Memoirs from the Land of Suits and Ramen, Tue, 05 Nov 2013 | written by Simon
Simon with Eva at a City, Park in Asia, Japan

A bit disappointing. There is hardly anything here. Sapporo is a rather boring city of wide streets, high buildings, more wide streets, perfect 180x480m grid and little spirit. All built after 1850. It feels boring, and as it turns out, it is rather boring, at least culturally. Basically, there is nowhere to go here. We checked out the view from the radio tower, it’s all right, we checked out the art gallery, it’s OK, we saw the local attraction, a clock tower, and it was a disappointment, we went to the Hokkaido Shrine and it was nowhere near as good as what we saw before… All except for one thing. The trees. It’s a beautiful autumn here and this made up for other shortcomings. And the two ravens who joined us in the park for some cookies. But essentially, we saw most interesting places in five hours and ended up killing time towards the end of the day, waiting for our host to return home.

From what we know, Hokkaido is beautiful outside the city – forests, mountains, lakes, hot springs… Ah well, maybe next time we’ll rent a car.

The clocktower, the oldest building in town. Feels like the US.
The colours of autumn
In Hokkaido Shrine we met two Mormon missionaries. I asked them if they could explain to me what was the ceremony that was going on in the shrine about – they told me they didn’t know, but they did know I shouldn’t go in. I wonder what success they have here…
The ravens were way more cool than the Mormons.
Some more autumn trees
The Japanese take more photos than the tourists do…
Some observations: Sapporo is not only built on a grid, like other Japanese cities, it’s built on a oriented perfectly North-oriented grid. When the pedestrian lights turn green, they beep differently on the East-West line than on the North-South. There are fewer suits here, the ratio was almost fifty fifty even in the city centre. People generally look more relaxed, it’s much less crowded and the place seems more livable than Tokyo. Despite the myths about how expensive Tokyo is, food costs the same here, and museum entries and metro tickets are actually more expensive. Sapporo is famous for its milk and milk products, especially sweets – we will be testing that extensively.
Most sweets in Japan aren’t actually sweet, they are gooey, salty, seaweedy, or undefined. I mean, what do you expect if most of them are made from bean paste, sweet potato, or seaweed? Eva loves that. I just want my sugar back.