By: Atty. Marlo T. Cristobal
(This is a reproduction of what l have written sometime ago that l wish to share in the website of Banateros to give its viewers some information for their guidance in their trip in the future, or simply for their reading treat).
Before we left for Tokyo last December 22, l requested my son, Byron, to include Sapporo, Hokkaido part of our itinerary, a place that enchants me for its snowy weather this time of the year. l thought my birthday celebration there would be the happiest. My son, feeling my peculiar desire for the place, readily agreed. Hence, from Tokyo, we took the flight to Sapporo on January 5 to give ourselves enough time to acclimatize to its biting cold weather before my birthday.
Snow weather has been a source of intense fascination to me from boyhood to my adulthood. Scenes of snow depicted in Christmas cards greetings and in pictures left a deep impression in my boy’s mind that fathered a living throbbing pizazz in my adult psyche, that intensifies all the more when l see movies portraying life on snow. To be in countries during their snow time became my permanent obsession. This issue of my snow captivation l must admit is one enigma of my life.
On our arrival in Sapporo on the 5th of January and on the following day there was only a moderate snow all around just baring an all-white but hushed glory, yet nonetheless so powerful to provoke in me an undescribable excitement and fun. Came the next day, the 7th of January, my birthday, the snow-white dessert of Sapporo grounds continued to lie placid and quiet early in the morning as we took breakfast in an equally quiet restaurant, when all of a sudden at about 10 am Mother Nature unleashed its fury of sending down wind blown strong snow rains that immediately rendered me crazy as l went about dancing on sidewalks and streets and lying my entire back on the snow, since within minutes the snow has become thick and produced a lot of big mounds of powdery and cotton-like soft snow on the grounds. As if nature was telling me in melodrama, ” Happy Birthday, Marlo, and here are your gifts, your long-time dreams and obsession — life in snow this time in fucking living color (please pardon my unrestrained exuberance over the experience, only emphatic meaning, no sinful thought, intended).
For hours, my family went about cavorting in the thick powdery snow grounds, unmindful of the heavy snow flakes alighting on and covering our coats and faces, like wayward children going about their playful ways in complete abandon.
On the 8th succeeding day of January, still in hot pursuit of snow experience, we went to Hoheikyo Onsen, amid the continuing snow rains, in what looks like a suburban area, it being more than an hour drive away from Central Sapporo. This place is nothing but a hot spring no different from our Laguna hot springs. But here is the unique and perfect beauty of Onsen hot springs. Onsen has several pools built in open air or forests that accumulate the hot springs flowing down from the mountains nearby. The pools are segregated, one set of pools for women, and another for men. And here is the beauty. Men and women who soak or immerse their bodies in the pools must go completely naked. That’s why the men and women are absolutely separated in iron-clad privacy, otherwise pandemonium would break loose in a mixed pools as aggressive men or women or gays or tomboys would brave the chase of their perceived loves of their lives.
And here is the quintessence of Onsen hot springs, as you immerse your body in the pool hot spring you are driven to meditate and lullabied to continue to meditate by the ceaseless rippling sound of the hot springs flowing down from the snow covered mountains close to the pools. And you begin seeing the mounds of snow on top of the natural big and small stones overhead and around the pool and the snow flakes heavily laden on leaves and branches of trees that surround what appears to be pools in the middle of a forest. I would scoop up the powdery snow over my head or beside me and make snow balls and throw them to the hot springs at the same time that my head gathered the ongoing snow rain. I saw the cool smoke of the snow and the hot smoke of the hot spring water beautifully blending and jelling together above. I went into deep pondering when l saw all the thick cool snow above me in glorious white while l wallow in a hot mountain water. What a poetic meaning l divined from this contrast of physical nature: snow and hot spring, cold and hot.Â
Life follows nature. It is an alternate or a contrast and blending of joy and sadness, of kindness and cruelty, of justice and injustice, of truth and lies, of fairness and inequity, of charity and selfishness, of betrayal and loyalty, of good and evil, and so on and so forth.
I thank God for gifting me the best birthday present l have ever received in my life (aside of course my good health and old age). I also thank my son, Byron, for allowing himself to be the instrument of God’s will for my birthday unique experience, and my two other children for choosing to live a life of reverence for God. All these are the real and legitimate kind of miracles of God in this present age.
Friends, if you want to experience life in snow, you don’t have to go far in America or Europe. What l saw exactly in pictures about, movies depicting, or stories on, snow and snowing, l saw them all in Sapporo, Japan, a place just a few steps away from your home, so to speak. I was crazy and obsessed about the detailed aspects of snow life. I experienced them all in glory in Sapporo. Now l can stop such obsession and dream, for Sapporo had surpassed this dream!
(Note: Above was written and sent only to a few friends on January 9, 2024)
