Inconvenient meeting

We, in a car, met another car in this road where they only carved out one lane during the winter. Luckily for us, the guy in the other car started backing up, and ended up going backwards for a kilometer or so until there was space enough for us to pass. Very kind of him.

Starwars and more at Sapporo Snow Festival 2015

Starwars snow sculpture

The huge Starwars snow sculpture when lit up to show a red light saber

Every year we have the Sapporo Snow Festival here for one week. We get 2 to 3 million visitors (which is a lot in a city with less than 2 million citizens) during this week. There are huge snow sculptures, and there are large snow sculptures. There are very many snow sculptures. And it is cold.

This year, the coolest sculpture is the Starwars one. The temple above has some very nice projection mapping at certain times during the night, which was also very good.

I expected a lot of "Frozen" (the Disney movie) themed sculptures this year, and I was right. There were many many Olaf. There were a few Elsa and Anna too.

There are also many Yokai Watch (a game/anime/manga for kids that is very popular now) themed sculptures. Koma was very common, as was Jibanyan. I liked Whisper best.

It is the year of the ram now, so there were many sculptures along these lines.

Sapporo is famous for Jingisukan, barbecued lamb. This meant that there were also many sculptures featuring the "Jin-kun" Jingisukan character. The year of the ram is the year of the "sheep" in Japanese, so Jin-kun is very topical this year.

I liked this Evangelion (an anime/manga popular among nerds in the West and in Japan) sculpture.

This is supposed to be Yo Oizumi (and actor). I have met him (we were in the same TV show when I did magic on TV) and it kind of looks like him.

The "kao nashi" from the Ghibli movie "Spirited Away" was popular.

Hatsune Miku, a Sapporo vocaloid (singing computer program)

Funasshi was popular this year too, and I like the thing from the Nausica movie on the right

More projection mapping

Very interesting looking smoking room

They also build a trick jumping slope in the middle of the park during the festival

Some sculptures are made from ice instead of snow

Camouflage

Today I wore white, so no one can find me. I need to find some white shoes or boots.

Sapporo bicycle parking

This is the designated bicycle parking area, and if you put your bicycle in some other place, people will get angry with you. The convenience of bicycle parking at our university this time of the year is debatable...

Snowing

Today it is snowing in Sapporo. And windy. When the wind really gets going, it is hard to see more than a few meters.

Eccentric bicycle parking

This style of bicycle parking is a bit strange. But it beats having your bicycle buried inside the snow, which is also common here.

Not bicycle friendly, and no mail

On Friday, I found a note from the post office saying that they tried to deliver something to "湖山鳩", at my address. Since the name on my post box is not written like that, it said that since they could not confirm that such a person lived there, they took whatever they wanted to deliver back with them to the post office and said to get in touch with them.

Those three Kanjis are "lake", "mountain", and "pigeon". My last name is Sjöbergh, which is made up from the Swedish words for "lake" and "mountain". "Jonas" comes from the Bible and means dove, as in a symbol of peace, in Hebrew. So if you were to write the meanings of my name with Kanji, that would be how you would write it.

Presumably, one of my friends had sent me something and decided it would be funny to write the name in Kanji.

I went to the post office and explained all of this to them, that basically that strange name was actually me. They asked me to show them some ID, and said: "The name on your ID is different". They then checked rules and regulations for 15 minutes or so and came back and said that since the name was different, they could not give me whatever it was that they had tried to deliver. They would send it back to the sender.

I asked if they could tell me who the sender was, so I could get in touch with them and tell them that unless they write my name with Latin letters, post will not reach me. (Sometimes things come through with my name in Katakana too.) They disappeared for another 10 minutes or so and came back and said that since the problem was that they could not confirm that this was meant to reach me, they were also not allowed to tell me who the sender was.

I asked if I could write a message that they could stick to the thing before they sent it back to the sender, to explain how they should get this thing to me. Again, after some more checking, the answer was no. They said that they would explain that "this name is wrong" when they returned it, though.

So I left empty handed, with no idea what they had tried to deliver or who might have sent it. Or, I had some ideas of who might have sent it, since not that many of my friends know my address, and not many of them think that the Kanji thing is funny.

The post office that takes care of these matters is pretty far from where I live. It is open 24/7 though, which is convenient. But since it is so far away,  I took the bicycle there. Parts of the way is not great for bicycles in winter. The photo for instance shows that the bicycle lane (center of the photo) is very much blocked on the other side of the street.

More work

The first week after New Year we were very busy at work. We had a big meeting with lots of people from Tokyo, Osaka, and Fukuoka coming here. Or, that was the plan. Then there was a snow storm so all the airports in Hokkaido were closed, and only one guy from a nearby university actually showed up to the meeting...

But the meeting was supposed to take up two days, and by the second day the storm had passed and people showed up for the meeting. After the meeting, there was also a dinner social event. I was required to be there, and required to pay for it myself (5000 yen, which is a lot of money for food in Japan). The food was very good, though.

Winter is coming

My bicycle did fine in the morning, but going home was tough after a sudden pretty heavy snowfall covered everything in quite a lot of snow.

Snow

In Fukuoka I wore a t-shirt and thought it was too hot. In Sapporo it started snowing when I was about to go home (photo taken after an hour or so of snowing) and kept snowing for two days. There was a foot of snow on the ground for a few days, but then most of it melted.

Yukidaruman, the word play character supporting snow removal in Sapporo

On Wednesday I had to give a presentation at a meeting regarding snow plowing and snow removal in Sapporo. We get 6 meters of snow every year in a city with 2 million citizens. This leads to huge problems, and the city spends 150 million dollars every year on keeping everything running during the snow season.

Another presenter mentioned that there is now a character called "ゆきだるマン" ("yukidaruman", a word play on "yukidaruma", snowman, and "man" as in "superman" or "batman"). He is used to inform people of what to do or not to do when it comes to snow in Sapporo (stop parking in the no parking zones, for instance).

The same presenter also mentioned that every night that they do remove snow in Sapporo they cover 5000 km in one night. They use about 1000 snow plowing/removing machines for this.

Snow in Tokyo

Extreme snow in Tokyo 

 
A few days before we went to Tokyo, they had extreme snowfall in Tokyo. Normally, Tokyo very rarely gets snow, and when it snows it is very light and quickly melts away. This time they got 27 cm. For Sapporo, getting 27 cm in an afternoon or so is just business as usual, but for Tokyo to get 27 cm in one or two days is very very rare.

More Tokyo snow

There was still some snow left when we got there, in the shadowy parts. Of course, there is still some snow left in Sapporo too.

Business as usual in February in Sapporo

Leftover snow in Sapporo