LOTS OF SNOW!!
We arrived in Sapporo, Hokkaido on Monday morning for our three week visit with Anna. Hokkaido is the large northern island of Japan. The temperature is similar to Ohio but there is MUCH more snow! Anna met us at Chitose Airport where we ate Korean food for lunch. We took an hour-long bus ride to her neighborhood and a taxi to her apartment. There are mountains in the distance on both sides and we drove in a wide flat valley. We walked to Anna's apartment on snow-packed sidewalks. The snow is piled up elbow high on the sides along the way. Much of the snow is hauled to snow dumps. The average snowfall in Sapporo is 248 inches. Cars with snow tires drive on two-lane snow-packed streets. This city is more modern the Ashyia, thus the two-lane streets and sidewalks.
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| sidewalk in Sapporo |
Anna's apartment is about half the size of Mark and Stephanie's condo. You enter a small entryway, which opens to a small living area--about 10X12. There is a small walk-in kitchen off the living area and a sink/laundry area with doors to each a bath and toilet. She has three small bedrooms. Anna sleeps on a futon with a heated sleeping bag in one of the rooms. We are sleeping on a western bed heaped with blankets in a tatami room. She uses the third room, which she calls "the cold room" to hang laundry and for storage.
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| Jess in "our" bedroom |
Monday was a national holiday in Japan called "Coming of Age Day". All young people who turned 20 in the last year dress up in kimonos and suits and go to the city hall. There the mayor gives a speech and they all drink their first beer. We saw several young women in beautiful kimonos with little white fur capes and traditional sandals with covered toes. Some of them had their hair done--just like girls do in the U.S. for prom.
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| Girl celebrating Coming Of Age Day |
Anna served us amazing salmon, brown rice cakes, and salad with bean sprouts for our first meal with her. For desert, we had rice balls on a stick with coatings of black sesame seed paste, carmelized soy sauce, and sweet bean paste--very good! Good quality fish is very inexpensive here. Anna also has a lot of fruit in her apartment. Fruit is VERY expensive in the Osaka area where Mark and Steph live, but much more reasonably priced here in the north. For breakfast, Anna eats natto, fermented soybeans, which we tried--it has a strong taste which one can aquire. For lunch, she served squid innards over rice! This is another taste Anna is working to aquire. . . it is a slimy, fishy, worm-like sauce. It was not something we would need to eat everyday. . . but we gave it a good try. We went to a bakery and each picked out a bread we wanted for the day. Anna does not have an oven--just two burners with a little tray that you put water in to grill or toast with.
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| pickled eggplant sushi |
Our second morning in Sapporo, it was snowing (pretty much an everyday thing here). Hokkaido is famous for skiing because the snow is dry and powdery. We hung out in the morning and I started a puzzle I brought along. After lunch, Jess and I practiced going to Sapporo station with Anna along and we caught a shuttle to the onsen. We enjoyed sitting in the hot baths outside--an earthen tub we both fit in and a salt/brine "fountain" tub--meaning the hot water was coming up through vents on the bottom. The snow was coming down as we sat in the baths and it felt tingly on our arms and stayed in our hair. The little girls were playing in the snow around the tubs and making miniature two-ball snowmen. This onsen had an indoor walking pool, where you walk through a hot bath on pebbles and then up and down steps and through a cold bath pebbles.
On our way home from the onsen, we met Anna's friend, Aileen (whom we had met at the Japanese Embassy in Washington D.C. when we saw Anna off 1 1/2 years ago). Eileen became a Christian last year when Anna invited her to church. We went to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant together--walking in thick snow coming down. When we entered the restaurant, I saw Elvis finishing his 20 plates of sushi--at least a man who looked JUST like Elvis! We sat by a table with a conveyor belt going by. We could take the sushi off the conveyor belt or order our own. Each plate had two sushi on it and was 100Y or a bit over $1.00. We tried pickled eggplant, shrimp tempura (deep-fried with a coating), sea eel, salmon roe (eggs), raw scallops, and many other kinds of sushi.
OUR FIRST DAY "AT HOME"
Last night, I slept through the whole night for the first time here. Because of jet lag, I had been waking up at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. each night and then napping midday. Anna went back to work today after almost a month off with the holidays and vacation. The sun is shining brightly! Jess and I are enjoying a day of less walking (most days you walk 20 minutes to the station and back plus lots of other walking to get to the places you want to go). We played our first game of Scrabble (Jess won 398-283). We will plan to walk to a nearby grocery store to get fish for the supper we will make for Anna tonight when she gets home from work.
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| Sunny scene from Anna's balcony |
I love reading of your visit to Japan...!!
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