Hokkaido!

This post will be super photo intensive. Sorry to anyone with a slow connection.

Got back from Hokkaido yesterday evening with my pal Aki and picked up Mochi from E's house. He was super happy to see me! Now I know he really loves me and not just because I fill his food dish!

Hokkaido was awesome and I'm bummed that I had to come back so soon. The weather was good and the temperature was at least 10 degrees cooler than Tokyo. I saw some famous sights and ate a lot of famous foods.

Here is the photo recap:

We got to Sapporo around 3 p.m. and immediately set out for Asahikawa. There, we unpacked and decided to head out for a famous meal called Genghis Khan　（ジンギスカン）. It consists of lamb and assorted vegetables cooked on a cone shaped iron pan. A special sauce is poured over the veggies and meat while they cook. It tasted great with Sapporo beer!

 

The next day we hit up Asahiyama Zoo, the main reason we went to Hokkaido. The zoo is the most famous of all zoos in Japan. While it's not as big as Ueno Zoo, it has better built attractions in my opinion. My only complaint was the select number of animals. Ueno rules with a much bigger assortment than what we saw in Asahiyama.

 

This little guy was just starting to turn white for the fall. He will be a beautiful snow white by winter with a cute black nose and dark eyes. Now he's halfway, so he looks kind of patchy and ragged. Haha. He is an arctic fox, or  ホッキョクギツネ in Japanese.

 

Spider Monkeys waiting for breakfast. We had to laugh because when the staff came out of the door, the monkeys all pounced on him. Wish I could have taken a photo of the handler's face. I have it on video, so once I get it on my computer I'll try and take a screen shot of it.

 

A lovely giraffe. Wish I had natural eyeliner like him! Would save me a lot of work in the mornings!

This is pretty famous. The zoo staff built this entire structure for the indigenous Japanese monkeys. There are swings, tightropes, wheels, and all sort of other fun things for the monkeys to do. They must enjoy it, because unlike the other monkey attractions where they just sit around, this group was really active and climbing all over the place.

 

This is a Japanese raccoon dog ( タヌキ). I'd never seen one in the flesh before, so I took a picture even though it's behind bars and hard to get a shot of. You see statues of Tanuki (as they are called in Japanese) in front of bars, noodle shops and sometimes they are used as sake bottles. I've also seen them in Kamakura outside temples.

I really like owls, so I took quite a few shots of this fellow sleeping near the fence. I'm not sure what kind of owl he is, but he was really big. Maybe the biggest bird I've seen that wasn't a turkey or vulture. He had these cute eyes that when closed, looked like happy half moons. My chatting to Aki woke him up however, and he gave me this look. It clearly says "Piss off!"

A lovely Emperor penguin. I have this thing about penguins. It's not an obsession, but I love to collect anything with penguins on them. It's kinda my mom's mission in the winter to find me flannel pjs with penguin designs. The penguin display at Asahiyama is one of the things that make this zoo famous. It has a large plastic tunnel that is built into the swimming tank. People can walk through the tunnel and watch the penguins swim all around them. It's like they're flying through the air. I managed to get one on film, so I will try and upload it soon. It was beautiful.

 

Next up, the Hokkaido Snow Museum! C'mon, you knew Hokkaido had to have one, right? I mean they have a Snow Festival and all...

 

The first part of the museum was actually kind of creepy and reminded me of the X Files. First, we had to walk down about 4 flights of stairs until we got to these two snowflake embellished doors. We could see a weird green light coming through the glass. What was it, do you think?

 

See what I mean? Creepy. Inside each glass window was a "natural ice or snow formation" that had been preserved. Some were more like huge ice stalactites and some just looked like hard snow blocks. It was interesting, but I wish they'd used a differed lighting theme. All I could think of was Scully and Mulder looking at frozen aliens behind glass. "The Truth Is Out There."

 

Here is a close up of one of the ice displays. It even looks something like an alien, doesn't it?

 

The rest of the museum, I'm happy to say, was a lot less disturbing. Here is where the snowflake hall started. Each small window is an actual photo of a natural snowflake. All of them were subtly different. It was a really nice room to walk into after the frozen snow abattoir. 

In this room, the four TVs had a looped video of different snow scenes. It was nice to watch. There was also another room with videos that explain how scientists study snowfall, snowflakes and other winter-related stuff. Er, a very good use of scientific time, I'm sure. I can't see one of those scientists scoring big at the bar.

Woman: "What do you do for a living?"

Scientist: "Oh, I study snowflakes!"

Woman: "..."

Scientist: "Hey! Where are you going?"

 

Since we were in Hokkaido, of course we had to eat ramen! This is Aki's Uni (sea urchin) ramen.

 

I, in my intense dislike for most creatures that come out of the ocean, settled for a nice chashuu pork ramen with miso soup base. The shop was extremely generous with the portions of meat (there was smaller chunks of meat under these slices you see here) and all for the bargain price of 1000 yen. The noodles were all handmade in the shop and they were awesome. The shop sells their ramen kits online, so I'm going to order some next time I get a hankering for really good ramen. UPDATE: The shop's name is 一蔵 (Ichikura) and their ramen is available here. Sorry, no English page. Thanks to Aki for the link!

  

After all the walking around we did, Aki and I were in real need of some relaxation. We found out that the hotel behind ours had a hot spring in it that visitors could use. When we called to see about pricing and times, we heard that we could experience a "Radium capsule" as well as the hot spring for about 1500 yen each. Always game for an adventure, we agreed and ended up in a room with this pink beauty. What it is is a kind of stone spa mixed with radium technology. After your nice hot bath in the hot spring, you put on these weird fuzzy pajama-style clothes and seal yourself in the radium capsule. For 15 minutes you sweat it out, and then change places with your partner. Aki and I reserved the room for an hour and a half. It had a foot massager, TV, DVD Player and great radio system, so waiting our turns to go in the capsule was comfortable and went by quickly. I enjoyed it a lot!

 

Here is a shot of the inside. Under the towel you can see the hot stones. It was really cool to be sealed inside (not for the claustrophobics!) and sweat out all the impurities. After I got out, Aki told me to lick my arm. Yes, I gave her the side eye. She told me my sweat (of which there was much after being sealed in a box and lying on hot stones) wouldn't be salty. She was right. My sweat tasted like water. The spa is healthy because you don't sweat out any of the essential salts your body usually looses when you get dehydrated. I wish we had one of these in Tokyo, but alas, they are only at that one hotel in Hokkaido.

 

What would a trip to Hokkaido be without seafood? Crab is one of the few things from the ocean I will eat, so I wanted to buy some as a souvenir. Unfortunately, they were beyond expensive. As you can see, even the small ones were more than 30 dollars. A little too pricey for just me to eat. The big knobby ones are Tarabagani and the smaller ones are Kegani.

 

I did get some crab, though! At the airport Aki and I ate 蟹召し丼 (crab bowl). It had shredded crab meat mixed in with rice and a nice sauce. It was pretty good and all for the bargain of price of 900 yen.I gave my melon to Aki since I was full. She assures me it was delicious.

 

Hokkaido has a lot of famous products that are popular as souvenirs. I decided to buy this baked pudding since I have never seen the product in Tokyo. The texture is hard to describe. The pudding has been baked so long that it can be cut with a knife like a really dense cake. Weird but good. It's from a famous bakery in Sapporo.

Part of the orgy of souvenirs I bought. A lot of the stuff I got is going to be given away as gifts (except the penguin stuff!). Now the hard part is figuring out who to give what.

 

Anyone who is a fan of Densha Otoko will understand why I had to own this. I howled with laughter in the gift shop.

 

Hands down the most famous gift from Hokkaido. I bought them to see what all the hype was about (pricey hype too), but I don't really care for them. The flavor isn't so amazing and they are too soft for me. I like my caramels to be chewy.

And last but not least;

 

My Mochi glad to be home and with his mum!