Snow Festival (Day 3)

Here is Sapporo's sister city Portland! I actually thought their sculpture was a little boring, but the guys did stop to take let me take a picture for Cliff.


More from the world competition
Singapore
Indonesia
Thailand
Hawaii (are you noticing a rather tropical trend here??)


Finland, I think?

Lilia on the drive home
Mt. Fuji on the drive home as seen through Yokohama

Snow Festival (Day 2) Morning

We got a pretty early start on Saturday morning. Lilia woke up early and she pretty much set our schedule. Fortunately the hotel had a free breakfast and it wasn't half bad for being Japanese. (The Japanese often eat fish for breakfast...) So we had plenty of fuel for the day and lots of sunshine to get us going.

Off to breakfast in the hotel!
Lilia had some craaaazy hair this particular morning.
Getting ready to head out!

Up!
Lilia all bundled up! It was soooo cold. It's a good thing she was facing into me because the wind was awful and the temperature was downright frosty the entire day.




Can you see all of the detail? There were flowers carved into the roof!







International competition in progress



Anpanman!!!



Russian Dolls in the international competition venue
The international competition was still in progress while we were there. We didn't get to see the finished products as we had to return to Tokyo, but we did get to see the sculptures in progress!

Snow Festival (Day 2) Afternoon and lunch

After a very busy and very chilly morning we were starving! Sapporo is famous for their seafood and specifically their crab so we decided to go to a fancy crab restaurant that we had heard about for lunch! We ended up at the wrong one, but it was still fantastic! Lilia had a major blowout during lunch, but we still had a nice time. This is Lilia pre-blowout....
Everything in the restaurant was crab themed. It was so fun!
Our room at the crab restaurant! It was a traditional Japanese tatami room.
Chrissy is hungry!
The ceiling. I thought it was cool...
Lilia in her own little chair!

Crab sashimi... It was... interesting...
Stair entrance. We took the elevator up to our floor.


It started to snow pretty heavily after we got out of the restaurant...
We went to see the ice sculptures, but because of the heavy snow fall some of them were a little difficult to see!












This was the seven story crab restaurant we were supposed to go to.... We ended up at a six story one instead.... I still thought it was really good! Who knew there were multiple many storied crab restaurants in Sapporo???


T-Rex Ice sculpture. Notice the awesome Japanese translation a couple of pictures down....