Hokkaido

The last stop in my trip before returning for Tokyo, Narita airport and thus home, was Sapporo on the Northern Island of Hokkaido. Although Sapporo is a great city I wasn't very happy to arrive there at first. When my domestic JAL flight took off from Fukuoka airport, the air temperature was a nicely temperate 27 degrees centigrade. Upon landing I was surprised with an awfully cold twelve degrees! Fortunately, the weather ameliorated consistently over the next few days.

In Sapporo, I stayed at Ino's place, a great place run by Eiji and Miwa and their two sons. Easily the best hostel I've been staying at during my trip!



As you can see here, Sapporo is a modern Japanese town, just like the large cities I visited earlier. The nice side about this northern place though, is that it is much less crowded than Honshu's cities. If it hadn't been for the so-so weather and the final-stop-almost-going-home-melancholy, Sapporo would have been my favourite place just after Tokyo.



Don't get me wrong here. The fact that I didn't take many pictures of modern buildings in say Kyoto or Hakata doesn't mean that they aren't present there, on the contrary! In those southern cities there are slews of temples which I think are much more interesting than modern architecture. In Sapporo, I ran into only two or three old-style temples and so I took the modern parts of the city.



Funny art is everywhere in the city, although not as common as in Fukuoka. I really liked this one in one of the exits of the JR railway station.
The lack of temples and ancient architecture in Sapporo is easily explained when you take into account that the city is only 130 years old: Hokkaido had been a no-go area for many centuries until the Meiji government opened it up for colonisation around 1870.

During the weekend of the week I spent in the city, there was some kind of festival in the central Odori Park, called the Lilac Festival (Rirakku Fesutibaru in Japanese - try saying that rapidly three times in a row!). A lot of orchestras, both professional and amateur, played on the festival and were practicing in the park. This resulted in some nice pictures...

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