Next Stop... Sapporo

Sapporo Time

After a relaxing and "action-filled" (Ethan's choice of words) time in Niseko, we were off to Sapporo for the weekend.  More action, relaxin', fun, and food!

We stayed at a hostel in Sapporo called Ino's Place.  Kids were very excited about the bunkbeds and the owners were very friendly, but as I overheard conversations of the mostly 20-something travelers, I began to wonder if I might actually be too old for hostels.  Naaahhh, not possible, right?  Right?

Our room at Ino's Place hostel

Winter Sports Museum

Silly skiers...

Our first Sapporo adventure was a surprising amount of fun.  We went to the site of the Okura Ski Jump from the 1972 Winter Olympics held in Sapporo.  Having just spent hours and hours watching and talking about the 2012 Olympics, this was fresh in the minds of the boys.  We rode the lift to the top of the ski jump and were amazed at how incredibly steep it is.... great view of Sapporo as well.

Next door to the ski jump is the Sapporo Winter Sports Museum.  Here, there were all sorts of winter sports simulations.  We all had a ball.

I did have to channel my non-Japanese self (which is not hard to do) when the man working the ski jump simulator told Ryan that he couldn't try the ski jump because you have to be 6 years old.  Kevin first tried the "I don't understand what you're saying" strategy, but that didn't work.  So, I had to go all 'assertive American' on the poor Japanese dude and explain "He's been waiting in line patiently, he knows how to ski, it's not a problem, please, may he try?"  It worked.  Of course I was probably cursed by him for the next 7 days for making him break the rules, but sometimes a mom's gotta do what a mom's gotta do.  And then oh-so-thankfully, Ryan, the 4 year old who was technically not allowed to try the simulation, jumped 125 meters - which is a very good jump, more than Ethan and Kevin (though not me, but I only got 6 meters further, and I know that's luck because I can't ski at all in real life- though maybe I missed my calling).

From Ethan: The second time we did bobsledding, mommy and I did really well.

Ryan on the ski jump simulator with a score of 125 meters!

The boys on a cross-country ski race - Ethan proclaimed this
his favorite!

Introducing....the Narimatsujayne Bobsled Team!

And the winner is......

Odori Park

Spent an afternoon and evening wandering (read: eating street food) around Odori Koen, basically Sapporo's urban central park.  It was a hive of activity as they were preparing for the Hokkaido marathon, that started the next morning.

The Sapporo TV Tower

We also happened upon some serious star-watching enthusiasts with HUGE telescopes hooked up to laptops, taking amazing pictures of the surface of the moon.  They were very excited to share their hobby with the boys.

Historical Village of Hokkaido

This place was fascinating!  It was set up in 4 distinct sections to showcase the history of old Hokkaido.

• town village
• fishing village
• mountain village
• farming village

Each of the 4 sections had an assortment of original buildings, donated and transported to the site.  They were decorated in the style of the era and the function that they played.

A town house - THIS is EXACTLY the kind of house I was hoping to
live in when we moved to Japan.  Only likely to happen if I move
to the Historical Village of Hokkaido, I suppose.

A fishing village - up to 40 fishermen lived here during herring season

The wooden fishing boats - can you tell most of the interest was in
the fishing village?

Another fishing village house (you can see the fishing nets in the back).
I would have lived here too...

We had made our way through the town and fishing areas and were just starting to explore the farming village when ...... we walked into an old building and found a woman spinning silk from the silkworm cocoons!  Seriously.  It was so unexpected and so amazing.

There was a shallow rectangular crate filled with leaves and atop the leaves, were hundreds of silkworms poking their heads up and spinning cocoons.  The little thimble-sized white cocoons were scattered all around the leaves.

The woman would take a handful of the cocoons at a time, put them in a pot of water (the water makes them easier to unravel), find the end of the silk strand, attach it to the spool, and then pump this wooden contraption that slowly unspun the silk from the cocoon and spun it back onto a larger spool.  Each cocoon consists of about 800 meters of silk thread.  I was downright mesmerized!

The woman spinning silk from the cocoons. The finished spools are in the foreground,
and the silkworms are on the right...

You can't see so well in this picture, but these are the worms and their silk cocoons

The cocoons are the pot of water,
and the wooden contraption is spinning the silk.

Feeding mulberry leaves to the silkworms

Off to the mountain village!  Here I was impressed by the thatch roofs.  Leave it to the Japanese to make a superior thatch grass roof - it was at least 2 feet thick!

The mountain village house - inside

Mountain village house - outside

Our time at the Hokkaido Historical Village also stimulated several conversations about the Ainu people of Hokkaido.  The Ainu are the native people of Hokkaido, and Ethan was very interested in learning about them.  We ran out of time to go to the Ainu Museum in Hokkaido, so we may have to explore an Ainu exhibit in one of the Tokyo museums.

Another favorite of the kids was the childrens' playground that had an assortment of old toys for the kids to try.  They had wooden stilts, much like the ones at Ethan's school, but none of us were very good at it.  They also had circular metal rims that kids pushed along with a stick and Ethan and Ryan's favorite, the old-fashioned spinning top.  A kind man showed the kids how to wind the string and spin the top.  We got them each one as their Hokkaido souvenir, and they have been hard at work perfecting the art of top-spinning.  If you happen to be on skype with us anytime in the near future, Ethan and Ryan will most certainly beg you to watch them spin the top.

Sapporo Beer Museum

OK, the Sapporo Beer Museum was nothing to write home about (though I guess I am, by including it in this blog).  It was, at most, 15 minutes of entertainment.  But the all-you-can-eat-for-100-minutes Gengiskhan next door made up for it.  More on that later...

Our trio of fresh samples...

Most interesting part was the timeline of Sapporo history
as seen through the beer posters.

Sooooooo wrong, but so cute!

Random Sweatshirt that I Just Have to Share

So, I've mentioned in a previous post about the "r" and the "l" switcheroo in Japanese pronunciation.

But, imagine my surprise when I see a man in Sapporo wearing a typical looking college sweatshirt (and why he was wearing a sweatshirt on a hot day, I will never understand), grey with blue lettering, large circular emblem in the middle, name of the college encircling the emblem.  You know the kind of shirt, I'm describing, right?  Only this one said:

IRRINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY

I had to look twice to make sure I had read that right.  I laughed out loud, right there in the bus station!