The Snow Festival Venues

In the coldest month of the year, the freshest ticket in Japan, and maybe the whole world, is for the Sapporo Snow holiday on Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido.  More than 2,000,000 visitors from around the world descend on.  Hokkaido's capital to watch it modified into the glittering, glittering, and gleaming sector of an ice-cold fairyland. 

For a week each Feb, the skyscrapers of Sapporo become upstaged by edifices and statues of frozen snow forming a second town in Odori Park and the streets at their feet.  Ice sculptures of the past have outlined everything from traditional japanese temples, samurais, and dragons to recent athletes, ice maidens, political figures, and fifty-foot high dinosaurs. 

the current Snow Festival is the descendant of a way smaller 1950 festival, the effort of a grouping of Sapporo high school students who built six snow statues in Odori Park and so impressed the park's visitors the tradition continued.  5 years on, the Japan Self-Defense Forces housed at Makomanai base introduced, as a training exercise, the technique for building the gigantic snow sculptures characteristic of the Snow festival today. 

The Snow festival Venues
Makomanai Base is now one of the three main venues for the festival, and is the site of the largest sculptures ; the 3rd site, where the ice carving competition is held, is in Sapporo's Susukino district.  In the 1972 Winter olympic games in Sapporo, the Snow festival gained global commend, and the Snow Statue Competition began 2 years later. 

The Snow festival is truly a community effort, with voter's groups both creating ice sculptures and aiding tourists, especially the disabled.  They also provide traveller information and act as interpreters for the flood of foreign guests.  Hotel reservations for the Snow festival should be made at least six months in advance. 

hotels close to the Snow holiday
The Korakuen Hotel Sapporo offers four-star accommodations convenient to all of Sapporo's parks and beautiful areas, and is ideally situated for commercial travelers.

To read more about travel topics, visit famouswonders.com and while you are at it, check out Nijo Castle.

Tags: Festival, Ice cold snow, Japan, Sapporo