Things I've Seen - Sapporo Snow Festival

An ice sculpture competition downtown.

A lot of companies put in entries so it has a very commercial feel to it.

Including this entry from my favourite 24 hour Sushi restaurant chain

The main part of the snow festival, however, is along Odori Koen a park that runs East-West throught the middle of the city for about a kilometer and a half. Sapporo TV tower marks the eastern most end.

An ice skating rink is set up just below the tower.

A couple of blocks down just near where the main North-South road interects the park they've built a small ski jump

Some sort of vampire demon bear

Dozens of food stalls are littered around the entire festival in small groups like these.

The Final Fantasy 14 ice carving

I assume she works here.

A description of what is going on.

The ice carvings are built on site, over about a month, by armies of  people (one lists that it took 1200 people to make)

This one is less snow and more ice.

The Japanese Red Cross/Blood Bank has this cute little mascot (a vampire bat with blood drops for ears) 

The sign says this one is 15 meters tall.

It also has some sort of swedish connection going on, so they had a live performance...

...by Abban, Japan's premiere ABBA cover band.

Some characters

From a children's TV show

It's the Tesla b4ear

There were many smaller carvings

Minions were very popular

A trio of fictional cats.

These two retards were taking photos of snowflakes that had landed on their gloves
and excitedly showing each other while saying "Sugoi!"

Sugoi is a word that means Cool, or Amazing, or Awesome! or something similar

It wasn't that cold, since these girls were dancing around in short skirts.

Not feeling the cold at all

International Teams competing in a smaller scale snow carving competition

Mmmm temple-y

The noodles form a slide that small children can toboggan down. 

At some points the snow forms into little clumps of crystals that look like snow drawn in a cartoon.
Here I caught some on my glove. Isn't it amazing?

The pink bear appears to be a good version / counterpart to the evil demon bear from earlier