Today is the big Sapporo Snow Festival for us.  The festival officially starts tomorrow but if you go the day before you beat the crowds and you get cheaper hotel rooms.

The Sapporo Snow Festival, one of Japan’s largest winter events, attracts about two million people to see the many amazing snow and ice sculptures lining Odori Park, the grounds at Tsudome, and along the main street in Susukino.  Here are some of the sculptures we saw both large and small.

For seven days in February, Sapporo is turned into a winter dreamland of crystal-like ice and white snow. The Snow Festival began in 1950, with six snow statues made by local high school students in Odori Park. In 1955, the Self-Defense Force joined in and made a massive snow sculpture, the kind for which the Snow Festival is now famous.

One end of the Odori Park looked like this.  A long line of sculptures lined both sides of the park.

As we explored the sites we kept coming upon groups of little Japanese school children.  They would come up to us, say “excuse me” and then ever so properly and carefully ask us questions like “where are you from?” and “how do you like the snow festival?” and what kind of Japanese food do you like?”  They were so cute.  They all had notebooks and were taking notes.  Of course there was always a teacher or two with these children.  Here’s me answering their questions.

Here’s a snow sculpture promoting the new Star Wars movie coming up in December 2015.

Temple sculpture where they are practicing for the opening ceremony

and a couple more large sculptures.

At the far end of this long park is the TV Tower

where we took an elevator to the top for a birds eye view of Odori Park and the Snow Festival.

Time for lunch and some sake tasting so we hoofed it across town to the Sapporo Sake Museum for some tasting and purchasing.  The art work on the bottle is so simple and so striking.  This sake is made from local rice and local water and the business has been in operation for over 150 years.

In addition to all of the snow sculptures that are ready for viewing, there is the International Snow Sculpture Contest.  Twelve 3-person teams from around the world will participate.  They have 3 days to create their sculptures starting today.  The teams are from Australia, Korea, Finland, Hawaii, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, and bum-ba-da-dum Portland, Oregon!

All the teams start out with their own block of snow.

Here’s a member of the Portland team in front of their block.  They are creating Orcas.

In another part of town, the Susukino district, are the ice sculptures.  These were very beautiful.

Here’s one more cool sighting from today in front of an office building across the street from the snow sculptures and one of my favorites.

OK, enough ice and snow sculptures for one day.