This weekend Sabena and I took a long trip all the way up to Sapporo in Hokkaido. We flew out on Friday night with just enough time to find the guest house we booked and go to bed. It was a tiny little place, but cozy. The owners chatted with us in Japanese, which was really cool. One of the other guests was from Osaka city, so we heard the distinctive and now familiar Osaka dialect even way up in Hokkaido, which I thought was amusing.
All the beds crammed in a small area made putting the sheets on difficult, but it was a great little guest house!
On Saturday we had a reservation at the Toyako Manseikaku Hotel quite a trek away from Sapporo, but we had enough time to wander Sapporo on Saturday morning and early afternoon. Sapporo is, of course, much farther north than Osaka and so it was much colder up there. It was actually nice, though, since Osaka was about seventy degrees (though admittedly unusually warm that day), which is unheard of back near Chicago. I hadn’t realized how much I missed the seasonal rhythm that I was used to back home until I spent time in Hokkaido. It was cold, but not too cold, so I didn’t need more than my jacket.
While in Sapporo, we stopped at a ramen shop for some Sapporo style ramen on my Japanese speaking class teacher’s recommendation- though he currently lives in Osaka and teaches at Kansai Gaidai, he’s originally from Sapporo, so I asked before going what he recommended we do. He said since it’s the off-season for tourism in Sapporo, one thing we should definitely do was try Sapporo style ramen, which uses a miso base as opposed to the salt base they use in Tokyo. It was fantastic!
Sapporo definitely felt a bit different than Osaka. Though I couldn’t quite explain how, they spoke differently than in Osaka besides just not using Osaka dialect. They also didn’t seem to be bothered by light rain as much as those in Osaka and Tokyo. In Osaka and when I was in Tokyo, it rained just a little for a half hour or so but even though it was just a drizzle, everyone put their umbrellas up. I even felt a little weird not bothering with my umbrella because everyone else had theirs. But when it drizzled in Sapporo, I didn’t see any umbrellas. Lastly, one of the most telling signals that we weren’t in Osaka was the side of the escalators and the stairs people used. In Osaka, if you don’t want to walk up the elevator, you stand to the right so people can pass you on the left. Everywhere else it’s the opposite.
Sometimes I forgot to stand on the correct side of the escalator, but this time I remembered! Even while uploading this picture, I second guessed myself on whether or not I took the picture while standing on the correct side!
After exploring Sapporo a little, we took a two hour express train ride out to Lake Toya, famous for being an onsen town. I took a Japanese public bus for the first time there since the Manseikaku was kind of far from Toya Station. Unlike the Kansai region, the trees in Hokkaido have completely dropped their leaves. That, too, felt more natural to me. Though I like that Osaka is warmer than home, it still feels really weird!! As far as everywhere I’ve seen in Japan so far, Hokkaido looked the most like home, but instead of hills like we have back in the countryside of Indiana, they have actual mountains in Japan.
Taken on the bus ride from the hotel back to the station.
Christmas isn’t really a big holiday in Japan. Couples go on dates on Christmas and maybe a few people exchange gifts but Christmas just isn’t a big deal in Japan. However, Hokkaido is also apparently much more into the Christmas spirit that the south. Maybe it’s because it’s actually cold at Christmas with the potential for snow up in Hokkaido, but for whatever reason, there were so many decorations and trees in malls, stores, and stations in Sapporo in addition to nice Christmas instrumentals playing in all of those places. Even though we had to wait over an hour in the JR station for our train from Lake Toya to Sapporo, the constant Christmas music was really nice. I’ve been missing that!
A cool little lit pathway across the street from our hotel at Lake Toya.
The Manseikaku was a really nice hotel, with a nice dinner and onsen included in our stay. It was my first time to an onsen, and I really enjoyed it- it really is very relaxing, though almost too hot.
The view from our hotel room. Lake Toya, a volcanic caldera lake.
Sunday morning we headed back to Sapporo (after having to ask a local when the bus would come since I couldn’t make heads or tails of the schedule at the bus stop), where we had a couple hours to shop at the airport, which pretty much doubled as a mall. There was even a chocolate factory! -Royce chocolate, a high-quality chocolate company based in Sapporo had a factory and shop there.
Unfortunately, our plane back to Kansai International Airport in Osaka on Sunday ended up landing a half hour late, causing us to be unable to make it home that night. We hopped the very last train from the airport to Tennoji in central Osaka at 11:30pm, but shortly after we arrived the trains shut down for the night. We used the little remaining battery on our pocket wifi and phones to book a cheap hotel about a kilometer walk from Tennoji station, checked in at 1am and left at 6:15 so Sabena could make it to her 9am class that day. Luckily my only class on Mondays is at noon. But it was still hard to get up and travel over an hour by train back to Hirakata during the Monday morning rush hour. But to be honest, it was an interesting experience. Japanese company workers have something of a reputation even abroad for working overtime so long that they miss their trains home and have to stay at a hotel like we did. Since that’s part of the culture, it was actually very easy to find a cheap place to stay for the night, which made our lives easier. All in all, a wonderful weekend!