Hokkaido- Day 1- Sapporo

Sapporo, Hokkaido

After a very early morning due to an early flight, we found ourselves checked into our hotel and off to "Hill of the Sheep," which is supposed to be a famous place in Sapporo. I'm still unclear as to what it's supposed to be. Perhaps its more lively there when there are actually sheep present? We took the bus all the way there (the bus takes you into the park) only to find out that the sheep are sick and have been relocated for the time being. The only sheep we saw was this one:

They had some awesome benches there, though. I think that it was supposed to be like Austria? Not 100% sure, but one of the buildings had a sign that said "Austrian Bldg." Anyway, here are the benches:

Anyone who's read any other post on this blog knows that all entries MUST have something food related on it, so here's what I ate while on Sheep Hill: ハスカップSoftserve. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what this fruit is called in English and was unable to find the translation online. I did, however, succeed in finding the scientific name in case you're intersted: Lonicera caerulea var. emphyllocalyx. So there you go.

You can see a picture of the fruit in the background. It's so hard with new flavors to decide whether the flavor's going to be too strong. I went with the swirl just in case, but this one would be best non-swirled, I think. Also, Lonicera caerulea > egg soft serve (from the Hakone trip)

Some other random findings:

The statue is of one William Smith Clark, an American. Not sure what he did. The school that I work with has a school festival every fall and last year the theme was "girls be ambitious," undoubtedly taken from this guy. The melting snowman doll on the right was found in a small museum that looked like it used to be a church that was filled with small replicas of snow and ice sculptures that have been created for the Hokkaido snow festival. (FYI: Hokkaido is the most northern of Japan's 4 main islands. Its latitude is below that of Seattle's but because of other factors, it is known to be a very cold place with lots of snow, and therefore, lots of good seafood!! Also, for some reason, there are many large breweries here including Sapporo, Asahi, and Kirin.)

This was a really fun place to play around with my camera. The gardens were impeccable.

We went to the Asahi beer plant since the 3 big breweries in the area have all you can eat "Genghis Khan," which is a way to cook mutton. When we got there, we found out that they weren't doing that anymore at that restaurant. It looked like another restaurant on the grounds may have had it, but it'd started to rain so we just had the buffet there. There were cooked foods and then some that you could take back to grill yourself. It was very good. It also turned out that you have to make reservations to go on the Asahi tour, helpful information that was not written in our guide book. 

We decided that we should do something cultural while we were there so we went to an Ainu cultural museum. 

Canoe, bathrooms (with a sign that says "please don't use") and a replica of what a house looked like- with fake snow!

This jacket is made out of salmon and other fish skin!