Makomanai Park and the Salmon Festival

Finally rounding out our tour of all the parks in Sapporo is Makomani Park. (There's still other parks we've yet to see in/near Sapporo but the weather is quickly becoming colder and I'm not sure it's going to be park weather for long so this one might be the last new park we'll visit.)

This park is about a 25 minute subway ride south and 1 km from the station. We packed a lunch and headed off. We could have ridden our bikes...but I think we wanted a relaxing day. Anyway, the subway ride gave us time to read/play our gameboys. The weather looked great until we stepped out of the station and it started drizzling. Actually it was more like a misting. We seemed to be walking away from the rain but once we got to the park, the mist had turned into substantial drops. Good thing we didn't ride our bikes and that Ryan happened to have his umbrella in his backpack! (Was he a boy scout?)

I remembered that there was supposed to be a Salmon festival at the Living Museum of Salmon in the park so we made our way to the museum. Besides the fact that this event seemed interesting (I really want to see salmon swimming back upstreat!), a museum meant shelter and shelter meant being warm and drying off. When we got to the museum the rain wasn't so hard so we actually laid out our picnic tarp (picked up at the 100yen on the way because we forgot our usual tatami mat! oh the convenience of the 100 yen shop!) under the trees and ate our lunch.

After lunch, we walked around the festival. First thing we saw was a turtle race!! Much more exciting than it sounds, really! You'll see in the pictures that the blue turtle won, the red turtle didn't move at all (she was the oba-chan aka grandmother), and the yellow one, the tiniest turtle, made it half way and then decided to stare at us. Of course, since it was the cutest, the yellow turtle was the crowd favorite. After the excitement of the turtle race we walked around the museum, which had indoor and outdoor exhibits. There were some monster salmon there! They also had other river animals, like water beetles and crawfish and a variety of fish and frogs.

Overall it was pretty fun but I didn't get to see any wild salmon swimming upstream. I WILL see them one day!!

Enjoy the pictures:

Makomanai Park and Salmon festa

Summer's Over!!!

And what have we been doing with these last few warm days? LOTS!!!!

First of all, it has been a hot summer...for everyone, I guess. But for Sapporo?! We have neighbors who didn't even own fans until this summer. Coupled with the unusual humidity...everyone was exclaiming: 蒸し暑い (むしあつい　= mushi atsui = humid) and wiping their necks with their handkerchiefs the last few weeks. We are finally experiencing some cooler weather, though this is a far cry from last September when the first snows were falling in the northern Hokkaido mountains already.

We missed the Summer Festival Beer Garden in August because it was too rainy but I don't feel too sorry for that. We more than made up for missing the beer garden in our own ways:

BBQ!!!

Learning Japanese drinking games!!!
I think they are more enjoyable than American games!

Drinking at Liebspeise Beer Garden...
Otaru Beer is supposed to be the best beer in Hokkaido (?) and their recipes are actually based on German beers. Very interesting flavors- such as strawberry and banana. The Pilsner was my choice. Also, it was all-you-can-drink for 3 hours at only 2000yen!!!

And karaoke, of course!!

So, I think we did enough partying that we didn't need to spend the night in Odori drinking as well.

At the end of August we were also able to watch the Hokkaido Marathon. There were 9000 runners in it!! I put an album up with some random shots and then a few of people in costumes. I was so excited when I noticed on the TV that they were coming close to our apartment that I ran out to the refreshment and sponge tables up our block and forgot to load my camera with its SD card. Luckily Ryan brought it down to me just in time for the first runner...However, when I saw him, I was in so much awe I forgot to snap the picture!! Besides that, he was too fast to catch on film! Hahaha.

It was so hot that day and the race started at noon! I made the mistake of crossing over to the same side as the refreshment table and was basically trapped for an hour as 9000 people ran by. Ryan says his favorite part was buying a Pepsi from the vending machine and standing in the shade of an RV in a parking lot. Hahaha.

Hokkaido Marathon

Lately, we've been hitting all of Sapporo's parks. This is a truly green city. After today's rainy excursion to Makomanai Koen (koen = park), I think we've only got one or two left to go. So you're in for a treat 4 park picture albums!!

First up, Sapporo Geijitsu No Mori (Sapporo Art Park).

Sapporo Art Park and the Ghibli exhibit

I really wanted to go here because they were having a big Studio Ghibli exhibit- the makers of anime such as Princess Mononoke, Totoro and Spirited Away. This exhibit was gigantic!!! I mean, the amount of work they had on display...I guess it makes sense- they were basically showing sketches for the movies- but I was only 1/3 of the way finished looking at all the work and I almost gave up! Many of the pieces were drawn Hayao Miyazaki himself! The exhibit organizers did their job well- I gained a lot of appreciation for the work that goes behind animation. You'll see in the album pictures of me laying on Totoro's stomach and of the kuro-kuroski (black dust balls) that I drew for their wall.

The art park itself was wonderful. They have studios that you can rent and do work in and a crafts building where they teach crafts (really?!). I think there's even a music hall. My favorite part of the park was the pond. There are stairs that basically go into the water and when I first walked up to it, I noticed a mother and child throwing pieces of bread into the water. I thought they were feeding ducks but as I got closer, I didn't see any ducks near them. I only saw that the water in front of them was swirling and writhing. Holy crap! I thought. There's a sea monster in this pond! Well, that's a silly thought- it'd be a pond monster, if anything. Anyway, you'll see from the pictures that my pond monster was actually gigantic fish. They were practically walking up the steps!

Next, Takino Suzuran Koen. Actually, maybe this park doesn't count as a park within Sapporo. It was a 35 minute bus ride south of the city.

Takino Suzuran Park

This was a kind of spur of the moment trip. We decided we needed to take advantage of the good weather and I decided on this park because it supposedly has one of the 100 most beautiful waterfalls in Japan. Well, you'll see the album has zero waterfall pictures. Actually, there are waterfall pictures but it wasn't THE waterfall that we were aiming for. We were still pretty happy to see a waterfall (see pictures).

What we did get to do was play in what I think is Teletubby land. Actually, I think it was the Children's Valley and had lots of things to do like rolling giant red balls up and down a giant hill, various slides (some so dangerous kids were wearing helmets!) and a really cool underground play area with a giant net that kids jumped around in. It was awesome!! There was also a giant anthill.

We're going to revisit this park soon so we can check out that waterfall (and probably play again!!).

Next, Maeda Forest Park. We went there this past weekend because even though the forecast said it would rain, it was bright and sunny and once again, we had to take advantage of the good weather. (Did I mention that lately the weather has been nice and warm EXCEPT on days we have off?)

Maeda Forest park

So we decided to ride our bikes there- a nice 10km ride. All in all it's a beautiful park with a really long canal leading up to a building that websites say is supposed to look like a castle but only sort of looks medieval. I was lucky enough to spot two girls wearing costumes and having a photoshoot. So, of course, I asked them if I could take some pictures with them. Don't ask me what I was trying to do in the last picture. I think I said "I'm going to look scared now!"

It seems like a great park for runners and dogs. We saw a lot of those. We also saw some men putting together an RC car. Japanese people always have such interesting hobbies!

The last park is Makomanai Park, which we visited today. I'm glad we finally got to it since I'll be running my first 5K race there in less than two weeks! But I haven't uploaded the pictures yet so you'll just have to wait for the next post!!! Until then, enjoy the pictures!!

(I'll try to caption them ASAP as well though I tried telling their stories in this post!)