Once again I must start off with how bad I am about consistently putting these blog posts out. I will now say that the new bar for consistency is going to be “every once in awhile.” Teaching at 12 schools means teaching a class every single period every single day, which means I’m tired every single day. Am I complaining? only a little bit. Do I love my job? A lot a bit. So no real complaints on my end.
Anyways let’s get to the main event, the Yuki Matsuri. This past weekend I went to the Snow Festival in Sapporo with some of my friends from college who are also working in Japan as JETs. This trip has its roots in an initial visit to Sapporo 2 years ago in April. We came just after it was warming up so we didn’t get to experience the infamous winter of Hokkaido. Because of this we all felt we absolutely had to make the trip up, so here we are.
The Snow Festival is an internationally recognized event where ice sculptors and snow sculptors come and work their magic. Above you can see a picture of me and my friends at the Star Wars snow sculpture, which happened to be my favorite. Other notable ones included a large Final Fantasy themed sculpture, one based off a famous building in Taiwan, the Arc de Triomphe and many other smaller sculptures. The big ones were certainly impressive, but the festival really got interesting when looking at the smaller sculptures, which brings me to a tangent that I have to go off on, given Donal Trump is now our President and you need to know how he’s perceived in Japan.
Sorry this picture is huuuuuge, I know, there’s just something about Trump it’s hard to explain. Trump is pictured above with a PPAP. For those of you who don’t know it’s the biggest fad to hit Japan and it all started with Pico Taro and his PPAP dance. The PPAP dance consists of a man, who most parents would keep their children away from in America, doing a weird dance where he combines a pen, apple and pineapple, accompanied by some unpleasant sound effects. The result is a daily dose of the song and dance at every school I go to from 1st graders to kids in Junior High School (maybe that’s why Trump doing PPAP is so fitting). Sorry, back to the matter at hand (I’ll refrain from the overdone small hand jokes, as much as I enjoy them).
If you’ve looked at the picture you will notice that while Trump’s hands are indeed small, he’s pictured rather grotesquely. That’s no accident, because he’s no more than a joke to most people I meet here. I even get asked by my 5th and 6th graders who I prefer between Trump or Hillary. However the most telling time was the day that Trump won. I walked into the office and all of my coworkers looked at me with a half-pity, half-you gotta admit this is kinda funny face, because they were unsure how much this hurt me. It’s safe to say with what’s happened the pity face was the more accurate treatment. Well Trump is not a topic I’m fond of and I won’t be fond of it until he does something to knock everyone out of the trance he has them under so we can impeach him. So let’s wrap this up.
I’ll end with my favorite sculptor, based off of a drawing submitted by an elementary school student nearby (the tower in the background is not a part of the statue). 
It was truly a great weekend spent with friends I hadn’t seen in ages. It was incredibly cold, compared to my small town way down south in Kagoshima, but being around a festival, eating from the stalls and seeing all the sites was a fantastic time. I highly recommend you go, because you not only see amazing sculptures, but it’s almost like seeing a review of 2016. Also make sure to get a day of skiing in while you’re there, I wasn’t as successful.
Bartels Talks 