北海道の雪祭り （Snow festivals in Hokkaido) : 旭川動物園

En français
The next day I got up early to go to 旭川 it takes almost two hours by train to get there. The thing I liked in 北海道 is that no matter where I wanted to go, I didn't have to transit. I took a direct train to 旭川駅。Then I was a bit lost arrived there, I needed to find the bus stop number 5 to get to the zoo, but I didn't want to go wondering too much out of the station in the wrong direction in the snow. Hopefully the Japanese tourist information was really helpful, the woman there gave me a time table of the bus departure to the zoo and to come back and showed me exactly where the bus station was. It was funny to speak in Japanese when she was answering in English to me. I took the bus to the zoo, it takes about 40 minutes to get there. It was starting to snow while we were waiting. A lot of people had decided to go to the zoo too. 旭川動物園　is one of the most famous zoo in Japan, it's not very big but it has winter animals such as polar bear, penguins and an arctic fox. And the very special penguin walk activity. My camera's battery got frozen during this but I still managed to get awesome pictures.
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北海道の雪祭り （Snow festivals in Hokkaido) : 札幌のすすきの

En français
After 大通 I went to すすきの。The 雪祭り　there was made of ice sculpture. I had the chance to see some people working on the sculpture too. The ice sculptures are thin and filled with a lot of details compare to the huge snow sculptures. It was really contrasting. It seems to be easier to get things prisoners in the ice and then to sculpt it to give a given effect. There was bottles from sponsors inside of some, event crabs and other seafood, or flowers.
Travel table of content

北海道の雪祭り （Snow festivals in Hokkaido) : 札幌の大通

En français

After checking at the hotel when I arrived in 札幌　I went directly to the main attraction in the city which was the 雪祭り　on 大通。On the way, I met some igloo which could be visited, people were lighting up candles inside. I then reached 大通 and the first view was a huge street aquarium sculpture or more exactly a sculpture of the submarine life. It was illuminated and absolutely amazing. I then walked along the street to see the other snow sculptures. Several of them were in fact stage where people were playing games or singing. I had a ラーメン before continuing to すすきの。

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北海道の雪祭り （Snow festivals in Hokkaido) : Introduction

En français

It has been a long time since the last blog post in January. Sorry about the long silence. Hopefully I have something new and interesting to entertain you for the next few days. I wouldn't say my life was on the down side for the last month but it wasn't quite as entertaining as it used to. Hopefully it's on the way up and I have to say that I spend the last four days week-end traveling up North to go and see the 雪祭り（yuki matsuri) in 北海道 (Hokkaido)。

The 雪祭り　is a festival with snow and ice sculpture and delicious street food as for any Japanese festival held in Hokkaido, the island in the North of Japan.

Normally when you tell people that you are going to see the 雪祭り they expect you to spend the day in 札幌 (Sapporo)　the main city of 北海道 and to spend a  day or two in 大どり(Oodori) to see the snow sculptures and the show there and to visit the other few sites of festival in 札幌。Few months ago, that's what I intended to do but not quite what happened. Instead I took four days to go to three different cities : 札幌、旭川 (Asahikawa) and

 小樽 (Otaru), to discover three very different and equally entertaining 雪祭り。 The next few posts will be telling the tale of my travel in the "Grand Nord". Stay tunned.

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Reading Challenge

I love books, when I was living in Belfast there was a shop where you could get second hands books for very cheap and it's the same in Japan so I collected a lot of books that I didn't really have time to properly read.
Several times while reading on internet I came across this idea (don't ask me from who it is) it says if you want to read many books get a empty shelve and make a pile with your books near it, then you are allowed to tidy the books by putting them on the shelve only when you are done reading them. I thought the idea was funny and he did turn a bit in my mind but the last time I saw it, I decided that I needed to give it a try. First because it is clearly bugging me to have all those unread books.
Second because you can never know if something will work before you try it for yourself (No it wouldn't work for me bullshit here).
Thirdly because it does make my room look kinda cool this way.
I emptied my closet (and I wonder how the books could fit in in the first place). I empty the shelve of the unread books and here we go.













































The books include, English classic, American classic, Homere and Virgil, scientific book (Mathematic, Physics, Chemistry, Paleontology... ), Japanese Manga, Harry Potter 3 in Japanese, one novel in German...

I have books from my "special collection" which will need to be read later as they involve the fact that I'm not fluent in their language and sometimes even don't have the basics.

Some more books will be added soon as I'm waiting for two package from Amazon, one containing American classical science fiction novels and one being "The Fault in Our Start" (more about it later).

I don't know how long it's going to take me to read all this, if I was still in middle school I would say two months but with my actual life, I have no idea. Stay tuned for the updates.

ジウ 警視庁特殊犯捜査係 (Jiu)

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ジウ　警視庁特殊犯捜査係 (Jiu) is a Japanese drama in 9 episodes from 2011 based on a novel suspense serie by Tetsuya Honda.

The Japanese S.I.T. (special investigation team) police organization have two women in the team. Misaki is very warm and feminine and turned toward negotiation. Motoko is more athletic and tend to solve the cases by force which end up with having her transfered to the S.A.T. the special intervention unit normally reserved to men. Both girls are trying to track down Jiu, the perpetrator of very brutal kidnapping crimes.
Cinema, Manga, Animation Content

Casting : 

黒木メイサ as Motoko Isaki
多部未華子 as Misaki Kadokura
城田優 as Takashi Amamiya
北村有起哉 as Hiroki Azuma
김명수(L) as Jiu (Jiu is the Chinese character played by a Korean guy in a Japanese drama... interesting)
飯田基祐 as Numaguchi
伊武雅刀 as Kensuke Asai


I like this drama because it is filled with suspense. Also my favorite charactere is Motoko she is more my type. I also like Jiu's personality even if he is the bad guy in the story.

Rainbow catcher (JulNoWriMo part)

Last July I participated to JulNoWriMo and at the same time to Camp NaNo. This works on the same principle as NaNoWriMo you need to write a certain amount of words to win. I might have been really busy with other stuff at that time because I just realized few days ago that I didn't brag about winning... wait I was traveling in Ireland and France at that time. So I didn't have time to blog post about it !! Anyway the fact is that I actually won JulNoWriMo (and failed AugNoWriMo) with a partial novel called "Rainbow catcher".
The novel is about a boy who travel into a very desert country to catch the purple rainbow he needs for his younger sister's heart surgery. I know it sounds a little crazy but well you'll have to read it to make up your mind about it.
I'm uploading it now because I'm intending to finish this story this month while participating to JanNoWriMo 2012. During the summer it was really easy to write something which took place in a desert as it was really hot. Now that we are in the middle of winter, it seems a little bit more difficult. Anyway, we will see the outcome soon I believe.

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