A Snowy Day

Welcome back readers! Here we are, already at the end of February. Time sure is flying by! It has been almost seven months since I arrived in Japan, which feels so crazy! It seems like I just arrived. I haven’t been up to too many adventures lately, but I have a few things to write about. This post is about the nice trip I took up to Iiyama to see the snow festival with a bunch of the other foreigners in the prefecture.

I started out my trip nice and early with an hour long drive up to Nagano City. I parked my car at a friend’s and we walked to the station to take the train up to Iiyama. We were pleasantly surprised by the train we boarded. It was kinda old and fancy looking, with tables and booth style seats. We were expecting just a normal commuter train. However, it ended up being more expensive, so we had to pay an extra ¥500 for it, so that was a bit annoying. It was a more comfortable ride though, and we got some pretty nice views out of the window. It was snowing beautifully, so the views of the mountains and the countryside were quite wonderful.

Once we arrived in Iiyama we waited for the other foreigners to arrive and explored the snow festival for a bit. It was held around a community/performing arts center, so they had a bunch of vendors. We got some yummy baked goods from a local vendor, then headed to a shop to learn how to make some washi postcards. Washi is a traditional type of Japanese paper made from the inner bark of the gampi tree. We were shown how to take the fibers that are sitting in water (absolutely freezing water by the way) and scoop them into frames. You have to dip the frame (which has a screen on the bottom) into the water and scoop up the fiber, then shake out the water. It is quite difficult to get the fibers to spread evenly. You have to do that a couple times, all without ruining the spread of the fibbers already in the frame. It was very challenging, but very cool.

Once we scooped enough of the fibers into the frame, we were allowed to put some pressed leaves and other greenery on the fibers in whatever design we wanted. The worker then took the frames and put them over this sort of vacuum that sucked most of the moisture out of the fibers. We then had to leave our postcards there for a few hours to dry, so we headed back to the snow festival to get some lunch and look at the snow sculptures.

Though I live in a mountainous prefecture, my village isn’t as high up, so we don’t get as much snow. This winter has also been pretty mild so the snowfall has been even less. So, as a good Wisconsin girl, imagine how happy I was to be in a place that actually had snow that was sticking! I do love winter, so I have missed having snow. I may or may not have been the person who started a snowball fight on the way back to the festival. I mean, the snow was perfect for compacting into a snowball.

When we got back to the festival we first admired all the cool snow sculptures. It was awesome to see all the different creations people had made out of snow. And they were also huge. Check out some photos of the sculptures.

After looking at the sculptures, we grabbed lunch. There were all sorts of food stalls, and I settled on a delicious oven baked margherita pizza. We then ventured back to pick up our washi postcards. I was pretty proud of how mine turned out, and I definitely want to do it again.

We spent the next few hours just venturing around the festival and enjoying more of the local vendors. I have developed a love for taiyaki, which is essentially a fish shaped pancake with filling. That’s the closest description I can come up with. They are quite delicious, and I nabbed me a caramel one this time around. We then stumbled upon a little sledding/tubing hill they had made out of a giant pile of snow, so of course, being the adults that we are, we asked if we could join in the fun with the other Japanese children. I haven’t been tubing in years, so I enjoyed my ride down that hill, though it was very short. It was a nice way to round out a fun day in Iiyama.

That sums up my trip to Iiyama. The rest of the day was spent travelling home, then binging The Dragon Prince on Netflix (highly recommend to everyone). Overall, a pretty lovely day. Stay tuned dear readers for another tale of my adventure from this past weekend. Also, if you have any ideas of things you would like me to write about, I would love for you to leave some comments to give me ideas to write about something else!