北海道の雪祭り （Snow festivals in Hokkaido) : 旭川の雪祭り 氷

En français
When I came back from the zoo, I went to see the 雪祭りunfortunately it was a little early and my camera's battery finally died before I could take pictures of the illuminations. The first part of the 雪祭り was on the street in front of the station and was the presentation of ice sculpture. They were even more impressive than the one in 札幌。
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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.
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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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