Entries this day: Today nice_finish zz_snow_pictures

Today

8:35pm JST Tuesday 08 February 2005

Our trip is coming to a close; we're in Chitose airport in Sapporo now, chillin' and oh my gosh I'm occassionally getting wireless access.

Today we scoped a couple of ice sculptures, but generally found them to be boring except for one which wasn't boring cause it was a bit morbid with actual fish frozen in it.

We headed back to Nakajima Park, with plans to dig another tunnel. Today we much more successful; we selected a good spot and both worked together to extract the snow. Quite fun, actually; I'm really glad we did that instead of going to see more boring snow things.

I started digging a hole next to a light post, and then realized I could dig out the ice adjacent to the marble base of the light post with ease. We reached the ground next to the base and connected that area with my original tunnel. We made quite good progress and noted that the ground was sloping up, matching the hill of snow underneath which we were digging! (snowfall on hills makes hill shaped blankets of snow)

We were approached by some people who offered us shovels (!) which really helped our spirits as much as our digging, cause there wasn't much room to manuever a shovel.

Some kids were sliding down a nearby snowblower-made hill and they invited us over to play as well. I was basically done with the hole; it had filled (no anti pun intended) its purpose, and I was ready for a break.

However, one of the kids wanted to help dig, so I stayed to watch him in case the snow collapsed on him or some such thing. He was probably 9 years old and did a decent 9-year-old job of digging out snow while keeping the basic tunnel shape intact.

He ran off and was replaced by a 6-year-old who couldn't quite

oops gotta hurry.

He couldn't dig snow out of the tunnel really at all so he saw the much easier to reach snow: the top of the tunnel, and worked at hacking the top of the tunnel into the bottom of a bigger hole. I didn't tell him to stop, but I did say it wasn't much of a tunnel anymore, so he tried to dig out from the tunnel again, quickly abandoned that as too hard and I left as he began tearing the tunnel apart again.

I joined them on the hill and slid down a couple times, the first time I slid super fast (low friction with all innertube and no butt) and had to put my foot out to stop from hitting a hand rail on the stairs near the bottom of the hill.

The second time I was like "who needs a tube?" and slid head first on my back, using my YRUU hoodie as a snow shield. Awesome. But I crashed into a kid on an inner tube. I didn't see her there when I started; I'm not sure what happened there.

I was beckoned back to the hole by the first kid, so I went over (not knowing where he was taking me) and stayed for a bit. Missed any further chances to slide down the hill, but overall had a great time.

Time to continue the deconstruction of the tunnel so Hitomi buried me and got pictures.

And then she walked away, leaving me to freeze.

nice finish

11:44pm JST Tuesday 08 February 2005

We're on an express train *and* it stops at Motosumiyoshi.

zz snow pictures

1:39am JST Wednesday 09 February 2005

Way too tired to do much good tonight; I scanned through several emails and did a bit with Yahoo Auction (the mystery fields were sent in the mail)

I'm just going to upload all these and then fix them later.

1:35pm JST Sunday 03 April 2005

Okay, I have spent a few days injecting photos in the journal entries from this trip. Here are some that were taken specifically so I could go back during the summer and take pics in the same places, but without the snow.

The coolest of these were in a little playground for kids.

Oh no!