Final day in Hokkaido

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Whoops forgot to hit Publish on this yesturday... was pretty outa it when I wrote this due to lack of sleep:
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So todays my final day on the island of Hokkaido. Yesterday visited the Sapporo Beer museum as well as the city of Otaru.

The Sapporo Beer museum was smaller then I pictured it, but not too bad. Most of the signage was in Japanese but I got the gist of it. My favorite bit was these little models they had setup that made it look like beer came from a Santas workshop type atmosphere. Made me chuckle and reminded me of the Simpsons episode where they go to the Duff Brewery theme park. The tastings they had were relatively cheap, and the actual grounds was very nice. Some pretty cool restaurants, went to one where the middle of the tables were actually hot plates to cook your own food... I had lamb was quite tasty, once i figured it all out.

Otaru is a pretty neat little town. From the looks of it before the war it was quite a bustling place, major financial institution and some pretty wealthy families that made fortunes off of the herring industry. Nice canal type area thats been made into a park, and seems to do a lot of business with Russia, everything was written in Japanese, English, and Russian.

Finished up the night back in Sapporo, went to a pretty cool Sushi bar that had a great view of the city, then went to a bar called the 500 Yen... the idea is everything is 500 yen but prices have apparently gone up a bit. Pretty trendy spot tho, although didn't stay long since I was pretty tired from walking around Otaru.

Thats it for now, tomorrow off to probably Morioka and check out the capsule hotel thing.

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Photos

Sapporo Beer Museum
This is the original Sapporo Beer Brewery, just over 100 years old.

Founders
The founders of Sapporo Beer

Model town
Lots of little models on display, this one was showing the relation between the brewery and the city itself

Museum floor
This is on the 3rd floor, you worked your way down back to main, took about 40 minutes but was free.

Yay for beer!
And the town rejoyced over the beer

Commercials
They were playing commercials through the ages. Before this was a cartoon from the 50s involving a little girl excited over Sapporo Beer.

Ad prints
Apparently the women here like their beer too.

Nippon.. HAM.. Fighters
Think its a baseball team. Not sure what Ham means in Japanese, but Im sure we need more Japanese Ham fighters.

Otaru Canal District
Quite a nice little area with old converted warehouses on the one side.

Warehouses
These were pretty busy back in the glory days of this place.

Showing the shipping days
Glimpse as to how it once was.

Comments

[m t]

man that beer museum was pretty tacky - LOL at the beer in the middle of the town display...