One week in Nippon – part 2
After three short shopping days at Tokyo, we fly to Hokkaido [北海道], then rent a car from the Sapporo [札幌] airport. Hokkaido is a big island prefecture at the north of Japan. It kinda looks and feels like at Canada, wide open, green, blue sky, mountains, sea, lakes, hot spring and fresh fishes!
I didn’t dare to drive the first day because the driver seat is at the right side in Japan. Why in the world do we need to have both standards? We don’t even have a map of Sapporo, lucky the navigation system in the Toyota Esteem mini-van seems quite sophisticate. And more fortunately, there are quite a large amount of Chinese words [汉字] in Japanese language. In some case we are able to understand a phrase if we know the context, just by reading the scarse Chinese words that we could understand. Many road signs, street names, city names, public signs and instructions have Chinese words that we understand. They might use those words in a slightly different way but it remains in the same context. For example they use the Chinese words 化妆室 (make-up room) to indicate a bathroom, which is understandable. They use 大丈夫 (big guy), meaning no problem, like in you’re big boy, no problem. They use 无料 (no stock) to mean free of charge, see, it’s not so difficult to understand when you’re in the right context.
Again our friend Desmond is quite familiar with Sapporo and Hokkaido as he has come here 5 times already. He can use the navigation system (in Japanese) without reading the words. I would have trouble using it myself, until the last day.
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Sapporo is small and quiet city. Its downtown area comprises of ten streets down and across, that’s it! To my surprise, they have a subway system for this nearly 2 millions population city. I guess it’s really convenient for them during Winter, which I heard could be as bad as Winter at Toronto, or worse in mountainous areas. We spent the first day walking around the downtown, again ate like pigs and drunk like cows, several meals a day, sometime 3 meals at night, no kidding!
It must strike every first time tourist as to how polite the average Japaneses are, much more that the gentlemen at UK I bet! In North America people are friendly, in Europe people are snobs (or sophisticate sometime), in China many people are plain inpolite, especially the low end of the population, but in Japan everybody seems to be really polite and nice! I haven’t been bow to so many times in my whole life compare to one week here. I haven’t been said aligato gazaimaseta (thank you – politely) so many time in every single meal or shopping. I guess they must have said many other polite things that I couldn’t understand. At the end of our trip, I was already used to aligato everyone that I meet, and bow my head too…. If I stay a year there, maybe I would be stuck with that habit forever!
I think if there’s something nobody can beat the Japaneses, it would be politeness and hygiene! Every toilet that I’ve seen and used in Japan, in hotel, in restaurant (big or tiny), in public toilet, shopping mall, are all really clean and smell-less. It’s hard to complain about anything in their toilets, every little details are well thought of. You have to be there to really feel this. I wonder how Japaneses can stand it when they travel abroad to other countries, like those south Asia countries that even myself can hardly accept despite my pass experience there. Politeness, on the other hand, is something much easier to get use to. We normally respond in the same way we were treated at first place, that’s universal.
We spent a large part of our second day at Otaru [小樽], a little city 35km north of Sapporo. It looks almost like a tourist city, but actually it is a major port city of Hokkaido. I was surprise to see, on their main street, several excellent bakery and chocolaterie, litterary written in French. Beside this and the traditional glass-ware industry, there isn’t much thing to mention about this city. It was just nice to walk around and have seen it.
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The third day was really a special day for me! I started to get used to driving at the right side, and going to the other side of the street when turning right. So I drove, for the first time, at the right. It wasn’t so bad as I thought, I didn’t make any stupid mistake, but I was slower than usual, naturally.
Equally fun is our golf game at the Sapporo International Golf Club, a 27-holes public golf club that is absolutely impeccable and easy to enjoy. The only problem is that no one seemed to speak English there. We had to deal with the lady at the counter by writing numbers and Chinese words. We rent the golf clubs and the shoes. We had a lovely old lady as our caddy, she ride a small motorized cart with our equipments on it, kinda like a sophisticate lawn mower where she can stand on it, so it wasn’t exhausting as being a caddy during a PGA tournment. We enjoy the walk without anything to carry on the shoulder. The weather was perfect, it can’t get any better when you can walk under the sun of noon time without a cap and not feeling any discomfort! It was majestic!
Deeply in my mind, I was really worried that I can’t play a normal game because I have only practiced once since Summer last year… Then we didn’t have enough time after lunch to drive a bit before our tee time. We barely had enough time for 25 balls, and that was enough to bring back a little confidence in myself. So, off we go, following our caddy. She must be an experienced caddy, she can understand the basic golf keywords in English. She takes her job very seriously, following the golf rules rigourously, but without taking away our joy of the game. On a few occasions she suggested me to use a different club that I would have used, and she was right on the spot! Still, the strongest memory of her is how she call nice shot in almost a military order way… And also when a ball looks like going bad, oh… bunka!
And my score? I didn’t write it down… But I was happy with my performance, I did pretty good in the short game, using the rather cheap rental clubs, and I didn’t lose a single ball in the whole game! That’s almost the first time ever happenned to me. And obviously I wasn’t playing hockey, believe me…
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The next day we drove (I did) to Jozankei [定山溪], a village of hot spring resorts where we would stay overnight. On our way there, we tour around the sea shore of north west Hokkaido. It was a pleasant experience to see the blue sea and blue sky, although going thru the many narrow tunnels across the mountains could become scary sometime, the 2-way lanes were really narrow and the trucks are big!
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Hot spring is one of the healthy way of life of Japaneses, along with healthy foods and excellent hygiene, no wonder they’re ranked second in longevity in the world. This is how it works in a hot spring resort: they only let their hotel customers use the hot spring bath, no outsider. You check in the room, change for the traditional Japanese cloth (yukata). Relax in the hotel, go to the hot spring bath several times a day, about 40 minutes everytime. You would have all the meals in the hotel’s restaurant (included in the package). So, just go there and forget everything, relax. It is nice to do that once in a while, but if we have to stay more than one day, we would probably get bored quickly. This was my first hot spring experience, it was nice. We’ll try another resort next time, definitely!
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During our 3 days at Sapporo, we had eaten so many fishes, mostly raw. The best that I can remember was the samma [秋刀鱼], served raw with a bit of gingered rice, it was the most delicious piece of sushi I ever had in my life! Simply melting in the mouth and fabulous taste! We also had toro, saba, bla bla bla. How can I remember all those fish names in such short time?
We also drunk uncountable types of sake [日本酒], sochu [焼酎] and umeshu [梅酒]. The one I can remember most is Otokoyama [男山]. That one is easy to remember, but we also had several other good sochu. Again, how to remember so many names in such short time? Need to drink more often, unfortunately Japanese wines are only good to serve with sushi or sashimi, it won’t fit with Chinese or western foods at all. Nevertheless, we have tried so many good dishes in Japan that we won’t miss sushi at Shanghai for a while.
Our plan is to return to Japan once again, with a tour guide, so that we could visit the attractions and understand something about them (reading book is too long). At least I want to go to the Mount Fuji [富士山], Kyoto [京都] and Osaka [大阪], and revisit Tokyo properly. I think there are many photo subjects there… You know what I mean………………….
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October 30th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Hello webmaster…Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Tuesday