Sapporo Snow Festival

Huffing and puffing on day two

Ed, Rika and Kim cross-country skiing.

We woke up on day two and the weather looked nice, so we decided to go through with our plan to go cross-country skiing.  Me, Alisha, Peter, Kim, Ed, Bryan Green and Rika caught a train and bus out to the south side of the city where there's a 'snow park'.  Only Alisha had ever done cross-country before, so none of us really knew how hard it was (except Alisha).  I thought it was going to be quite easy, like skiing without the danger.  But there's more to it than that.  First of all, there's no gravity to make you move forward.  This was a major obstacle.  You have to kind of skate on skis, which is quite hard.  I actually did most of the course in a style that could be called 'walking with skis attached to my feet'.  I could rarely skate more than a couple of metres before I lost my rhythm and all my momentum with it.  Another aspect to cross-country skis is that you can't control them like you can control downhill skis.  This meant that when I managed to pick up speed on the downhill sections I couldn't slow down.  This wasn't a problem most of the time because the downhill sections were short and not very steep.  Except, that is, for the last section which was quite steep and straight.  I couldn't manage to ski straight, so I ended up in a metre deep snow drift with snow in my ears and up my back.  Once he'd finished laughing and taking pictures, Ed helped me to de-snow myself and I continued on to the end of the 5km course. 

Alisha on a rubber ring.

After a quick lunch I thought about going snowshoeing.  There was supposed to be frozen waterfall somewhere in the park and I quite wanted to see it.  However, when I asked about it I was told that the snowshoe path was closed because it was covered in snow!  I was a bit confused about that, but went away to go sledging instead.  (I've since done snowshoeing on Chokai.  It's good fun and relatively easy.  I definitely recommend it.)  We went to find sledges, but couldn't have imagined what we were going to find.  Not only a hill fully equipped with sledges, but also giant rubber rings and lifts to tow you up the hill.  The only problem was that they forgot to ban kids from the area, so it was heaving with them when they should have been somewhere else doing something less fun.

After that we were so tired we all went back to the hostel for a nap.  In the evening Brian Naumann led some of us to a fantastic restaurant near the station after we briefly messed around looking for Mexican.  It was a cool place with cool music, good food and drink and reasonable prices.  I wish I'd known about it before.  After that we had a another wander around the sculptures and went to bed fairly early, because we wanted to go skiing in Niseko the next day.