Sapporo Beer Museum

We took a long weekend this last weekend and headed up to Sapporo, which is on the north island of Hokkaido for the Sapporo Winter Festival.

We took off from our house on Thursday morning and walked to the train with our back-packs on. We hit the trains during rush hour and it was quite an experience. Toward the end of the trek up to Tokyo, the train was getting so packed with people that we were quite literally squished in so we couldn't really move. Caroline and I surrounded William to ensure he didn't get squished, though most everyone around us was quite mindful of William and was very careful. It was a bit of a struggle to get all our bags and coats and get off the train at the right stop, but it all seemed to work out.

We caught our flight from Haneda airport. This was our first experience on a Japanese domestic flight. We tried to check in at the front counter, but they gave us a confused look. I'm not sure, but I think Japanese only use the check-in counter to change something on their ticket instead of just to let the airline know that they are there. As we put our bags on the security scanner, we scanned in the bar code on our e-tickets and slips of paper came out with our gate number. Then, as we entered the flight, our tickets were scanned again and our seat numbers were printed out.

The flight to Hokkaido was just a bit over an hour.

At the airport, we grabbed a train to Sapporo and then a taxi to our first goal: The Sapporo Beer Museum!

We started off with food in the Sapporo Bier Garten where they have an all-you-can-eat Genghis Kahn grill-it-yourself lamb meal. It was really good after the long trip.

The museum is not terribly extensive, but it is pretty nice for a free tour and has two bars for beer tasting. Hard to go wrong here.

Outside, there were some snow sculpturing going on. One guy looked like he had a beer bottle and mug outlined and a funny looking round form with two circles on it. He noticed our puzzled looks and pulled out the owl statue he was modeling. This was just a warm-up for the big snow sculptures we were headed to see the next day...