Hokkaido 2012 - Furano Skiing 富良野 スキー

If you want powder snow and don't want to rub shoulder with tons of foreigners then you should try skiing in Furano. Don't take our word for it, you can check out this FT article on skiing in Hokkaido.

Hokkaido 2012 - Eating Out in Sapporo & Furano グルメ 札幌 富良野

As you probably know by now, vacation trip for mum and dad isn't quite complete without going out of their way to search for food. So lets just see what they had in Hokkaido.

Sashimi beef rice bowl (sukiyaki beef set behind)

Sashimi beef rice bowl 和牛刺身丼 from Kumagera くまげら in Furano. Slices of  locally raised beef over a bowl of hot rice topped with a small dollop of wasabi, this is the signature dish of this famous restaurant. Walked in from the freezing cold of below -10C, one bowl may not be quite enough. The melt-in-your-mouth beef is perfect complement to the slightly sweet rice.

You can develop a huge appetite after skiing from dawn till dusk. You might associate dull and tasteless offering with ski resorts' restaurants, but mum and dad just couldn't say enough good things about the restaurants within the New Furano Prince Hotel. You can see some of food they had there.

Furano beef steak rice bowl

Fried Tokachi Pork Cutlet rice bowl

炭焼処きたぐに - Sumiyaki Dokoro Kitaguni serves local produce in Izakaya style

Roast pork loin from upper Furano 上富良野ポークロース焼き

Roast Taraba Crab claws

Dim sum buffet lunch, a firm favorite with a lot of Furano locals

There are plenty of restaurants to sample in Hokkaido and if a restaurant is mentioned in one of the Hong Kong guidebooks then you shouldn't be surprised to see an even longer queue of people with quite a few Hongkongers waiting in line. That was definitely the case with Nemuro Hana Sushi in JR Stellar Place building.

Creamy swiss roll with soft ice cream inside Shiroi Koibito Coffee Shop

Botan ebi from Gourmet Tei in Sapporo Fish Market ボタン海老−北のグルメ亭

Mix seafood Chirashi again from the Sapporo Fish Market

A massive bowl of Ramen from Ichiryuan near Sapporo JR station - 一粒庵

Hokkaido 2012 - 63rd Sapporo Snow Festival 札幌雪祭り

After a 4-month hiatus, we finally get our acts together and start blogging again!! Life has been quiet and we got to spend a lot of time with mum and dad. That's until they decided to visit Hokkaido for skiing and the snow festival in Sapporo.

You might have noticed that the term "global warming" is no longer in vogue, instead the preferred term now is "global climate change". This may have a lot to do with the severe winter US experienced last year, and it wasn't easy for the media to conjure up the image of "warming" under such circumstances. This winter, it is North Asia's turn to experience such weather. Snow accumulation totals are measured in meters (4 meters along the north western coastal area) and a lot of places have double that of average.

Such conditions must be good for the snow festival!? But the first couple of days after the official start of the festival, the weather turned warmer and some of the snow sculptures were melting. It's then when one realized the painstaking steps not only to create the art works but the effort in keeping up.

Two ladies working on the snow castle with their bare hands

お城(野田市)　- the most intricate of the small sculptures

Some of the exhibits were literally gigantic and their constructions involved industrial cranes and other heavy machinery.

Snow Aquarium at night 雪の水族館

Snow Aquarium (An US Navy band playing live) 雪の水族館

One Piece (A super popular, long running comic in Japan)

One Piece at night, the color spotlights brought more of the intricate features to life

鶴ヶ城 Tsuruga Castle - fine tuning the spotlights

Taj Mahal タージ.マハル

Tokyo Disneyland - Dreams come true!! 夢がかなう場所

National Palace Museum (Taiwan) 故宮博物院 

One often associates the Snow Festival with all the art pieces above, but it is almost like a carnival with stall selling everything from roasted chestnuts to Brazilian barbecue. On top of the multitude of food stalls, one could find queues of people waiting in line for free tastings from tofu to health drink. There was even a snowboard competition. You could easily spend a day walking along Odori Park to take everything in, especially when a lot of the exhibits looked completely different between day and night.

Snowboard Acrobatics

Free Tofu tasting - 10000 bowls of these were the target

Brazilian BBQ

Mum getting a bag of freshly roast chestnut from a pressure chamber roaster. Juicy, tasty, just yummy!!

Kyushu 九州 Trip - Best of the rest

eeny meeny miny mo

 100 Yen loop bus taking you around the city centre of Fukuoka

Special guide dog toilet - not sure if the signs are for the guide dogs or the blind people?!

Surely Yadoya is the name of the hotel......

The warmest outside temperature was 27C.

Cobble path in Nonohana (野の花)

The extended sakura season - shortly after a drizzle.

Sakura in the morning

Onsen bath attached to the room (露天風呂付き部屋) in Nonohana (野の花)

Onsen Egg, the natural way

Onsen Pass in Kurokawa (黒川)

Thought our parking lot is tight!! Kurokawa (黒川)

One of the many feral cats in Kurokawa (黒川)

Look out for cows and horses. En route to Mount Aso (阿蘇山)

Taking a break on top of Mount Aso (阿蘇山)

Japanese Giant Hornet (オオスズメバチ) - kills about 40 people on average in Japan every year. Of course, mum had no idea when dad urged her to take a closer look at the beast!!

Luck and fortune are literally in your hand.

Guys need to throw it into small puddle of water at the back of the rock turtle using their left hands and girls do it with their right hands. Mum got one in. Yahoo!!

The taxi rank outside JR Hakata station