Yuki Matsuri was totally awesome! Enough said - here are some details! :D

As usual, I left my packing until the last minute on Thursday night, hahaha. I managed to get to bed by midnight, though. The resulting far-too-early 6:30am start on Saturday was pretty tough, but it was made a little easier because of how excited I was about the upcoming adventure. So I rushed around getting ready and taxied down to the train station at around 7:40am. I'd used Hyperdia to plan my train journey, but I was somewhat suspicious of a suggested train change at Aioi. Thankfully there were some friendly looking people sitting across from me, so I broke out the Japanese and asked them if the train was going all the way to Himeji. Naturally, as 20-something year old Japanese girls, they freaked out when I spoke to them, but were eventually able to give me a straight answer :)

Everything worked out perfectly as the train did go all the way to Himeji, where I jumped straight onto the waiting special rapid train bound for Kobe. I was somewhat surprised when, as soon as I entered the train, a Japanese guy waved at me and said 'Hey!'. I responded more because I thought he might be one of my students or someone I knew from Ako than for any other reason, but it turned out he was a random. Hooray Japan! He just wanted to have a chat to practice his English, so we talked for most of the trip to Kobe. Interestingly, he was a Himeji castle tour guide in his free time, which I thought was pretty cool.

Once in Kobe, I called Goran and found out that he and Dan were coming in about 20 minutes later. So I decided to grab a quick coffee while I waited. When Goz and Dan arrived, I met up with them and we then joined Cassie and Michelle. Shortly after that we met Aimee and Team Yuki Matsuri was at full strength! We chose to meet in Sannomiya for good reason, as we could just jump on the Portliner train to get to Kobe airport. Which is a pretty cool place - it sits on its own artificial island, sweet!

All the airport related stuff was pretty much the same as in Australia, so it was relatively simple. After a quick morning tea in the departure area we were finally onto the plane and off to Hokkaido! I don't really mind flying, but it can get pretty boring. Thankfully, this flight was only 2 hours, so it was pretty bearable. We all just chatted, listened to music and so on. To our delight, we were greeted with a sea of white as we swung in over Hokkaido's bulky south end and landed at Chitose airport. The airport was quite a bit bigger here because it was international as well, but we managed it all ok. After we grabbed some food for later, we jumped onto a train to Sapporo. Nothing too exciting there, although the piles of snow on either side of the train tracks were awesome.

Once in Sapporo, it was a short subway ride out to Nakajima-koen to the hotel. Nakajima-koen is a really great place to stay in Sapporo. You can walk to Susukino (the night district), it's very close to O-dori and central Sapporo, and Nakajima-koen itself is a very beautiful park. After a bit of confusion, we eventually found our hotel and checked in. They only had two non smoking rooms, unfortunately, but it turned out that the non smoking room was perfectly fine too. I was sharing a room with Dan, and after we'd dumped our stuff, we met up with Goran and went to explore Nakajima-koen.

The park was a lot of fun. There was about 30cm of snow over the whole thing, and we ran around in it throwing snowballs and generally being stupid. Dan taught us a game called 'Mr President', which was hilarious. One person, at random time intervals, puts a finger to their ear and tries to attract the attention of other people around them. This is meant to be like a Secret Service agent getting a message on their earpiece. Everyone who sees them also does it, until all but one person is doing it. That person becomes the President, at which point all the Secret Service agents yell out 'GET DOWN MR PRESIDENT' and tackle them into the snow, hahaha. It was a riot.

We headed back to the hotel about 5pm to change our clothes (jeans do not like snow, not even powder snow after a while) and head out for dinner. Dan wanted to take us to the famous 'Ramen Alley', which is (rather unsurprisingly) an alley of really good ramen shops. So we wandered down through Susukino until we found it. Here, we managed to squeeze into a good looking place and chowed down on some really good ramen. I'm not the world's biggest ramen fan, but this stuff was pretty damn good.

After dinner we explored the ice sculptures on the main road in Susukino (and an ice bar, serving warm Baileys - it was totally awesome) before the girls went back to the hotel. Dan and I continued down to O-dori to check out the famous snow sculptures. There were 12 blocks of them and they were very impressive - some were enormous. Eventually Goran and his friend Ryan joined us and we met up with another friend, Suzie, and her sister and cousin. We wanted to go drinking and eventually found a place called the Electric Sheep Bar, themed on Bladerunner. The decor was great but the drinks were very ordinary, there was hardly any alcohol in them! Goran was happy though, one of the drinks he ordered came in a whole pineapple! Following that it was back to the hotel and to sleep, ready for snowboarding in the morning!