Hokkaido 2012 - Furano Skiing 富良野 スキー

If you want powder snow and don't want to rub shoulder with tons of foreigners then you should try skiing in Furano. Don't take our word for it, you can check out this FT article on skiing in Hokkaido.

Hokkaido 2012 - Eating Out in Sapporo & Furano グルメ 札幌 富良野

As you probably know by now, vacation trip for mum and dad isn't quite complete without going out of their way to search for food. So lets just see what they had in Hokkaido.

Sashimi beef rice bowl (sukiyaki beef set behind)

Sashimi beef rice bowl 和牛刺身丼 from Kumagera くまげら in Furano. Slices of  locally raised beef over a bowl of hot rice topped with a small dollop of wasabi, this is the signature dish of this famous restaurant. Walked in from the freezing cold of below -10C, one bowl may not be quite enough. The melt-in-your-mouth beef is perfect complement to the slightly sweet rice.

You can develop a huge appetite after skiing from dawn till dusk. You might associate dull and tasteless offering with ski resorts' restaurants, but mum and dad just couldn't say enough good things about the restaurants within the New Furano Prince Hotel. You can see some of food they had there.

Furano beef steak rice bowl

Fried Tokachi Pork Cutlet rice bowl

炭焼処きたぐに - Sumiyaki Dokoro Kitaguni serves local produce in Izakaya style

Roast pork loin from upper Furano 上富良野ポークロース焼き

Roast Taraba Crab claws

Dim sum buffet lunch, a firm favorite with a lot of Furano locals

There are plenty of restaurants to sample in Hokkaido and if a restaurant is mentioned in one of the Hong Kong guidebooks then you shouldn't be surprised to see an even longer queue of people with quite a few Hongkongers waiting in line. That was definitely the case with Nemuro Hana Sushi in JR Stellar Place building.

Creamy swiss roll with soft ice cream inside Shiroi Koibito Coffee Shop

Botan ebi from Gourmet Tei in Sapporo Fish Market ボタン海老−北のグルメ亭

Mix seafood Chirashi again from the Sapporo Fish Market

A massive bowl of Ramen from Ichiryuan near Sapporo JR station - 一粒庵

Hokkaido 2012 - 63rd Sapporo Snow Festival 札幌雪祭り

After a 4-month hiatus, we finally get our acts together and start blogging again!! Life has been quiet and we got to spend a lot of time with mum and dad. That's until they decided to visit Hokkaido for skiing and the snow festival in Sapporo.

You might have noticed that the term "global warming" is no longer in vogue, instead the preferred term now is "global climate change". This may have a lot to do with the severe winter US experienced last year, and it wasn't easy for the media to conjure up the image of "warming" under such circumstances. This winter, it is North Asia's turn to experience such weather. Snow accumulation totals are measured in meters (4 meters along the north western coastal area) and a lot of places have double that of average.

Such conditions must be good for the snow festival!? But the first couple of days after the official start of the festival, the weather turned warmer and some of the snow sculptures were melting. It's then when one realized the painstaking steps not only to create the art works but the effort in keeping up.

Two ladies working on the snow castle with their bare hands

お城(野田市)　- the most intricate of the small sculptures

Some of the exhibits were literally gigantic and their constructions involved industrial cranes and other heavy machinery.

Snow Aquarium at night 雪の水族館

Snow Aquarium (An US Navy band playing live) 雪の水族館

One Piece (A super popular, long running comic in Japan)

One Piece at night, the color spotlights brought more of the intricate features to life

鶴ヶ城 Tsuruga Castle - fine tuning the spotlights

Taj Mahal タージ.マハル

Tokyo Disneyland - Dreams come true!! 夢がかなう場所

National Palace Museum (Taiwan) 故宮博物院 

One often associates the Snow Festival with all the art pieces above, but it is almost like a carnival with stall selling everything from roasted chestnuts to Brazilian barbecue. On top of the multitude of food stalls, one could find queues of people waiting in line for free tastings from tofu to health drink. There was even a snowboard competition. You could easily spend a day walking along Odori Park to take everything in, especially when a lot of the exhibits looked completely different between day and night.

Snowboard Acrobatics

Free Tofu tasting - 10000 bowls of these were the target

Brazilian BBQ

Mum getting a bag of freshly roast chestnut from a pressure chamber roaster. Juicy, tasty, just yummy!!

Jozankei 定山渓 - Final stop

Mum and dad did not decide on the final stop of their trip to Hokkaido until the night before going there. With internet connections in almost everywhere, they often decide on where to go and stay on the fly. Jozankei is a famous hot spring area in Hokkaido near Sapporo, so it's a convenient last stop before coming back to Hong Kong.

Tokachigawa Onsen 十勝川温泉

Of course we cannot show you pictures inside the hot spring, but we can show you the view from inside. This is without doubt the hot spring with the prettiest view that either mum or dad has been to. The only thing comparable is the sauna and steam room in the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong.

Obihiro 帯広 - don't go if you're on diet

Pictures only!!

Hokkaido - eat your heart out

Within one day mum and dad saw two sets of TV crew from two different countries filming food related programs in two different places 120km apart in Hokkaido. They saw a Japanese TV crew filming in Kushiro Washo Ichiba 釧路和商市場 in the morning and late afternoon they saw a Taiwanese crew filming 莎莎 probably for 食尚玩家 in Kita no Yatai 北の屋台 in Obihiro 帯広. 莎莎 was actually filming in Banchou Butadon in the afternoon according to the old lady at the shop. Auntie J was happy to meet a fellow country woman and took a picture with 莎莎.

Unfortunately, they still have no idea who the Japanese actress was.

Update
The Japanese actress was an AV star called Rio. She has her own blog here.

Obihiro 帯広

Nowadays with so much written on every place imaginable, you often feel like you've already been there before you set off on your journey. Using Google map, you can see every shop front along a busy street and with all the online travel guides and blogs you can even get a feel of what the place is like. But once in a while, you get surprises when you arrived at the actual destination. Mum and dad just could not forget the bugs in Shiretoko Five Lakes and the sight of dozens of chimneys covered by dense fog just before sunset driving into the city of Kushiro. The fog reminded them of San Francisco.

Obihiro 帯広 was probably the city with the highest non-construction related noise pollution that they have ever visited. Every street corner, no matter where you were and what time of the day, you would hear a continuous stream of public broadcast which covered everything from road safety to commercial ads. This was a strange contrast to the sparsely populated street in early evening. The city seemed to liven up as it got deeper into the night. Kita no Yatai 北の屋台 (Food stalls of the North) with two rows of open-air food stalls along a small stretch of street was jam packed with customers. Perhaps it was the long weekend 三連休 which drew the crowd out.

Kitanoyatai 北の屋台

Instead of rubbing shoulders with the locals, they decided to have dinner in another famous Obihiro offering, Butadon 豚丼 (pork bowl). As you can see from the Wikipedia entry, this dish originated from Obihiro and Banchou ばんちょう is the original butadon store. A photo just would not do justice to a simple dish like this. Highly recommended if you ever visit Obihiro.

The queue outside Banchou Butadon 豚丼のばんちょう

Shops selling Butadon were everywhere. They also tried the shop within Obihiro JR station. This shop was established just 1 year after Banchou, which opened in Showa 8 year. The meat was not as fatty and perhaps why it lost out just that little bit.