Hello from Sapporo! We’ve been here for a couple days so it’s past time for an update.
The biggest thing to happen here already is all the snow!
It has been snowing basically nonstop since we got here; we just went out to dinner (I’ll get to that at the end of the post!) and it was full on slipping around, footprints-in-the-snow level white everywhere; only the roads were clear.
As both of us grew up getting snow but have lived the last decade of our lives without it, it’s been really fun… and also really cold. Definitely more fun than cold, though.
(It is worth noting that the weather here isn’t terribly separated from Hakodate; I’m expecting to return there to it all being white, too. Pretty excited about that, actually.)
There has been a lot of fun stuff here other than just the snow! But most of it was all at one place.
Sapporo’s sister cities with Munich, apparently, so they have a Munich themed Christmas village all December; a lot of the shops are even staffed with Deutsche. They had a lot of German food – sausages, pretzels, candied almonds – and also a lot of churros, haha. Cassie and I had some mulled wine and hot beer which was lovely in the cold.
It was a really fun atmosphere, too, with everyone there having fun; a lot of laughter and smiling faces.
We’ve also done some shopping in town; there’s a massive outdoor shopping street that we had fun walking down.
I got a copy of the first tankōbon1 of Dandadan, which Cassie and I have started watching and really like. It’s, uh, definitely above my reading level, but I am actually reaching the point where, with a dictionary in my other hand, I can piece together a lot of it. I’m away from my other books for the moment, but once we’re back in Hakodate, I’m looking forward to tackling some of my books with furigana2.
Oh, and the food! Sapporo is known for this dish, soup curry, which is fantastic for cold weather. It’s exactly what it sounds like – curry that’s been watered down to the point where it’s more like a stew than a sauce – so long as you understand that Japanese curry is nothing like Indian or Thai curries. (Fun fact: Japan actually considers curry to be a Western dish, since they got it by way of England.)
The other night, when were killing time waiting for one of the other events at the winter village, we went to a nearby mall (to visit Sapporo’s Pokemon Center, haha), and at the mall we got some omurice3 that was outrageously, unfairly good. I got a beef stew one where the beef was beyond melting in your mouth; it was practically melting into a puddle on my plate. Absolutely incredible.
And then tonight we went to an American themed place – not because we were missing American food, but because Sapporo is also known for its beef and its burgers, so we went to a burger joint. But once we were there, we didn’t actually get beef; I got a chicken chili cheeseburger that was incredible, and Cassie got a quesadilla that was great, but was served with salsa that was very possibly the greatest salsa I’ve ever had in my life. (In Japan. At a burger joint. The food here is outrageous.)
We still haven’t even had miso ramen, which is another thing Sapporo is known for doing really well. But man, I’m already planning on going back to that burger place; they had a salsa burger that I think I would kill a man just to try.
- A graphic novel made of collected issues of a serial manga. In plain English, a reprinted collection of several issues of a comic book. ↩︎
- Tiny characters that tell you how to read kanji. Oh, uh, kanji are the more complicated Japanese characters, borrowed from Chinese – Kanji literally means something like “Chinese Letter.” ↩︎
- A portmanteau of omelette rice, and in its simplest form, it’s exactly that – an omelette on top of rice. ↩︎