First Snow

On Thursday we got our first little blast of snow here in Sapporo, and of course I was disproportionately happy. Snow! Oh man, I love snow. People here love to ask me: "Do you like snow?" and are quick to follow it with a "Ah, you won't in a couple of months!" but to hell with that. No matter how deep, how slippy, how bone-chilling, how many fingers and toes I lose... snow is snow, and I love snow.

Yeah! Snow!

So it didn't last very long anyway, it snowed a bit on Thursday, stuck around until Friday, but mostly disappeared in some mild weather and torrential rain on Saturday. But tonight we came out of an izakaya in the middle of the city to find that it had started up again, and there's a nice dusting all over the place now.

Snow! On Thursday morning.

Along with the snow the temperature nose dived this week, which meant that I had to try and figure out my heater. Luckily my heater is a) easy to use and b) awesome, so I've been toasty warm this week. But unluckily my heater is a) easy to use and b) awesome, so I'm probably going to run up a comically large gas bill this winter. It has a thick glass plate on the front that I can see the flames through. I love my heater. I love snow.

Last weekend I hit a homebase-esque furniture store for those lamps that I KNEW would make my appartment that much better than the harsh neon ring I had to live with. Turns out the store is about three minutes from my door and that it had everything that I've been needing for my appartment for so long (decent rubbish bin, lamps, kitchen stuff). Such success meant that I could easily gloss over the fact that I didn't really do anything else.

This Saturday night we went out for a fun, sprawling, ill-thought-out night on the town, but before that we were in Sapporo station and we found a small iron bathtub full of milk, in an iron cage. In itself this was a somewhat disquieting find, but it signified a sort of low key art fest today that we immediately resolved to attend, hangover or no!

Turns out the bathtub wasn't quite as pointless as it had looked in Sapporo station, it was meant to have a projector above it projecting a film onto the rippling milk, and it looked quite cool when we found a bigger one today. The arts fest, called Arts! Meet! Mart! was in an abandoned school in the centre of Sapporo, and it filled their big sports hall with local arts and artists, selling their wares or just performing. I went with Tara and Akira, who is a school teacher and thus could explain that the school was empty because of that population doughnut that means no families live in the centre of cities anymore. Hence no catchment, hence no pupils. Included are pictures of a crowd watching a performance by a guy in a shed who stuck prepared adhesive shapes onto a background, while a vintage movie projector played over him and ambient guitar noise twanged away; SCIENTISTS in welding masks and their art robot that mostly just talked; and Tara and Akira posing with Terebi-to San, one of Sapporo's mascots, a personified TV Tower, with the personality of a slightly grumpy father (hence the moustache). They both signed disclaimers, so they may end up on a poster, TV or a weird website for tourist mascot fetishists.

There was plenty of fun stuff, and after that there was coffee, running into other friends, nabe, ramen and snow. I declare Sunday a rousing success!

Sadly, although this guy's art was fun, it was almost impossible to actually watch what he was doing clearly, so I didn't bother to include any pictures of his "Art-Shed". The crowd was fun to look at, although that woman in the middle has clearly "made" me.

Art-Scientists in motion.