Two for the Road

I was on my way to the Sapporo beer museum when it started to rain. The weather forecast has been notoriously unreliable since I’ve been here, so I’ve instead favoured looking out the window to judge whether to bring my umbrella. On this day, I’d decided not to bother as I set out for the hour or so walk to the old brewery.

As fate would have it, the heavens opened when I was about half way there feeling foolish under a brige along a riverside path. Waiting to see if it would blow over, a woman approached me and motioned for me to take her umbrella saying, in perfect English, that she was only a minute from home. I tried to politely decline but she insisted. Faith in humanity restored, I continued to my destination.

Luckily the beer museum had English audio guides and as a reward for completing all the sections as I wandered around I got a sticker and moved onto he most important part – a taste test. I went for their premium lager and the Kaitakushi, a beer which is a faithful reproduction of their 1870s original recipe. Both were tasty, but I think I preferred the modern style. While I’ve been here I’ve also sampled the ‘Classic’ a beer from the producer which is only available in Hokkaido.

Next I headed into the city centre to join a food tour, which promised to help me and two other travellers see some locals spots in the city.

We went to three or four spots, trying a wide variety of food and drinks, from craft beer, to shochu. Highlights included a mackeral potato salad and raw scallops.

Our host Aika was wonderful and helped us make friends with locals along the way. She’d just returned from a year studying in Ireland where she had visited over 200 pubs – my kind of girl!

At the end of the tour she invited me to head to another bar and eventually a club with some of her friends, and as is the way with nights out, the less planned they are, the better. We had a blast and danced until the sun came up.

Somehow managing to avoid giving myself mid-trip jetlag from being a 24-hour party person, I emerged from my appartment an undisclosed number of hours later to head to Otaru, a nearby seaside town.

The town felt quite touristy compared to Sapporo and had an enormous shop full of music boxes, a steam powered clock, and lots of branches of LeTao, a famous bakery founded in the town. I stopped there for lunch trying their cheesecake and an italian influenced lunch.

Otaru is also famous for fishing and fresh seafood as well as a beatuiful canal bordered by old warehouses, so I had to take a walk past the market and down to the promenade – it was beautiful!

Since my last update I’ve also done a couple of long walks to sights at the outskirts of the city. On one of these trips I headed to the Sapporo dome, a convertible stadium (the first of its kind in the world) which can host both baseball and football. It’s quite an iconic looking building and even had a observation deck at the top of a very long escalator. It was a weekday afternoon when I got there so it was very quiet, but led to be getting some good shots from the viewing platform.

I then walked a couple of miles to another observation area. I’d spotted it on the map and it turned out to be quite a strange place but interesting.

It turned out to be more famous for its statue of Dr William S. Clark than the view of the city. Despite only staying in Sapporo for around eight months in the 1870s, he became an icon of the area. He was vice principal of the Sapporo Agricultural College which later becacame Hokkaido University. Upon leaving his role at the institiution his parting words to his (all male) cohort was “Boys, Be Ambitious” which became a motivational catchphrase in the city and beyond.

The observational area even had an employee whose whole job was to get people to pose in from of his statue. I thought the hand gesture could be mis-interpreted so gave it a miss. The clearing next to the statue had a few other buildings which upon closer inspection were a museum deducated to the good doctor Clark, a sheep rearing information centre, a museum about the Sapporo Snow Festival, a lamb bbq restaurant (so after you see the sheep you can eat them, naturally) and a gift shop.

I visited each in turn and most facinating was definitely the Snow Festival Museum. I hadn’t read much about this event as it’s obviously the wrong season but it looks incredible. Because Sapporo gets so much snow every year (over 500cm on average!) there is a snow sculpting festival of epic proportions, and the photos and models of some of the past creations were mind blowing.

Also mind blowing are the number of mascots in this country. Every single place and attraction you go has one and on this day of exploring I saw ones for the snow festival, the Sapporo dome, the open air observation deck and the TV tower!

I also spent a day exploring a couple of museums away from the city centre – the Hokkaido Museum and the Historical Village of Hokkaido.

Both were worth visiting but I loved the open air museum particularly, with lots of different types of buildings and artefacts. I even learned how to make a fishing net form one of the guides there!

In amongst all my exploring this week I’ve also spotted some great wildlife, from water birds, to large insects and foxes.

Last night I headed to a firework display down at the river. Conveniently close to my house, so I avoided the crowded subway to get there I joined a couple of thousand others, many in traditional dress for this once in a year free display. The Japanese word for firework is Hanabi, which aptly means ‘flower fire’.

My time in Sapporo is coming to a close, so it’s nice to go out with a bang, just a couple of days of souvenir shopping to go!

Iris