No joke, pain is everywhere. Especially me as a office guy. But Lothar saved our lives when he found a back-massage-chair at the artists lounge.

The sculpture as such progresses quite good today. We have now 12 hours left to do the fine-tuning.

Team Black Forest comes with their own Salmiaki Bar – Ice cooled!

Final result at day 3

Now we are on the way to the “Snow Conference” where lots of very, very important people talk about the latest techniques and tools in snow carving – pppffftt we know how to carve and so this mandatory event might be a bit of verbal pain for us. Just right now we decided to be late for the opening 🙂 Ups…

I might post some pictures from the conference, where we expect much more fun as I just wrote in a sentence before.  Lothi “the princess” deviate a bit from the dress code 🙂

Just got the information that the 2012  Air Guitar World Champ Justin “Nordic Thunder” Howard will perform at the Baltic Snow Call 2018 – We are looking forward to that – OMG!!! 🙂

Day 2 is is over – well nearly over. You may have asked yourself what will the sculpture look like. Here as sketch of the sculpture:

“Every bubble stands for a dream, a wish, hope, friendship and anything which makes life so exciting and unique. The wings of the sculpture models the wind which blows the bubbles up, higher and higher to the sky. At the end all will fade away but hope remains”

We progressed very well on the sculpture. Time flies, but we have 24 hours left. Here some pictures of the current state:

Town Hall invite

Thanks to Pia (she crochet the hats) we got some really outstanding black forest hats. We took the opportunity tonight to wear them the first time at an official Oulu Town Hall meeting. The whole event was very, very official but the hats made the difference. From now on we wear the hats during carving.

 

Schwarzwälder Kirschwasser

One bottle of Kirschwasser was already empty at the point we opened the second one in the Bus back from the town hall to Nallikari. The first bottle we served strategically during the carving to distract our competitors while carving. But tonight we open the second bottle in the bus and we got an empty bottle back. All the carvers drunk Kirschwasser like there was no tomorrow. Strange, since we would never drink Kirschwasser in Germany – We use it just for Schwarzwälder Kirsch Torte or to disinfect a cut in the finger. But here in Finland, where a small bottle of beer costs around 6€ and Schnaps a fortune, they slammed the Kirsch like water. We are sure that some of the competitors (pictures shows the Norway team) are knocked out tomorrow 🙂

The next surprise for our competitors is the three slices of Schwarzwälder Speck. Not sure how and when we serve it, but since the Saturday Party is in a Finish Sauna we are tending to offer the Speck there. This might be the beginning of a new Finish tradition – or maybe not 🙂

Thanks for all of your nice comments. This always let us feel a bit at home and also it feels like you are all here with us. We miss you!

We started carving today at 16:00. Not many pictures taken since we wanted to progress as much as possible. We only got 40 hours for our sculpture and that is a quite tough timeline. Here are some pictures of the current state:

I was shopping today since we ran out of coffee. We were a bit concerned that we might have not enough space in the fridge. But we were lucky.

 

SNOW CALL OULU – Finnland 2018

We are now on the way to the carving site. At the lottery we won cube #2 – Not sure which one it is but we will find out in some minutes. More pictures will come later today.

Lothar is getting the carvers-package.

 

Our first flight from Basel to Munich was delayed. So we missed the one from Munich to Helsinki. We got another flight from Munich to Helsinki but we now missed the one from Helsinki to Oulu. Meanwhile it is 23:40 and we got a plane to Oulu. Not a good start but could be worse. Lufthansa gave us a 10€ Voucher for the trouble. Very nice, eh 😠

Lothar tried everything at the counter, but there was no mercy from the Finnair staff. So we had to buy three new tickets for the last flight, 200€ each.

To stay fit and to share a bit of the rituals of the Black Forest with the Finns we put some Schiiibe into our luggage. Hope we find a good ramp there, however there is a table in our Appartement 😜

Some presents for our competitors. Hope the Kirschwasser distracts them a bit so that we benefit indirectly. Lets see what they say to Schwarzwälder Speck…

I was asked to write some not so typical answers to the questions we got from the Baltic Snow Call during the application phase. It is really the truth that I was not thinking that Lothar sends this to the committee. To cut a long story short, he did!

TEAM GERMANY – BLACK FOREST

At least I (Mike) was not responsible for the picture above 🙂

Introduction

Tell us about your team; who are you and where do you come from?

Team Black Forest is a mixed team of artists with broad experience in landscaping, music, light art and snow sculpting. We live in the very south-west of Germany at the border to France and Switzerland. Our sculptures are inspired by the beautiful Black Forest, the proximity to France, Switzerland and Italy. These cultural influences are reflected in our sculptures and as soon as we see 25 tons of compressed snow we are going in for the kill and do it for the thrill!

Team History

How long have you worked together? What are your team’s greatest achievements?

Team Black Forest work togehter as a snow sculpting team since more than 14 years. Beside the core team there are always handpicked friends joining in to ensure diversity and provide the most exciting sculptures for international competitions. Team Black Forest was 1st place in Lake Tahoe, USA and just 7 days later 1st place in Nayoro, Japan. On top of that Team Black Forest built the world-wide first interactive snow sculpture in Whitehorse, Canada 2016.

About Snow Sculpting

How did you end up carving snow and what is best in snow sculpting?

In the Black Forest it can happen that you are not able to leave your village because of snow blocking the streets. If we have had enough of repairing cuckoo clocks and swinging our balls we started getting creative. After building many snowmen we figured out that we are destined for greater things. Snow-sculpting is for us the transformation of cold and pain into team spirit and from there to the great satisfaction called a snow sculpture.

Baltic Snow Call?!

What do you expect from Baltic Snow Call?

Our dream is to sit with the Finnish Hockey Team Leijonat in a Sauna, listening to the Leningrad Cowboys and drink some of the nice Salmiakki to celebrate 100 years of Finland.

More info

Facebook: Team Germany-Black Forest