12^th.

So what can be said about the festival?? Well what I gathered, the festival consists of a few different sites around Sapporo that host giant ice and snow sculptures that have been crafted by people all around the world. From the simplest carving of an anime character, to a full blown ice palace complete with different coloured lights that light are linked up to a piano and that light when their specific note is played! Pretty impressive right?! Unfortunately I didn’t actually see a great deal of the actual sculptures as I was too busy enjoying the other sights and sounds that Hokkaido had to offer. In fact, I only went to one of the sights on Friday night and walked up and down one strip for about an hour, before we decided that one only needs to see so much snow sculptures before they all stop being impressive and start becoming the norm! Anyway, what I did see, I was highly impressed with. I’ve posted a few photos of my personal favourites for you to see!

One Piece - a really popular anime in Japan

Malaysia's entry

 

So what did I do that kept me away from the festival itself? Well, for one thing I was constantly bouncing from one food shop and restaurant to another, for as the saying goes, ‘When in Hokkaido, keep eating!’ The food in Hokkaido actually was rather exceptional, and myself and my friends took this saying to heart, trying to fit in as many different food opportunities as humanly possible before we had to return to the drab tastes of Tokushima.

So here is a quick run-down of the to-die-for meals that we consumed in Hokkaido.

Thursday dinner: A little izakaya which had the most delicious ‘meat-on-a-stick’ I’ve ever tasted! Add that to asparagus wrapped in bacon, the camembert blobs and quite possibly the most delectable tasting umeshu (plum wine) in the world, I considered it to be an awesome start to our food binge holiday.

Friday dinner: All you can eat crab. Need I say more?! I don’t know whether it is a British thing, or a Liz thing, but I have not had too much experience with eating crab. Every now and again I may have a little taste of it in some sushi, but that came ready to eat in one. So imagine my positive fear when we got to this restaurant and a platter of giant crab legs get placed out in front of me, with a veritable menagerie of different utensils I could use to crack, claw and scrape my way into getting the smallest morsel of meat! So, full of trepidation, I picked up the smallest, and safest looking legs, grabbed a pair of scissors, and began to panic, whilst the American and Canadian crab-eating veterans around me were already well into getting their bit of meat! Anyway, eventually with a lot of squirms from me and a great deal of encouragement and tips from my friends, I finally managed to successfully excavate my first bit of crab meat. And wasn’t I proud!?! After that there was no stopping me (ignoring the little squeaks that would accidently erupt from me!) and I proceeded to almost enjoy the cutting of crab legs with scissors to get to the sweetest crab meat inside! Yummy! Though I had to admit, everyone who went to the restaurant had definitely had their fill of crab by the end of the evening, and none of us will be having crab for a while yet to come!

Saturday lunch: Cheesecake. Simply cheesecake. As I will talk about later in this post, on Saturday we went to a town out of Sapporo called Otaru which is famous for its delectable cheesecake. Well we couldn’t say we’d gone to Otaru if we didn’t have any, so we promptly found ourselves a (what I like to think of as) tearoom and ordered our cake. Yum. Not the best cheesecake I’ve ever had, but definitely not the worst, and a really enjoyable start to my afternoon for sure! Along with a toasted egg mayo sandwich, nothing works better to get rid of a lingering hangover!

Saturday dinner: As if we hadn’t had enough ‘all you can eat meat’ from the night before, we decided to go for this tabehodai again – tonight’s meat? Lamb. This was experienced at the Sapporo Beer Factory, a huge building that was filled with the smoke and smells of a hundred different grills cooking the tasty meat. You knew the evening was serious when we sat down to find paper aprons presented to us (oh dear, I thought, what does this mean?!) actually it basically meant that if you weren’t careful (or even if you were) by the end of the meal you would have quite a lot of lamb fat splatters down your front (thank god I didn’t come with my parents... they would have hated it!) However, I quite enjoyed the freedom of having a hot plate placed in front of you along with a plate of meat and you could take as long or as little as you like in cooking and devouring the numerous trays. I was sharing a hot plate with a friend from Canada, Dinah, and we felt very proud at being able to consume a tray of meat each (these weren’t small trays!) However, this paled into insignificance compared to Naomi and Dani who managed to get through five plates of meat together over the course of the night! Crazy. Anyway, lamb in Hokkaido is extremely delicious, though I had definitely had enough of eating  lamb by the end of the night, and could do without eating it for quite a while longer yet!

Ok, so apart from eating, what kept us away from seeing the many different snow sculptures around Sapporo?

Well, what better way to get accustomed to the snow than by doing a bit of late night skiing/snowboarding! This was actually a really fun night. About 10 of us headed up to a local ski resort Thursday night to partake in a bit of night skiing! This was great fun, especially as the whole idea was Naomi’s, an Australian girl who had barely even seen snow before, let alone skied! I spent most of my evening following her down the slopes, trying to do a bit of teaching, though finding it fairly awkward as I had chosen to snowboard this particular night! It was great fun anyway and Naomi did a great job of getting down the slope quite a few times, with only minimal topples and falls. All in all it was quite entertaining!

 The Friday morning a group of us decided to head to the local zoo to see what it had to offer. I can honestly say it was the most fun I’ve ever had at a zoo, seeing animals that I’ve never seen before and just being able to go from exhibit to exhibit walking around in the snow was an exciting experience in itself. The highlights for me were seeing the red pandas, which were fairly active in the snow, and spending time watching a ‘slow loris’ creep around its enclosure! Possibly the cutest things I’ve ever seen! Add a couple of ice slides in the middle of the zoo and you have yourself a brilliant day!

Did I mention I got to hold a hawk?! (or whatever bird it was!)

Ice slides in the zoo!

soooooo cute!!!!

Snowballs in the street!

 So on Saturday, our final day in Hokkaido, we decided to take the train out to the smallish town of Otaru to see what it had to offer. This day just proved to me all the more how, sometimes, the best times are when you don't always plan every part of your day. Our main reason for going to Otaru was to have a piece of their famous cheesecake before we left. That being said, we were in no rush to get there, allowing us to happily meander around the snow covered suburbs, tossing the occasional snowball and just getting the chance to see a bit of normal life. That being said, we eventually stumbled across a rather strange place that we simply couldn’t refuse to enter. Basically it was a rather large building that had converted its interior into a room of ice! And not just your average room of ice either (because I've seen a lot of ice rooms in my day?!) no, this room of ice was created using ice blocks with various things frozen inside ranging firm piece of lavender and flowers, to fish as long as my arm and crabs bigger than my head! It was somewhat unnerving walking through the aptly named 'fish alley' feeling the eyes of all the fish following you as you walked between their walls. In fact, this place was probably one of the most random places I've ever been to. What from walking through walls of fish, chilling on a bed made of ice (literally), walking past a wall of mammoth fossils (well that was what the sign said!), navigating through a flower ice maze, to finally taking the ice slide back down to the ground floor! It was certainly a very bizarre experience but one that definitely added that little bit extra to the trip. I wish I could post photos of the place but unfortunately we weren't allowed to take our cameras in with us. You'll just have to take my word for it, it was completely random, but great fun!
After coming out of this ice house, we finally made it to, what I can happily compare to an English tea house, serving the famous Otaru cheesecake. Here we stopped for lunch and I thoroughly enjoyed my toasted egg mayo sandwich, double chocolate cheesecake slice all washed down with a tasty cup of tea! Bliss. Then it was back out in the snow to do a bit of sightseeing and shopping for omiyage (souvenirs and sweets to take back for friends and colleagues). Here we discovered a great little Studio Ghibli shop, bought a rather large amount of Royce chocolate potato chips (crisps covered in chocolate = simply divine) and we went into a shop where everything was ¥1050. Here I bought my only non-edible souvenir from Hokkaido - a curtain divider for a doorway which I used to replace my one hanging on the doorway leading to my bathroom.

So after Otaru (and loaded with a massive bag of omiyage) we decided to make our way back to the hotel to drop off our stuff before heading back out to the nearby 'snow dome' filled with the promise of more ices slides and fun! Unfortunately we left it a little too late and as we arrived the place was closing. It was a shame but we all felt like our day in Otaru more than made up for missing this. Plus, we had managed to go on ice slides on the past two days so we weren't too disappointed.
After this, it was time to head to or final dinner of the trip - our all you can eat Genghis khan lamb experience at the Sapporo beer factory (as already talked about above). After fully gorging ourselves on the food we headed outside and had a few spontaneous rounds of snow sumo before walking back to the hotel for a lamb-filled sleep.
The next day was spent simply travelling home (stopping to pick up yet more omiyage at the airport) lots of catching up with sleep was done on the journey home, but it was smoothly done and I got home without a hitch.
It really was a fantastic trip. Great people, awesome snow, and fantastic sites. One of my favourite trips and I am looking forward to going back to Hokkaido in the future!

Yes we do!!

.