Week 27: Sapporo Ice Festival

This week's blog is written by a super-old 30-year-old guy who went to Sapporo without his amazing and understanding wife, leaving her all alone with their one-year-old son. That's right. I'm in charge today. Mwahahaha.

Anyway, this week, the brass quint(oct)et from the USARJ (United States Army Japan) Band were invited to perform at the annual Sapporo Ice and Snow Festival! It was such an amazing (and cold) experience. I ate WAY too much food and spent WAY too much on it, but it was incredibly fun! Below are some highlights, culminating in a video from my time there.

 REALLY yummy dessert from one of the places I ate. Underneath that whipped cream is ice cream!

 Awesome Final Fantasy XIV snow piece. It was like 50 feet tall!

 

They had a store for Final Fantasy stuff right next door. There were some really cool figurines, but the cheapest was about $70.

 Ol' Lenny, himself! Apparently he started the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo in 1990, but unfortunately passed away before it really got started. So he's kind of a big deal here.

 Also, Sapporo must have a high concentration of Christianity because this was just one of several Christian churches I saw just in the few blocks of the city that we explored.

 "This is the very steak. The big cut of steak." - Ikinari Steak.

And here's the montage video:


If you'd like to see the whole Final Fantasy video, you can CLICK HERE. And if you'd like to see the whole Leonard Bernstein video, you can CLICK HERE. (Note: the Bernstein video is about 15 minutes long.)

I got back in time for my birthday. Had an awesome day with the family. Then today we went out to a train hub (Sagami-Ono station) and just wandered and explored the shopping area around there.

See you next week!