snow festival

Okay, I know I wrote a very short entry about Wednesday (I had forgotten I'd set it up so I could email posts, like from my phone). But I'm going to start at the beginning again to avoid forgetting anything.

Wednesday

We left the dorm around 11:30 and got to the airport at about 1. We ahd to go to the travel agency desk to get our tickets and then went through security. No one ever asked for our ID to make sure we were really us. There was a yellow airplane with pokemon painted on the outside and it was parked at our gate... and then it even turned out to be our airplane! The headrests and curtains had pokemon on them, and so did the paper cups and the flight attendants aprons. We were sitting right in front of the wing on the window, and there was no one next to me so we had the row to ourselves. Landing was uneventful, except for all the snow. I was really excited. We took the train from the airport to Sapporo (I put my boots on and my gym shoes in my backpack). Then we had to find the hotel. It was snowing pretty hard and by the time we got to the hotel we were all snowy. A lady ran out into the foyer and brushed the snow off us and took our backpacks and put them on a cart for us. The hotel asked for our passports to photocopy. The room was huge. We had three two person beds (that were not a full double bed) and a table and a flat screen tv and a really big bathroom with a separate room for the shower. After we put down our stuff, we went back out and looked at the snow sculptures, walking from the east end to the west end of the park and back. They didn't photograph that well at night. I got a venison steamed bun that was really good. After we were cold, we went back and decided to go to the mall attached to the hotel by an underground passage. Which ended up not being heated. Then it was past 8 so the stores were closed, so we had to runoutside to the building with the food court. I got a bowl of noodle soup, with a shumai and a dumpling and a miniature steamed bun from Mr. Donut. I also bought a hello kitty for my phone that is dressed like a snow bunny that is on a lot of hokkaido posters. And a hello kitty sitting on an ANA airplane.

Thursday

We left pretty early, stopping to take pictures of a clock tower building in Sapporo that's supposed to be the only remaining Russian structure, and took the train to an outdoor museum. It had a lot of historic buildings that had been moved to the site and you could go inside them all and look at what the interior looked like in the olden days. Luckily I wore my boots that are easy to take on and off, because you had to put on slippers for all the buildings. We also rode on a sleigh pulled by a horse. We walked around the entire place, which took about 4 hours. Then we walked back to the train (we had taken a bus there because the japanese lady we asked how to get there took us to the bus stop on the other side of the station and the bus went straight there and was due in five minutes). There was 15 minutes before the next train so we went to the grocery store next to the station and bought food for lunch. Then we took the train to a different station and walked to a chocolate museum/factory run by a company that only sells their cookies in Hokkaido. They gave us a sample one and it was really good. The building looked very European, kind of like a castle. It was pretty near the mountains, and it looked very pretty in the snow. Inside was really fancy and castle-y looking too. They had rooms of hot chocolate cups and chocolate packaging and a place where you could watch the factory make the cookies. They had snowmen with different faces lined up around the top of the building and at the store at the end, they had ice cream in snowmen and I got raspberry ice cream. My snowman is scowling. Then we walked to the subway and took it back to downtown. Silke wanted to go up the tower at one end of the park, but the wait was 40 minutes to go up. We'd found onthe map of the mall a grocery store so we went there and bought food for dinner and breakfast. We went back and ate and watched this tv station that had english-language movies with japanese subtitles. The movie was about a pretend evil version of microsoft. It was kind of confusing.

Friday

Friday morning I decided to wear my gym shoes because my boots were making my feet hurt walking around all day. We checked out of the first hotel and put our backpacks in a luggage locker at the train station under the park so we wouldnt have to carry them around all day. It was nice. We looked at the snow sculptures in the daylight and took pictures. We also went to the greenhouse in the botanical garden, which was very green and humid. Then we finished looking at the snow sculptures andwent into the underground mall to find something to eat for lunch. We ate at a bakery and I got a pizza calzone and a chocolate chunk scone. Then it was almost time to go to the new hotel, so we got our stuff from the locker and went to the fish market and looked at lots and lots of crabs and fish. I bought some dried salmon. It was the least intimidating thing there. And was tasty. It made me really want to eat crab, though. The sheet of paper we had from the travel agency had one hotel on it, so we went there and tried to give them the room ticket and then it turned out we were at the wrong hotel, so we had to walk to the other one(which we had been very close to at the fish market). We went and put our stuff down and sat around resting for a while andwatching the BBC. Around 4 we headed out to the streetcar and went to a ropeway/cable car thing that took you to the top of the mountain. It had started to snow, though, so it wasn't as clear as might have been hoped for going to a lookout, but it was still very pretty to see all the lights at night. Also, I'd never been to a mountain in the winter before. They had a bus with caterpillar wheels to take people from the top of the ski lift to the building at the top of the mountain. We wandered around and took some pictures and shopped in the store (I bought a magnet, a couple keychains and a stuffed hello kitty (well, it was actually Daniel, Kitty's boyfriend) dressed as an Ainu. He is very cute). Then we went back on the caterpillar snow bus and at the ski lift there was a bar inside an igloo that hada lot of icicles and lights inthe walls. It was really pretty but also kind of small. Then we took the cable car back down and took the streetcar back to the end. We went to the department store across from the streetcar terminal and got some food in the basement for dinner and breakfast and lunch the next day - I had a little package of spaghetti that I didn't eat the previous night and I got a package of crab meat to go with it. I also got a small loaf of brown bread with raisins and a yogurt. We looked at about half the ice carvings that were in the street outside the department store onthe way tothe hotel and went back and watched the BBC some more and went to sleep.

Saturday

Saturday was a veryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy long day. Again we ate and left the hotel by 9 and put our stuff in the luggage locker at the subway station. We took the subway to the zoo and walked around there for 4 hours. It was kind of sad because the animals weren't in natural-looking habitats and the cages were smallish and plain. Thereseemed to be a lot of outside space but mostly it didn't look like they cleared the snow for the animals to go out in the winter. They had the oldest lion in Japan and he kept roaring and the little kids were hiding. There was a pretend mountain with lots of Japanese monkeys (like, the kind that live in Japan natively). It was surprisingly big but almost all the buildings looked really old (which is probably why they had old looking cages and not nice modern natural looking ones like in America). They did have a bird house with a huge open room with a lot of tropical birds and a flock of flamingos in it. And the seal trainer had a seal doing its checkup stuff on the sidewalk (granted, it was covered in snow and the other seals looked jealous) outside the seal area instead of like at lincoln park zoo where the trainer goes in to the exhibit. It was kind of weird. Silke said she hadn'tbeen to a zoo since she was a small child and that this zoo was somuch bigger than the one in Germany that she'd been to. We went back to the subway and went back downtownand looked at all the icesculptures in the daylight. One of the kids from my Japanese class last year at UIC is teaching English in Hokkaido and hewas going to the snow festival too, so we met for ramen for dinner. The teachers at his schoolhad given him recommendations, but the first choice wasn't open yet, so we went to the second choice. It was really good. Ramen is supposedto be one of the local specialties in Sapporo (Hokkaido seems to havea lot of flavors of candy and types of cookiesthat you can only get there). It was nice to see someone from home, and he said that I was the first person from Chicago he'd seen since he came to Japan in August. It made me really sad on the airplane back to Tokyo, though, I wished I was going back to Chicago. We walked back to the luggage locker and got ourstuff and walked to the trainto get to the airport. It was starting to snow again. We got to the airport too early, but it was nice to sit down and not do anything for a while. I got a pudding in a little glass jar. It was tasty. Our flight ended up leaving 10 minutes late. In the airplane, we had to go up a staircase to the second level of the airplane. We had windows, though. I got lemonade to drink. Silke for some reason had bought "Breakfast at Tiffany's" in English (with some things explained in Japanese) and I read that on the way back. I think I've read it before, though, and I know I've seen the movie. It was just past 11 whenwegot off the plane. The train line we took to the airport had already stopped running, so we hadto take themonorail and thenchange trains twice. It was a little worrisome that we might miss the last train, but we got on the second to last rapid train going in this direction (but it didn't go as far as Inage) and then switched to a slower train where it ended and were back to the dorm by about 12:45 am. I wasn't really tired yet, but I took a shower and went to bed.