Third & last stop was Sapporo[札幌] Hokkaido’s largest city and home of the Sapporo Snow Festival.

The origin of the Snow Festival dates back to the 50s, when a couple of local high school kids build 6 snow statues in Odori park. Nowadays it has become the largest winter event of Japan with hundreds of statues and over 2 million people from all over Japan & from around the globe visiting. This year it was split into three main locations.

The biggest one was Odori park, hosting the snow statues, a snowboard jump and countless food stands. In front of most giant snow statues there was some sort program (e.g. concerts & light shows). Especially at night when everything was light up, it was very beautiful. As a former Mercedes employee it pains me to say, but the Audi light show was probably the best product placement at the festival. Their light show was featured on all news casts reporting about the snow festival. I put a video of it and another light show I really liked at the end of this article.

The second festival location was Susukino (Sapporo’s red light district), where the ice sculptures were on display. Same as with Odori park – the sculptures were particular beautiful at night when colored light was used to make them shine.

The third festival site was Tsudome (Sapporo Community Dome). This was the location for kids (and people refusing to grow up;-) Here you had ice slides, tube slides, you could go snow rafting and inside the dome they had jumping castles.

Besides the Snow festival, Sapporo has a lot more to offer. However since I was only a couple of days in the city I could only try a few. I ate at the Ramen Yokocho, I went up the TV-Tower and I visited to the Sapporo beer museum (including beer tasting:-)