Snow Festival

Well I know I said I was gonna post up photos of our latest skiing trip but well...I'm not because I'd rather talk about the world famous Sapporo Snow Festival!! Yes...since I arrived here last year, people have asked me have I heard of the Snow festival and am I gonna go to it etc etc...suffice to say...there was a lot of hype about the snow festival and...it was well deserved.

And so...yesterday, I went to the Odori Koen site for the snow festival (there are 3 different sites). The weather was great...and by great I mean it was snowing a shitload for the entire day and night!! Seriously...it was hard walking around the place...and seeing whats in front of you was hard enough let alone taking photos...but regardless of all that...a shitload of photos were taken...

For those of you who don't know...the Sapporo Snow festival is basically a free showcase of a shit load of snow and ice sculptures - some of them absolutely massive!! And these sculptures are kind of scattered around Odori Koen (the others are in Susukino and...this other place that I'm not sure of...heh). I can go on and on about it but methinks photos describe it a lot better than I do so...here goes...


Here's Ben (my younger brother) in front of the "Freedom Cup noodle" sculpture...one of the many huge centerpieces of the Odori site...


Here's me (duh) in front of the Okinawa Aquarium sculpture...note the absolutely massive whale sculpture...


"Kingdom of Dreams and Magic" - the unstoppable Disney empire...lead by Stitch...


A bit of...in house cleaning was in order...


In front of the many baseball sculptures...note the heavy snowfall...it was like that for most of the day...


The "AntiJap Monsters" - a visual kei rock band that played live at the festival from abt 6pm-8.30pm...this is the sorta shit you'll NEVER see live and in the open back in Aus...see where the lead singer is placing the microphone???


The "AntiJap Monsters" abt 1hr later...please note...the temperature was about -4degrees celcius...and the lead singer had no shirt on...also note that the ground was quite slippery with snow and ice...and yes...that is a mosh pit in front of the stage there...it was beautiful really *sniff*


Here's me again in front of another huge ass centerpiece...everything was definitely much prettier at night...

So that's the Odori koen site for the snow festival. Don't think that this is the last that you've heard about the snow festival...I'm gonna keep going on about this thing until you're all sick of it because well...this is pretty much the main tourist attraction on Sapporo's yearly calander...

(p.s. only 2 weeks left to go now...my return to Sydney creeps up ever so closer and with it...an increasing sense of I DON'T WANT TO GO BACKness)