Hokkaido diary: the 65th Sapporo Snow Festival

In one of the many cut-rate sci-fi adventure stories I read as a youth and continue to read to this day (this one was On Earth As It Is In Hell, an officially-licensed Hellboy novel by Brian Hodge), a defeated villain defiantly tells the hero: "Do you know why you'll always lose, in the end? Because what you consider victories are such small things."

Going to the Sapporo Snow Festival reminded me of that quip, for some reason. It just impressed me how something that started so small—a pack of enterprising Hokkaido University students building modest snow sculptures in Odori Park in central Sapporo—blossomed into an annual world-famous festival that attracts over two million foreign tourists per year.

This year I was one of them. Here's my diary entry for that day: 

2/5:

10:32 a.m. Nice long sleep-in. At Kita-12 jo waiting for the train. Hardly anybody here. Is it because I'm used to Seoul, which is always a zoo, or because of the festival? The 65th Sapporo Snow Festival starts today, and I am heading first to Odori Park and then to Susukino to take in two-thirds of it (the other third is up in Tsudome, near Asaba, way up north, but I'm prioritizing). 

It's STILL snowing. Must have snowed all night. Light snow, heavy snow, light snow again. The only time it hasn't snowed was the bright sunny first morning. Wow. Not sure how easy it'll be trying to wrangle an umbrella AND a camera in this weather, but I'll try.

1:07 p.m. What I was praying for happened. At 11 or so, 30 minutes after I arrived at Odori Park, the sky cleared. The snow stopped.

Hokkaido scallop, ¥500. Good deal. 

Crab soup, also five hundred yen. Three kinds of crab!

I got some great pics and then strolled south to Susukino to see the ice sculptures.

 

That there may be no speculation...those are real fish.

Now they're just making me hungry...

Now I'm standing outside of Sushizanmai (which looks packed to the gills) and memorizing the menu. I want the Uruoi Sushimori Special, which has herring roe, boiled prawn, salmon roe, red tuna, white stuff that could be squid or flounder, red snapper, and six other things besides. Great place—the waitresses bustle and flit about in blue blouses, white aprons, black stockings and buckled shoes, while the chefs flay away at the fish, egg, and seaweed with their long, thin knives, shouting hearty hellos, goodbyes and thank-yous to the patrons coming and going. The tea is hot and the atmosphere warm in more ways than one.

You could immediately tell the difference between this and any other cut-rate sushi joint—fresh, tender ginger, moist rice and succulent seaweed. Eating the herring roe was an interesting experience—it had the color and texture of an orange slice. The miso soup with prawn heads was a lovely counterpoint. The sea urchin roe had the consistency of apple butter. There was also sardine, sea eel, and albacore tuna, plus shellfish. One of the red fish—either mackerel or red tuna—simply melted in my mouth. A feast. 

3:00 p.m. Sitting in the Hokkaido University Museum. Made a brief but futile stop at the gift shop for souvenirs. Pole Town (an underground mall between Odori and Susukino Stations) was a bust, too. Speaking of busts, I'm going to go see William Clark's now.
"Boys, be ambitious!" 

3:41 p.m. Just sent off the postcard to my folks at Sapporo's big blocky grey post office, east of the station. I'm lucky everything is so close together in this town. I think I'll hit the station on the way back to the hotel in one last-ditch effort to find souvenirs. 

5:32 p.m. Darkness has fallen. My last day in Sapporo is over. I'm ready to be gone, but I am a bit sad. I found no souvenirs—not in the station, nor Tokyu Department Store, nor anywhere else. All that's left is to get some chicken kebabs (yakitori) and beer for dinner, pack my bags and go to bed early. 

7:28 p.m. ADDENDUM. I had a peek in the yakitori place and discovered it was actually an izakaya—and the prices weren't nice. So I stumped a bit further south and found something that wasn't crowded, noisy, or overpriced—Beer & Coffee Venison. The name isn't poetic license—they serve deer meat. So I went on in. The light was low, coming from a line of glass globes over the wooden bar, every other one of which had the names of various Scotch whiskies written on it in multicolored marker. Lots of dark wood and white stucco-like walls, interspersed with tables and chairs with cross-shaped holes in the back (plus fully-antlered deer skulls on the walls and old coffee grinders and tea tins on the shelves) completed the rustic ambience [sic]. Behind the bar were two men: one elderly and thin, severe in demeanor, wearing a tie and black waistcoat and apron, with a beige wool-knit cap which clung to his bald pate like a yarmulke. The other man was likewise in a dark suit (with a fleece jacket flung over it) but was young, handsome, and energetic. He drummed his fingers on the bar in time to the jazz playing on the stereo (Colin Stranahan and Lloyd Miller), and buzzed about snipping labels or sterilizing glasses. The place had a bewildering collection of empty beer bottles in the window and quite a few in the fridge, Negra Modelo, Old Tom, Stone IPA and Löwenbräu among them. The Scotch selection, though extensive, tended to favor Islay and Highlands single malts, I noted. 

I sat down and ordered some venison sausage and a ¥500 glass of Heartland (a European pale lager made by Kirin, with a fine flavor and a delicious creamy head). I nibbled on Hokkaido potato salad and sliced pickles (and later the sausage and some fresh fruit) while the younger barkeep and I attempted a conversation. His name was Kei, and he loved jazz. It was he who manned the Toshiba laptop above the bar and chose tune after syncopated tune. I sensed rather than knew—for he spoke as little English as I did Japanese—that he was a student at Hokkaido University and that this was his part-time job, and that he longed to escape from pulling pints and pouring whiskey and escape to Tokyo (or perhaps even New York) and found a jazz trio. We talked as much as we were able. I sipped beer. The old proprietor washed up or stared into space. I felt the weight of my impending departure weigh heavily upon me. It was an introspective moment—the old man in his wool cap behind the bar, arms folded, staring at the empty room; Kei drumming his fingers, nodding his head and gazing at the computer screen; and me with a cleaned plate and a sweating beer glass in front of me, eyeing the collection of whiskey bottles in their glass cabinets, thinking about getting up at 4 a.m. tomorrow and feeling simultaneously warm and content yet lonely and restless. 

I got up, paid, snapped some photos of the bar and its stewards, bowed low, and left. I bought a crap-ton of food at the convenience store for tomorrow's 18-hour journey—onigiri, bento, salad, coffee, beer, apples, and even something which looked suspiciously like kimchi. All I have to do now is pack my bags and await the dawn. 

hello, spring...nice to smell you

When people start honking about spring, they usually honk about the same things: how nice and green everything gets, or how blue the sky is, or how prettily the birds are twittering, or how warm the air's getting, or how lovely the flowers smell. Come on, people. Those are obvious. They're nothing that every other human being on Starship Earth hasn't honked about every spring for the last five thousand years. I think these folks are taking a bit for granted. How about a little appreciation for being able to smell again, period?

I love winter, make no mistake. I like snow. It's great for hiding from one's enemies. I like ice. Nothing like a little Cha-Cha Slide down the sidewalk. But more than all that, I like cold. I've never been able to stand hot weather. Dry heat's bad enough, but moist heat? Gag me. Better yet, drown me. At least I'll die quickly from total immersion rather than being slowly suffocated. With cold (or even cool) weather, I can do whatever the heck I like and not break a sweat. Nothing beats a bad mood, a hangover, or writer's block like stepping outside and receiving an icy blast of air in your face.

I'm serious. Try it sometime if you don't believe me.

There's just one thing I dislike about winter, though. It's the sterility of the air. The lack of smells bothers me. I hate stepping outside, taking a sniff, and having my boogers freeze. No, no, I don't mind that, on second thought. Frozen boogers I can handle. What I mind is not being able to smell anything. No flowers, no grass, no trees, not even the dirt. It gets to me after a while. Oh, coming in out of the cold and wet and getting a hit of roast turkey or pumpkin pie is great. But there's just no substitute the smell of grass on a spring day.

I walked out of the airport with Spud last week right after the landscaper got done mowing the median in the parking lot. A big ol' whiff of cut grass smacked me right in the kisser. And man, it was glorious. Fairly shouted that springtime was here. Nothing beats going out on a walk in March and smelling the dirt. Winter didn't hit us too hard down on Geoje Island in South Korea, but things still froze up pretty well. But when springtime rolled around, and the sun came out, and the ground thawed, and you could smell the dirt again... It's hard to beat that wet-dirt smell. It's just as much a part of spring as daffodils and cherry blossoms, if not more. A nice noseful of that will brighten anybody's day.

I live in the desert, as you know. Grass is scanty around here. Greenery of any kind is. The appearance of spring isn't so much a literal "appearance"; it's a gradual lengthening of the days, a warming of the atmosphere, and a marginal revamping of the local smells and scents. So perhaps I'm more sensitive to smells than most. I knew it was spring when I stepped outside yesterday in the predawn twilight and smelled the desert (without it having rained first). I smelled sand. I smelled rock. I smelled plants. I smelled houses and people. It wasn't quite as divine as, say, someplace more fertile like Tennessee or South Korea. But it smelled pretty dang good, after the sterility of winter. I took a deep breath and said to myself, "Okay, I guess I'm ready for spring after all."

Welcome back, spring. My nose missed you.

random travel destinations - Sweden

Let us begin with an equation.

POSTMAN ≠ ARCHITECTURE BUFF

That being said, I gave serious thought to converting to Christianity when I saw this church. ...and not just because it's flippin' amazing, either. It happens to be located in Kiruna, Sweden. That's the northernmost city in the country, about 90 miles north of the Arctic circle, in the province of Lappland. How awesome would it be if you had to shoulder polar bears off the road on the way to Sunday services? (That's assuming you had enough light to see them by.) Doesn't look like the place is hurting for precipitation, either, does it? Kiruna's other big claim to fame is its proximity to Jukkasjärvi, where the world's first ice hotel was built. Yes, you read that correctly. It's a hotel. Made of ice. Sounds like my kind of joint already. Ice hotels are these novelty inns built in the far North, where guests repose in sleeping bags laid on reindeer hides. Supposedly it's an interesting way to spend a night in the Arctic circle. I don't give a darn about any of that. It's a HOTEL. Made of ICE. It looks just like the White Witch's ice palace in The Chronicles of Narnia. And if you slide sideways into Finland, you'll be very near where they filmed all the outdoor scenes for the Rebel base on Hoth VI in The Empire Strikes Back. So, all in all, northern Sweden scores high on my list of best places to geek out.

Monday: RPMs and magnetos

Do you have any idea how tricky it is to find 29 Palms Airport from the air (even with help from that little purple line on the GPS)? Jeez, they hid that sucker. We were only five miles away from the place when we spotted it, but we did find it, and landed on it. And thus, after three days of cancellations and postponements, Harold and I finally managed to make it to 29 Palms. This marked the second dual cross-country we've done together, and the longest: nearly 100 miles round-trip. I now have barely seven hours of requisite flight-training left, and then I'm through with my private pilot's license. I wanted to spend all four days of Thanksgiving weekend with the fam-bam, so I scheduled my three weekly flying lessons on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of Thanksgiving week. Yep, I'd be flying three days in a row: quite a cram session. That didn't bother me. There was some exciting stuff in the offing. On Monday I'd be soloing, but I'd have the reins to myself: nobody would be in the office, even. The book with the key and the required documentation would be left in the plane for me, and I'd simply walk straight through the airport building, climb inside N42126, and go. How cool is that? Tuesday and Wednesday would be given over to cross-country. On Tuesday, Harold and I planned to fly to 29 Palms, a town of some size and scenery west of here (near an also-sizable Marine base). On Wednesday, I'd solo to 29 Palms and back. It didn't fall out like that, though. Heck, no. Let's start with Monday. I got to the airport, duly bypassed the flight school office, and sauntered right out to the plane. I leisurely performed my preflight inspection, a self-satisfied grin on my face as I planned the takeoffs and landings I'd practice and the maneuvers I'd pull over Bear Valley Road. I climbed in and started the plane, not without some difficulty. It's been getting down below freezing at night lately and when it's cold, the engine gets cranky (no pun intended). So I primed the bejesus out of it and finally fired 'er up. Everything was proceeding normally until I taxied down to the run-up area for runway one-eight. As soon as I tried to throttle the oldLycoming engine up to 1700 RPM for my run-up, something weird happened. Dumbo swooped down out of the sky, opened the door of the plane, and handed me a complimentary in-flight bag of peanuts. No, no, I'm just kidding. That would've been really cool, though. What actually happened was this: the RPMs started fluctuating rather severely. Instead of smoothly accelerating up to 1700 (from 1000) the tachometer needle jumped and jerked and stopped and started. The engine's smooth roar suddenly tripped and staggered. I powered down quickly, then cautiously powered up again. The same thing happened. The third time, the power succeeded in reaching 1700 RPM, but it wouldn't stay there. The needle wobbled back and forth, as did the pitch of the engine noise. Not good. Well, I didn't want to muck with it if there was something screwy preventing the pistons from revving smoothly. I didn't want to be caught in mid-air with my pants down. Not in an airplane, anyway. So I taxied back to the ramp and, lo and behold, there was Harold. He'd just dropped in to the airport for a few minutes with his eldest son before driving all the way down to Oceanside to pick up (heh heh, didn't I think this was appropriate under the circumstances) a new engine for N42126. "You just heading out?" Harold asked as I got out of the plane. "No, just coming back, actually," I answered as I unfolded myself. I proceeded to explain the trouble. Harold, puzzled, got in and (with me standing over the right seat, with the door open), proceeded to fire up the engine. Before I tell you how that went, let me share a few choice words about what it's like to be standing anywhere near a propeller aircraft when it's going full blast. You know how when you're riding in a car you're completely oblivious to the amount of air that's moving past just inches away from you? That invisible element, howling along at ridiculous speeds, casually and undetectably deflected by the windshield? Well, now picture yourself standing under the wing of a Cessna 172, only your head and shoulders inside, the door open, directly behind the propeller whirring at full speed, the engine roaring, the wind screaming past you. I felt like I was going to get caught with my pants down after all, because the wind was about to tear 'em off. There was absolutely nothing wrong that Harold could detect. It seems that in between the run-up area and the ramp the mysterious engine ailment had melted away. Perhaps literally: Harold figured Imight've had a little ice in the carburetor. The run-up had probably melted it (or me turning on the carb heat halfway down the taxiway and therefore negating the reason for returning to the ramp in the first place). Harold believed me, and I know he didn't hold it against me or think me silly or overcautious. He's a good man and a good instructor. Plus he knows that, in the world of flying machines, there's really no such thing as overcautious. (My old flight instructor Mike used to tell me, "There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.") But I felt pretty stupid regardless. Anybody's bound to feel frustrated when they perceive a problem (say, a hideous monster lurking just outside the window) and then when everybody turns to look, the problem has vanished. Makes you doubt yourself. Anyway, not to be thwarted by some minor technical difficulties, I jumped back in the plane and taxied back to the run-up area for the second attempt. No soap. This time it wasn't the RPMs, it was the right magneto. During run-ups, it's customary to check the magnetos and make sure they're both working properly by turning them off one at a time and seeing if the other still runs. You do this by flipping the key in the ignition switch to "L" (leaving the left magneto on, and turning the right off), then back to "BOTH"; then flipping it to "R" (leaving the right on, and turning the left off) and back to "BOTH." As you do this, you observe the tachometer and make sure that the RPMs don't drop by more than, say, 250 (when one of the magnetos is off). Well, darn. That morning, whenever I turned the key to "L," the tachometer needle would fall like an egg from a tall chicken. I had to flip that switch back to "BOTH" but quick; the RPMs were falling off so fast I was afraid the engine would just die right there. I repeated the test three more times, with the same result each time. The hell with it, I finally decided. Flying like this wouldn't be advisable, or safe, or sane. Normally I'm the first guy to try something inadvisable, unsafe, or nuckin' futs, but I didn't feel like it this morning. Particularly not in a rented airplane. So I taxied back to the ramp (Harold had departed in the meantime), shut down, secured the plane, and stomped back to my car. I left a note in the cockpit explaining the trouble, and drove back home. That was Monday's flight lesson.

random travel destinations - Canada

At the urging of a fellow blogger, I've revived this serial sooner than expected. (The original second-release date was 2059.) I've picked a place that not many people have heard of, and even the ones who have find hard to pronounce...unless they're an Inuit or a Canadian. It's called Nunavut. That's how I heard about the place, by the way. Canadians. I got a free geography lesson just for mentioning the Northwest Territories within earshot of my Ottawa-born friend Jeff. We were sauntering down a back alley in Korea one day with our English friend Adam and our English-speaking friend, Charles. These four steadfast gourmands were on their way to try a little sannakji (live baby octopus, eaten while it's still wriggling). Somehow or other we got to talking about places we'd all like to visit someday, and I mentioned that the Northwest Territories sounded like an interesting sort of place. Jeff promptly informed me that, well, the Northwest Territories had been split up a few years back. I believe it had something to do with Inuit tribal claims to the area, which the Canadian government decided to honor. The western portion retained the same name, but the rest of it, including Baffin Island (pictured above), became Nunavut. It's officially its own place now. Got some representatives in Canadian Parliament, its own postal code, even its own official territorial bird (the rock ptarmigan, sweet!). The place still covers three time zones, even though it's half the size of the former Northwest Territories. It's pretty much a lot of coastline and Arctic islands. Looks pretty wild, doesn't it? And now it has the significant distinction of being the newest Canadian territory: double the reason for checking the place out.