The Streets Were White, Really White

Planning trips is always fun and you have a picture in your head that the sun is shining and moving from place A to B is the easiest thing to do and you just can’t wait to see the postcard scenery.

I had booked a nice ryokan for us in Lake Toya, which is little bit far from Sapporo (almost 3 hours by bus) and the owners seemed nice and had also visited Kemijärvi (how weird is that again). Flying with stand by tickets is always “fun” (read frustrating). A week earlier there were plenty of room at the planes from Haneda to Chitose and because the flight frequency is high we decided just to show up at the airport. Good or bad choice? Hard to say… the lady was kind enough to give us stand by numbers and told all important information forgetting one thing that we found out from a man who kindly told that because of the snowstorm all the flight were cancelled the previous day which means that all the planes today are full. Oh well…we are use to this even though it’s no fun. At least we could enjoy the scenery: Mt Fuji. Our luck again we got seats to the next plane which was better than we expected. Smile in our face we lined up when the announcement came “ due to the bad weather conditions in Sapporo this plane might return to Tokyo, sorry for the inconvenience”. WHAT??

Well it sounds like a bad start but we got to Sapporo and literally the streets were white. Even the runway was totally, totally white. So no wonder why the flights might get cancelled. It seems that the Japanese don’t use salt or any other poison to clear out the snow and the most amazing thing was that people knew how to drive and the traffic was smooth. You might think that in Finland people would no how to behave during winter times but know, the whole traffic is in chaos….

Sapporo is known for its Snow Festival (Yuki Matsuri) that is always held in February. This year it started on the 5th and ended up on the 11th, we got there on the 8th (see how far behind I am with my updates, ups). To be honest the festival might be the only reason why to go to Sapporo in the first place because the city to me looked boring and little ugly as well and I really didn’t get a good impression. One reason might be the bad weather though. It was freezing cold and wet snow was coming down the whole day. The sculptures looked pretty. There are two parts the big snow “statues” and ice-sculptures. As I was kindly informed by Gallagher and Gavin that the food in Hokkaido is the best thing we had some pretty nice lunch at the Nijo Fish Market and some nice ramen at Lake Toya. Thank you for the tips guys!