Carousel tune: Honey – 王心凌

Day 3 saw us visiting the Noboribetsu Hot Spring Resort, Hell Valley and the Ainu village. According to our itinerary, our destinations for the day were supposed to be the Otaru City Tour, as well as the highly anticipated tour to Otaru Orgel Doh – the famous music box museum. However, as the snow became really bad, most of the highways in Hokkaido were closed. Hence, our guide informed us of the possibility that the Otaru City Tour might not take place after all. I got quite upset when I heard that, cos I really really wanted to visit the music box place (after reading so much about it on the 8 days travel guide). Perhaps sensing our disappointment, our guide decided to change the itinerary and moved the activities for Day 4 to Day 3. And after that, she told us the only thing we could do was to pray and pray that on Day 4, the snow storm would lessen, so that the highways could be opened. And boy, did I pray!

Anyway, Day 3 was rather uneventful, as the places which we went to turned out to be not quite so interesting (my opinions lah). The Noboribetsu Hot Spring Resort and the Hell Valley were some sort of volcanic crater thingy which sprouted a

lot of smoke and had red coloured mountains. The Ainu Village was slightly more entrancing, displaying all the straw houses which the

Ainus – Hokkaido’s indigenous people used to live in. The performance put up by the people there was another captivating event. They have this instrument called the mukkur which, as described by the 8 Days travelogue, is a “stringed bamboo mouth harp” and produces this hauntingly musical tone. It sounds a bit weird at first, like someone striking a 古筝with very taut strings. But gradually, one can get drawn towards its melodious sound, and dunno why, but all the songs produced by the instrument sounded so sad!

The highlight of our day (and maybe, of the entire Hokkaido trip), was a visit to the annual Sapporo Snow Festival at the Odori Park. This event takes place every Feb 6-13th, and I had deliberately timed our trip to coincide with this occasion. Am I glad I did that! There were sooooo many beautiful snow sculptures in the park that it was virtually impossible to view all in one night! Many of them were cartoon / movie characters that are so familiar to us. We saw Totoro, Snoopy, The Incredibles, Shark’s Tale, Sleeping Buddha, Darth Vader, etc etc. There’s even one on Bae Yong Jun (yes, he’s really quite popular in Japan and is fondly known as Yong-sama there).

I am so sorry that I could not show it all on this blog, cos I think that would probably use up all my photo- hosting account space. But it’s safe to declare that if you ever wanna visit Hokkaido during Feb, do try to arrange the trip such that you would get to see all these sculptures. They are really amazing! The highlight of this year’s festival was the very impressive Nagoya castle. You wouldn’t have been able to guess it was made of snow! Oh yes, one thing I definitely remember about that night….it was FREAKING COLD!! The wind kept blowing, and the both us looked like Osama recruits, with our mufflers perpetually wrapped around our mouths. And adding to it, we still had to take all the photos… I really don’t remember how we pulled it off. Grrrr….

P.S. Thank you, all you dear blog readers out there who gave me such encouraging comments on my previous entry. But I have to reveal that fate has dealt me yet another heavy blow (the previous one being me not having sighted my bus stop guy ever since the dramatic incident), SDU has written a formal announcement saying their “DUE TO A SECURITY BREACH, THE SDU ONLINE SERVICES WILL BE SUSPENDED TILL FURTHER NOTICE” Geez….I had though of putting up my personal ad on the website, in the hope that I would get some interested suitors to come knocking at my email addy. And plus, all the details of the speed dating events are on the website, I’m not too sure if I still remember the person to contact if I were to sign up for the event. Suay right?