Snow and what to do with it

It's been a while since I last wrote a blog entry. I wasn't really motivated to do it lately (see post below). I guess there comes a time living in a foreign country when everything just becomes normal and doesn't feel fresh and exciting anymore. That's very dangerous. No matter where you are, I think you should always find ways of making things fresh and exciting. Even if, like me, you live in a place where the winter lasts for six months.

The people of Hokkaido have been a major inspiration to me in this regard. They get an incredible amount of snow each year, but this year has broken all records. The area I live in now is the world's official Snowiest Place 2012 (2011 was some place in California, by the way). It literally snows every single day. Trucks have to come in at times, take excess snow off the streets, and dump it into the next river or ocean. The snow walls towering over every street almost make you feel like you are a lab rat trying to find its way out of a snow-white maze.
Regardless, people here are still coming up with new creative ways of living both with and against the snow, so I decided to stop sulking and join them.

The obvious activity to try if you want to learn to appreciate large amounts of snow is of course skiing or snowboarding. Before I came here, I knew that I was going to live in a major ski resort. In fact I was hired because I come from an Alpine country with a "skiing culture", as they called it.
I hadn't been skiing in ten years, because it had always been too expensive and seemed like too much of a hassle. You have to put on seven hundred layers of clothing, buy or rent some costly gear just to fall down a hill in a more or less elegant fashion - was what I thought. But I couldn't let the community down, who expected the Austrian to bloody well go skiing. Plus, I needed some exercise anyway. There is no gym within walking distance and if you try to go jogging, you'll jog into an early grave what with all the ice and snow outside (at least with my sort of talent for movement).

To cut a long story short, I took part in a night skiing course my town offered for free (!) and i loved it! The snow here is truly fantastic, mostly because there is so much of it, but also because it's drier and the ski fields therefore aren't as hard and/or squishy as those in Austria, which has been suffering from lack of snow lately anyway.
It's like riding a cloud.

A friend of mine took this amazing picture when he came to snowboard in Niseko in January.

A more unpleasant winter activity around here is snow shoveling. I have to admit that I don't do a lot of this, because snow clearing is included in my rent, so every day a huge bulldozer clears the yard. However, my workplace organised a volunteer snow shoveling activity the other weekend to help Niseko's elderly. Japan suffers from an aging population, so a lot of elderly people living on their own in this area can't put up with the snow masses and get their houses literally buried under the snow. So we got divided into little troups of five to eight people and set off to clear one house off snow. The day before the event they had e-mailed us all a map of the houses' locations as well as pictures of the state they were in. In our case, the houses' windows were indicated by red arrows. At first I found this a little amusing, but when I saw the house I knew why: the windows had been buried under the snow and we probably wouldn't have been able to locate them without a plan.
We climbed the snow wall surrounding the house until we were standing on one level with the roof. There must have been at least two metres of hardened snow we were marching around on, it was quite exhilarating. Here's a picture of the first floor after we'd more or less cleared two windows:

As you can see the windows had already been bolted beforehand, to keep them from breaking under the weight of the expected snow masses.

About two weeks ago I observed the following scene in front of my workplace:

It's hard to notice the group of people on the garage roof, but lately it's become quite a common sight. If buildings have flat roofs, a couple of metres of snow can accumulate on them, which gets quite dangerous for the people walking past under them. So now every day you can see people standing on top of their roofs clearing them of snow. (Sometimes they have a helper taking watch on the ground. Sometimes not.)

But enough unpleasantness for now. Another way of reacting to Hokkaido's snow masses are the snow festivals that take place all over the prefecture. Usually snow caves or ice sculptures are built, or snow lanterns, which are then lit up by candles. We have one of those light festivals going on in Niseko right now, so please drop by.
The biggest of them all, however, is of course Sapporo Yukimatsuri (Sapporo Snow Festival) which attracts more people to Hokkaido than any other event on the island. Yukimatsuri is also the only occasion on which Sapporo is sure to be on Austrian television (that and when there's some major ski jumping competition going on). The reason for the festival's popularity are the huge snow statues built specially for the purpose. They line up along Oodori park, a huge park right in the centre of town.

 Taking the right pictures in the right spot is really important in Japan and the place was packed. So there were queues to be able to access the best photo spot to photograph a certain sculpture.

Many of the sculptures had popular mascots or cartoon characters as themes. Here's a huge Disney one.

 This is a snow replication of the Taj Mahal, because Japan and India were celebrating a diplomatic anniversary this year. Speaking of diplomacy and its opposite: a lot of the most elaborate snow sculptures had been built by the Jieitai (Japanese self-defense forces). Pretty amazing, but kinda makes you wanna make jokes about the army not having anything else to do, doesn't it?

 On the right there's a snow sculpture of Aizu castle in Fukushima. It is not surprising that the Tohoku region had a special place in this year's festival, as it was the setting of the earthquake disaster last March.

Several countries also offered contributions. This dragon came from Hong Kong. 2012 is the year of the dragon, according to the Chinese calendar.