To be honest, we had ALOT of expectations for the place, given hordes of people around us have been there and their tourism board did a spectacular job. It was a little underwhelming initially but then we took a step back and appreciated the beauty around us. One thing is for sure, Hokkaido is blessed with stunning nature - their expansive parks and rolling mountains at this time of the year were covered with reddish and yellow foliage.
Expectations-aside, it’s still an amazing place (isn’t that just Japan in general?). The weather was a crisp 11-18 degrees Celsius - I live for this sort of weather!
We stayed at Nest Sapporo Odori hotel, which I gave a rating of 9/10 ok booking.com. Hahaha! In fairness, it's not the newest hotel around but it's super convenient location-wise, helpful staff, and the breakfast is awesome. On top of the usual scrambled eggs and sausages, they had Japanese salads, tempura, curry, oden, and a DIY kaisen bowl area (staffed with sake, amaebi, ikura, tobiko, minced toro). #JapaneseBreakfastFTW
Don't we look dandy for a bunch of folks who woke up at 3:30am in the morning?
After nearly 10 hours of flying, we have arrived~
Many of such meals with consumed xoxo
Our hotel is a short walk to Odori Park, which made it necessary post-breakfast. This time around, I bought the boys a couple of disposable cameras so that they could snap pictures from their perspective. Russell got in on it really quickly but Lucas was more interested in the leaves on the ground (seriously, every park we visited, it was about the leaves on the ground).
The hotel was a 3-min walk to Nijo Market, pretty much a smaller scale of Tsujiki but with variety that isn't second to any other seafood market in this world. I didn't take too many photos as it felt somewhat disrespectful, especially since I didn't buy anything. While you are there, you might as well tuck into fresh kaisen bowls, which is one of the delicacies Sapporo is famous for.
One of the tourist attractions is Shiroi Koibito Park, which is exactly what it is - a tourist attraction. It's pretty quirky with Tim Burton vibes but we weren't enamoured by the place. That said, that soft serve is ridiculously smooth, perhaps one of the best soft serves we had on that trip.
We visited lots of parks in Hokkaido as we needed to let the boys use up some of their pent-up energy. I'm surprised by how elaborate many of their surburban parks are. Free of charge plus amazing weather, you couldn't ask for more.
No comments:
Post a Comment