Day 21 Japan
It's the last day of my JR Pass!
NOOOOOOOOOO - gasp - NOOOOOOO!
It's been awesome just tripping around Japan on the trains. It's such an efficient and comfortable system. But alas 21 days is all I will have so I have planned to finish in Sapporo on my last day. This means I will have travelled all the way from Kyushu through Honshu up to Hokkaido using my pass.
But first - breakfast in Hakodate!
One of the big things here is squid sashimi apparently. And my hotel is around the corner from the fish market. So here we go.
- Squid sashimi with dipping sauces - including a sauce I made myself with that mortar and pestle out of fish guts, ginger and soy sauce.
- Donburi (rice bowl) with salmon roe and scallop sashimi
The rice bowl was really enjoyable. I love roe and the scallop sashimi was rich and sweet and delicious.
The squid sashimi on the other hand was just a bit too sashimi for me. I ate it all but I can't say I really enjoyed it. It didn't have a huge amount of taste so I'm not sure what I didn't like about it. The squid was super fresh and the texture was fine but it just wasn't for me.
After that I walked around the fish market for a while and decided I wasn't hungry enough to try anything else. Something weird about rockmelon here. There were rockmelons going for 6-8000 yen which nearly $100 AUD. Not sure why and maybe it was a whole tray but that's still a shitload of money for rockmelon even given Japan's really high fresh fruit prices.
Back to the hotel to check out and head to the train station. My train today was about 4 hours from Hakodate to Sapporo. The weather continues to be dreary the whole way so the scenery wasn't amazing. I did see waves though! There are actual beaches and actual waves in this part of Japan. Some of them looked really nice too ... Probably a great place to swim on a nice day in summer.
I arrive in Sapporo without much fuss and head off to find my hostel for the next couple of nights. Late check-in strikes again so I dump my bag and head off to explore. Sapporo honestly doesn't seem to have that much to see and do outside of eating and shopping. It's almost the curse of the big modern city.
One of the places to visit in "Sapporo" is actually a place called Otaru. It's another one of those harbour towns (Japan IS a series of islands after all) with some preserved districts. Since this is the last day of my JR Pass I decided to go check it out this afternoon to squeeze the last bit I can from it.
Otaru is nice. There's a little canal area which is nicely preserved and packed with tourists. Heaps of rickshaw drivers as well plying their trade. They stand stand on every street corner around the canal almost looking like hookers trying to get some action (which is almost what they are I guess).
Otaru is also famous for glassware and clocks. There is a big long strip mall with a bunch of glass shops and a couple of clock shops at the end. The entire strip seems to alternate between glass shops and oyster / rice bowl shops. So many Chinese and Korean tourists there filling all the stores too.
So I walked around for a while and didn't buy anything. I ended up walking around a few of the back streets and saw some interesting modern houses. Saw a bunch of these "cubist" type homes. Very basic and very cube-like in a variety of colours.
On the way back to the train station I ran across my very first stand-up sushi bar! So of course I had to stop and try it. I ordered the chef's set of 6 sushi pieces and patiently waited while he served everyone already standing there. Given this is a harbour city I expected the fish to be really fresh and it sure was. It was delicious! I know half the battle is selecting the fish but the chef just made it look effortless. For anyone who hasn't seen it you should check out "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" (Derek and Kat got me onto it) which is a great documentary about a 3 Michelin star sushi chef in Tokyo.
Back to the hostel to check in then I head out for dinner. I've got a couple of dinner recommendations from one of the gents at the hostel and off I go. I want to try this dish called "soup curry" which is a Sapporo invention. I'm expecting it to be soup that tastes like curry believe it or not.
I could not find the places recommended to me (I'm sure I walked past them and didn't see them) so I just kept walking until I found a place that said soup curry on a sign outside and went in there. The soup curry was more like a stew than a soup I would say. A thin stew with chicken and vegetables that had a very curry-ish flavour profile And was served with rice. It was really delicious. Something like 18 or 20 spices go into it and the flavour was really complex. Thinking about it now it was a familiar flavour profile but I couldn't pin it down to being the same as any other particular country's curries. Really good and I'd recommend it to anyone visiting Japan.
Afterwards I went for a walk to have a look at Ramen Alley (a maze of small ramen shops all next to each other) and shake my head in wonder at the queue of 30 people outside 1 shop with 5 empty ones less than 5 seconds walk away. Idiots.
I also managed to stumble across the red light district. Apparently Sapporo has the biggest one in Japan outside of Tokyo. Didn't see anything shocking. Mostly just a bunch of drunk guys and a bunch of girls wearing different coloured bunny ears trying to entire said guys inside. I'm sure a whole bunch of depraved shit was going on inside the buildings but I didn't see it.
I ended up walking around for a couple of hours just enjoying the scenery. Since I missed dotonbori in Osaka this is the most neon lights I have ever seen in my life. I'm sure Tokyo will put it to shame in a few days.
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