Visiting the Sapporo zoo on a rainy day
Warmer today, could be as warm as 8C, wheres my shorts? Warmer however means rain. And it rained. And it rained some more all day.
The rain was not too much of a problem, because today is a rest day after yesterdays effort anyway, but I did get wet, and cold, and wet feet. I am not wearing my boots today because they are drying from yesterday, so my only other pair of shoes provide no protection from water ingress. No IP rating at all.
This means I have been squelching around in saturated socks for hours. Fun times.
I ventured along the park, to the main temple, which is better forgotten as its tiny and boring. In fine weather, I would have climbed the hill behind it, which seems to have more colorful leaves than a person could handle without dying from amazement. Even in the rain people were standing around taking leaf photos, collecting leaves, smelling leaves, tasting leaves, sneaking up on leaves to surprise them and offering leaves congratulations on making it off the tree.
Near by, is the zoo. Zoos can be terrible. I googled this one. Reviews were ok, more important than that, entrance fee, $5. Time to get wet and look at monkeys.
In the Japanese zoo tradition, it was 2/3 under redevelopment, forever. They wont redevelop it, they will just redevelop the redevelopment sign and scaffolding pretending to be redeveloping something behind it that has crumbled.
What was left was quite small, but they do have polar bears. They also had a Hokkaido brown bear, sleeping in a hole. He was massive, as big as a grizzly bear. I dont want to ever see one again.
I exited my hotel to be greeted by proper rain, now what.
First I appreciated some recycling stations for fluro tubes and printer cartridges. Cause I am working today. OK work completed.
This is a snow melting machine, for your home. You plug this in, and presumably stick a hose down your drain onto the bottom of it, then shovel snow into it. I am going to become the sole Australian distributor, PROFIT AWAITS.
This is the softbank mascot dog, you see him everywhere. Note he has a small dog on his head. I suspect they are preparing for the station cat situation.
Station cat is (was) a famous cat appointed head of a train station somewhere down south. He died of old age after approximately 9 million photos of him wearing a stationmaster hat.
By this time they had rebuilt the station around station cat, to be completely station cat themed. So when he died they had to make up some bullshit story about how station cat had a few years prior appointed an apprentice, and then they brought out a new cat they found going through the garbage a week prior.
Softbank are hoping to prevent this debacle by appointing the apprentice mascot before the original dies.
I dont know what this building is, but it has a large elaborate garden.
Note they tie all the trees and shrubs up in twine. I dont know why. Do they put plastic covers over them? I have seen some pine trees with wicker basket style covers over them already.
Pick a box.
Time for a few more leaves.
This is the main shrine of all of Hokkaido, or it claims to be. It looks small and boring.
The path to the main shrine is past peak leafery.
OK, I dont need to see Japanese monkeys in a zoo, I can see them in the wild.
So I looked at this Heyena instead. Lots of the photos show animals indoors in small areas. They can generally go outside if they wish, into larger green areas. But they are choosing to stay indoors near the heater. Even hippos, lions, deer, all of them want to be inside.
Snow leopard. Most of the time it was just me, and they followed me around.
Big tiger seemed to enjoy my company.
The lesser panda. They had heaps of these, they are a dime a dozen.
Dusty lizard.
Polar bears are the main attraction here. There was at least one other one, and he was taking flying leaps into a pool to fetch his plastic ball. Unfortunately I could not photograph that because he was behind a series of fences and grills. Japan hates you to get a good view remember.
Here is the city ski jump. Sapporo has actually been awarded the winter olympics twice, in 1940 and 1972. They did not get to host them in 1940 though, they decided to team up with Hitler to fight the world because they didnt like the dominance of power of one ethnic group in Hollywood.
The walk back had more leaves than you can shake a stick at. See what I did there?
If you are having a heart attack or the earths atmosphere is suddenly removed, go to this floor.
This is more China than Japan. Look at the light fittings, they have plastic bags meticulously attached under them. At the low point of each bag, is a tube, high quality work here. The tubes are then connected via a series of junctions into a bucket. All to collect water from the leaking roof.
I am sure it would have taken someone hours to rig all this up.
Indoor sports centres of Japan
I have often wondered if I would be able to make it to the majors, now I have that answer, unequivocally YES.
Before we get to my new amazing career, I must as usual describe the weather. Stopped raining, and not as cold as it was all day. Google disagrees with me and tells me its currently 0 degrees, but I swear it feels a lot warmer outside now.
Despite this, I still mainly wandered around underground, looking at flowers. Astute viewers may recall my trip this time last year to Hiroshima where they had chrysanthenumthemunumium judging going on at the castle. Or maybe it was Nagoya, or both.
Here in Sapporo they dont want to miss out. But because of the cold, it now occurs inside the big tunnel to the station. With no barriers around the prize winning bonsai plants and about a million people an hour rushing past in halloween costumes.
Seems risky to me, your 50 year old meticulously pruned and shaped flower bush could be knocked over by a harry potter godzilla zombie hybrid at any moment.
Now onto my baseball skills.
I was almost back to my hotel when I saw a SLUGGERS BAR. Potentially this could mean a lot of things. However they had a useful graphic at the bottom of the stairs showing people with baseball bats, rather than androgonous people in slug suits pretending to create more slugs.
So I went upstairs, and it seemed awesome, I observed for a while. A computer graphic of a person winds up to pitch at you, and then a ball fires out of the wall where there arm would be.
You can choose your speed, anywhere from 70kmph to 180kmph, which as I understand it is faster than any human pitcher. I settled on 90kmph, which is probably slug pace.
Anyway, you get 3 games of 20 pitches each for about $7, so I thought it was good value.
Game one, I hardly hit a thing. Japanese guys taking it seriously by bringing their own bats, batting gloves and ridiculous long socks and shoes were laughing at me. So I attacked them with my metal bat.
Game two, I got my eye in, and realised I was standing too close to the plate. Most of the pitches I hit went into the ground.
Game three, I was on fire, hitting everything. At the back of the big shed on a roof this was all in there were targets on the wall. I hit one, music played, cheering effects came out of loud speakers. No one else hit a target. Where were the scouts recruiting for the majors?
Part one of the flower show, full sized flowers. They all look half dead. Probably because they have been inside a subway tunnel for a week. I saw the old male judges taking this very seriously with head lamps and magnifying glasses on my way back.
Part two of flower show, superior bonsai version. Nowhere near as good as the ones I saw last year.
Thats a great deal!
Running off either side of the overly heated tunnel are numerous large shops, buildings, and in this case, multi storey brand new food court. Each level was a different quality, I stopped at a mid level for good quality but cheap.
As you can see, I am the only person here, but that might be because its new.
Soba time. With deep fried prawns and fried rice. Cause you need rice to go with your noodles. This was really quite nice. Even the white miso paste stuff on top of the noodles was ok.
Like many things in Japan, it smells fishier than it tastes.
Everyone knows there are strange kitkats in Japan, but I had not seen this higher class version of a kitkat before. Much more expensive, and only sold in Daimaru basement.
Somewhere along the tunnel is what I presume used to be a bank vault, they left the vault behind. It was probably easier than removing it.
Now onto the baseball. A fun activity for sure. First I photographed someone else playing.
And then here I am with my special helmet. Wearing a helmet was not mandatory, but I love a good helmet.
Also though, I dont understand the helmets, since you are most likely to get hit in the face and yet there is no grill.