As mentioned in the previous entry, the international (English-language) part of the engineering education conference in Hokkaido ended on Friday. We'd bought plane tickets before having the schedule of the conference available, and wouldn't be flying out until Sunday night. Tourism was in order. As we found out, there isn't really that much to do in Hokkaido if you're not equipped to hike or ski - but we found a few interesting ideas through the internet and brochures at the train station, and made it happen. As usual, the complete picture set is available through Flickr.
And thankfully it was not Meh-Meh Land, if for no other reason than the fact that she did not find the brochure until too late to go there. Examination of the other side of the pamphlet showed that Meh-Meh Land is one not-terribly-large building full of not-very-compelling-for-Lee things, like various sheep with various wools. I am very grateful not to have experienced it firsthand, though she did mutter "Meh Meh Land..." in a Cartman/Casa Bonita* kind of way for days after reading about it.
*For the unfamiliar, Casa Bonita is "the Disneyland of Mexican restaurants" according to South Park, and Cartman is a character who fantasizes about how to get there. The muttering was very similar to "Casa Bonita" at the end of the dream sequence in the clip below.
It was lunchtime and a bit past when we got there, and we discovered that both the gate fee and the refreshments were very reasonably priced. We decided to eat before heading in. I optimistically ordered a corn dog and found that it did not live up to childhood memories, though the fries were top-tier for fast food.
Step 3: Consume the crab by any means necessary - we weren't wallflowers here, they do the preliminary splitting for you, and from there between the scissors, various probes, bare hands and face we went through the shells faster than you might think, trying to keep our mouths full of tasty crabmeat. This whole dinner was more expensive than the Genghis Khan one, since crab commands a premium to lamb, but I'd say fairly priced and quite worth it. The atmosphere was not as good as the other beer garden, which was more lively. It was another good time for sure though, and probably more messy fun than the multi-course formal cuisine meals, though I wouldn't mind giving those a whirl sometime also if we ever return to Hokkaido.
There's one more day of Hokkaido tourism to blog, and that will be coming up next.
*For the unfamiliar, Casa Bonita is "the Disneyland of Mexican restaurants" according to South Park, and Cartman is a character who fantasizes about how to get there. The muttering was very similar to "Casa Bonita" at the end of the dream sequence in the clip below.
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| ...ride around small motorized animal caricatures! |
No, not quite. She picked the Asahiyama Zoo, which would in most places count as a pretty solid small regional zoo, except that many Japanese believe it is the best zoo in Japan and it therefore has about equal traffic with the Ueno Park Zoo in downtown Tokyo. For comparison, something like 30 or 40 million people live within 90 minutes travel time of the Ueno Park Zoo. There are about 5 million people in all of Hokkaido and it is a heck of a lot more than 90 minutes across. The rest fly in specifically to see this zoo, at least according to the internet. It was busy when we went but most schools are back in session and with no major holidays about things were sane, except maybe the motorized animal caricature things. The zoo was a couple hours' train ride out of Sapporo into the countryside, which wasn't so bad. Hokkaido seems wider than most of Japan - the fields go out a lot further before they hit mountains. It doesn't feel like home, but it seems not-exactly Japan-like either.
This zoo is the most famous thing about the city it resides in, and has special trains that run there from surrounding cities. I would be stunned if there weren't special buses from the airport and would not be surprised if there were special flights in for the zoo as well.
Not the best corndog
It was lunchtime and a bit past when we got there, and we discovered that both the gate fee and the refreshments were very reasonably priced. We decided to eat before heading in. I optimistically ordered a corn dog and found that it did not live up to childhood memories, though the fries were top-tier for fast food.
The best part about the corndog was the clever ketchup and mustard dispensing packet. This packet had a hard plastic top and soft plastic pouches containing the condiments - snapping the plastic back and pressing the pouches together in a V-shape caused neat lines of each condiment to be dispensed. I'm not sure I've ever encountered this technology before and I rather liked it, though the main accomplishment was probably to distract me from the corndog itself.
The Asahiyama Zoo got famous for two things: outstanding enclosures and the penguin march. The penguin march seems to be more of a winter thing where the let the penguins out of the cage and they go on a walk around the park while thousands of Japanese people take pictures, and it was not on the schedule for a hot, sunny day in September. That leaves the enclosures, several of which are notably pretty cool.
This penguin tank has underwater passages running through it with water on three sides
It is possible to get quite close to the penguins, but they have a guy there to stop those who lean too much over the fence.
The pens are sometimes quite vertical, where the animals might be right above and to the side of you. Mom - they had some signs having to do with deer and gardens, look for them in the Flickr set.
In another example of the plexiglass tubes running through parts of some enclosures, this young chimp sat on top of the tube (30 feet in the air) in order to get a good look at the inhabitants therein.
This other monkey told the capybara to get off his lawn.
As we were walking out Ana decided she needed to get a candy sculpture from this guy, who was pretty chill. I think the sugar starts hot, which allows him to mold and sculpt it, and then as it cools it becomes harder and holds the shape. He made her a pegasus in about 90 seconds.
Fairly impressive for some hot sugar and 90 seconds
After returning to Sapporo from the zoo, we found our appetite for local Hokkaido crab only whetted by that served during Thursday night's reception. We went to the train station and got all the brochures for crab-centric restaurants (and Meh-Meh Land) to figure out what we were looking for. There were several restaurants that would have been happy to serve us tasty-looking 10-20 course formal Japanese dinners with crab in every course, and the prices weren't even that bad, but we found we were looking for an experience with rather more crab and rather less fussing about. We went to the Kirin Beer Garden, an imitator of the Sapporo Beer Garden, for their tabehodai (all-you-can-eat) steamed crab dinner.
Step 1: Make the waiter bring a lot of crab and no extra vegetables - they were gracious about our gluttony and never brought a skimpy plateful, even on the fifth order of additional crab. As you can see, there are some fairly serious chunks of fairly large crabs here, and every now and then a really big piece would show up. They had English menus and English-competent staff, so we could tell we were in a tourist spot, which was fine with us.
When we arrived we got a table right away without any reservations, which was apparently only the situation for the crab-specific tables. The Genghis Khan tables were backed up for an hour, which affected us not at all, thankfully, because we'd come ready to eat. They started us off with a salad and some various sushi (unlimited sushi of 15-ish kinds was available to anybody with an all-you-can-eat dinner plan) and a soup and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting because the important part was the crab. Their obvious plan was to try to cut down on the amount of crab we could actually eat, but I'd say it pretty much failed because after eating those items we ate crab at speed for 100 minutes, alongside orders of additional no-extra-cost sushi.
Step 2: Put the cover on and cook it until you can't stand it anymore while drinking limited-release house beer (the Kirin special beers tasted a lot like Kirin regular beers, I switched to sake after we'd completed our sampling of the list of specials). It is probably safe to say that we got less conservative with how long we let it cook as the night went on, and that it got tenderer and juicier the less conservative with cooking time we got. There must be a limit there, but we didn't find it, and this was really very good crab. Flavor was a bit stronger than crab sometimes is, similar to lobster.
There's one more day of Hokkaido tourism to blog, and that will be coming up next.
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