Lots of snow in Sapporo (and beer too)

We have headed up North to the Hokkaido region and are at Sapporo. It is a lot colder up North at the moment and there was even snow on the runway as we landed.

Walking to our accommodation it was snowing and there was lots of snow on the side of the road. The snow is super soft and very dry. We headed to downtown Sapporo and walked around (mostly underground since it was below zero outside). There are some funny signs on some escalators here.

Downtown itself is looking lovely with lots of snow everywhere but it does make walking a bit treacherous.

For dinner we went to a little Ramen restaurant on our first night near to our accommodation and had a superb Kara-Miso Chasyu Ramen. It had a nice level of spice and had lots of flavour.

The following day was still snowing but only about –2 degrees Celsius so not too cold.

We had lunch at a restaurant at the Sapporo train station with a lovely view over downtown. I had a huge meal as part of a set menu that had crab as part of the fried rice.

After lunch we headed to the Sapporo Winter Sports Museum when the Okurayama Ski Jump is that was used in the Winter Olympics in 1972. There was quite a bit of snow on the road for our 10 min walk from the bus.

We unfortunately couldn’t get up to the top of the jump since it was closed to the day but it looked mammoth.

A benefit of going here when the weather isn’t the best is that you end up having the place to yourself. Well, there were about three other people in the museum the whole time we were there which was great. We got to use several winter sports simulators which was quite exhausting.

A snow angel later,

we headed to the Sapporo Brewery which is a very picturesque complex.

They have multiple restaurants here so we had a meal and a couple of beers. We even tried out multiple restaurants, and the one in the main brewery complex was the most lively. The beer tasted great fresh from the factory vs drinking it out of a can. We accompanied our beer with lamb shoulder Jingisukan and vegetables that we cooked ourselves (and didn’t burn anything!)  OK, we didn’t burn much...