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| Sapporo from the large hill jump |
Last weekend we took advantage of the long weekend to go to Hokkaido and see the Sapporo Snow Festival (pro tip: book early - we booked in December and it was hard to find flights and hotels). Here's how the weekend went.
Royce' Chocolate World
We went here because a friend had said it's the best chocolate in the world (that and it's conveniently located in the airport). Worth going to watch the robots making chocolate.
Odori Park
The biggest ice sculptures (along with lots of little sculptures, food stands, and thousands of people) are contained in the kilometre long park. The biggest ones are life sized building replicas (e.g. Wat Benchamabophit from Thailand) with the addition of a stage for silly Japanese shows. We went here during the day and at night when they are lit up.
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| Ise ~ Trip to the Myths |
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| The National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (Taiwan) |
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| Ski jumping (and falling) at Park Air |
Susukino
This is the nightlife part of town which also had a couple of blocks worth of ice sculptures. None of them were large, but they were generally more innovative (and commercial).
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| They're part of the sculpture |
There is an underground mall all the way from Odori to Susukino so people can stay out of the cold. On a Saturday night it's busy but none of the shops are open. Not everyone needs it though, apparently sometimes fashion is more important than the cold.
Sapporo Winter Sports Museum
Like Nagano, Sapporo has also hosted the Winter Olympics (1972) and has a museum dedicated to it. The main attraction of the museum was the simulation machines for 8 or so winter sports where I learnt that speed skating is exhausting. Outside, we caught the chair lift to the top of the actual large hill jump where we discovered that it's almost certainly not as trivial as the simulation would have me believe.
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On the left is the chair lift
On the right is the rows where spectator seats were set up |
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| The drop of the actual jump |
Otaru
Otaru is a small port town about an hour from Sapporo. It is mostly famous for the
crowded picturesque canal, adorned with street lamps, floating lamps, and hand-made-every-single-day-by-putting-ice-in-buckets candle holders. We took a bus to the ocean thirty minutes away to see Kihinkan, a lavish villa dreamt up by the 17 year old daughter of a very successful herring fishing tycoon.
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| Kihinkan |
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| Making candle holders |
We also went to the Otaru Museum, Bank of Japan because it was free. The bank was designed by a famous architect and inside you can pick up 100 million yen worth of imitation notes as well as inspect the security features of the real notes.
A couple of places we ate also seem worth a mention (it seems to me that eating in Japan falls more on the side of attraction than just pure necessity). In Susukino, we found the narrow "Ramen Alley" consisting of many ramen shops that seat about ten people each on a bar around the small kitchen.
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| "Our" ramen shop |
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| Ramen alley |
I had also marked a few vegetarian restaurants on my map (because getting vegetarian food in a not-specifically-for-vegetarians restaurant in Japan is hard). However unlike in Australia or America where you would just show up at the address and the restaurant would be in front of you, all of the building we found had an unassuming entrance leading to around 20 restaurants spread over many floors (pro tip #2: record which floor a place is on as well as it's address).
Hokkaido is also famous for dairy, and this manifests itself in the large number of dedicated ice cream/soft serve shops. Despite the fact that it's below freezing, we tried a few of the appealing flavours offered by one shop in Otaru - apricot, sake, purple sweet potato and sea urchin.
