February 7 - 9
Sapporo Snow Festival

Every year in Sapporo, the capital city of Hokkaido, a snow festival is held which showcases numerous snow and ice sculptures, some several stories high and requiring hundreds of people to work on them. This year's festival did not disappoint in the least.

I arrived on Friday afternoon, took in some of the sites, then checked into the Lifort Hotel. Later, I met up with Nicole and Travis and we walked through the ice sculptures of the Susukino district. Afterwards, we enjoyed some karaoke at Song Park.

The next day, we walked through all of Odori Park, which housed the bulk of the snow sculptures. The sheer size of the sculptures was matched in awe only by the number of people trying to view them. Everyone was in Sapporo! Some of the snow sculptures were of disney and other familiar charazters. One was a giant likeness of Commodore Perry, the US Naval Officer that forceably reopened Japan to trade.

There are way too many pictures of the snow festival to include in this entry, so please visit the Sapporo Snow Festival page to see all of the pictures that I took.

February 10 - 11
Asahikawa Winter Festival

Happening at the same time as the Sapporo Snow Festival was the Asahikawa Winter Festival in my own city. Tuesday (the 11th) was a holiday, so I got to enjoy the sights Monday night and all day Tuesday. While the Sapporo Snow Festival focused mainly on snow sculptures, the Asahikawa Winter Festival focuses more on ice sculptures. Some of the ice sculptures had so much detail to them that they would blow your mind away.

Ice sculptures lined Kaimono Koen (the large outdoor walking/shopping street) all the way through the city up to Tokiwa Park. In Tokiwa park there were snow slides for the kids, small snow sculptures made by loocal groups, and a giant Opera House built on the bank of the river that you could walk up to the top of. It was incredible.

As with the Sapporo Snow Festival, there are too many pictures to include here, please visit the Asahikawa Winter Festival page to see all of the pictures with descriptions.

February 19

Today was my last day at Asahikawa Commercial High School (unless I get placed there next semester). At the end of the English Club after school, Tadano-sensei took a few pictures. The picture here is of me and the students (they're really usually happier than that, I guess they just didn't feel like smiling in this picture).

February 22

If you haven't seen "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," go see it! I just saw it at the new theatre in Asahikawa and it was great. It's worth the ridiculous movie theatre prices in Japan to go see.

February 24

Let me offer a big ol' apology to everyone who has tried in vain to access my website in the past week. Let me explain the problem. First of all, my website hosting (the computers that store my website) and my domain name (the ownership of the www.dougieonline.com address) were set up through godaddy.com. I chose that particular service because they offered me the domain name for $9.95/year and up to 50 MB of web hosting for $9.95/month. Well, after uploading the pictures from the snow festivals, I went over my limit, which I assumed I would do eventually. However, I assumed that I would simply be charged double for my hosting and therefore pay around $20/month for 100 MB of space. Well, it turns out that godaddy.com wanted to charge me $40/month for 100 MB. That's 4 times the price for only twice the space! So, I pulled my hosting account out of there and went to Yahoo Web Hosting. They're much more reasonable when it comes to price. However, changing a webpage over is not an instantaneous deal. Therefore, it took a while to get it all switched over. However, I think it should all be working now. Please let me know if you find any mistakes or dead links on my webpage. Thanks.

February 27

Today was what will possibly be my last visit to Bifuka Koto Yogo Gakko (Bifuka High School for the Mentally Handicapped). Today I visited all of the first year students. Going to this school is always an enjoyable break from my other high schools. One of the things that makes this school enjoyable is that some of the students are super excited to get to talk to a foreigner and they do talk-all the time. Many of the students, however, have communication difficulties and are therefore shy. However, it always works out in the end. In the afternoon I spent time with the low level first year students. We went outside and built a "kamakura," or a snow house. Making a kamakura basically consists of finding a large pile of snow (a snow drift) and digging a lare tunnel in it big enough for people to sit in. It was a lot of fun, and afterwards we ate a sweet snack inside the kamakura.

Keep at it!

Two of the students

February 28

I was buying some groceries at Ito Yokado this evening when I saw the funniest thing while I was in line to check out. Do you know those wet towellettes that are attached to the bottoms of brooms to clean hard wood floors and linoleum? Well, here in Japan they've taken it to the next level. The item shown here is a little robotic creature that has one of those towellettes on its underside. You turn it on, then it just wheels itself across the room in a random direction. When it hits a wall or other obstruction, it will back up slightly, change direction, and then continue cleaning. I guess the theory is that if given enough time, it will clean the entire floor with no effort on your part. However, for about $50 US, I think I'll pass on this one.