Hokkaido diary: Mount Moiwa, the Sapporo Beer Museum, and Susukino

2/4:

• 12:45 p.m. After I finished last night's entry, I spoke with Miss H on the phone. Turns out Adam—the friend I was supposed to meet in Busan, got his dates mixed up. He will be in Seoul on the 7, 8, and 9. Darn. Oh well.
  
  I turned on the TV and Cool Runnings was on. Yay! I left it on and took a glorious hot bath that washed away the aches and travel grime. Then I read a few more chapters of The Terror, turned out the light and slept like the dead.
  
  I awoke to bright sunshine, feeling amazingly refreshed. I washed up, dressed, ate the rest of my snacks, and strode into the cold air, bound south for Odori Park and the streetcar station.

• I was crossing over the pedestrian bridge by Sapporo Bus Terminal when I looked over and spotted a scruffy, tanned foreigner emerge from its Stygian gloom. The first thing I noticed was his huge grin. He raised both his hands into the air in a gesture of triumph. Then he spotted me.
  
  
  Far from being embarrassed, his grin grew wider.
  
  "Good morning!" I called.
  
  "Morning!" he called back.
  
  
  "It's cold, mate!"
  
  His accent was Australian.
  
  "Yeah, I love it," I crooned.
  
  "I love it too," he said.
  
  "I could have gone to Thailand," I said, "but not me."
  
  He laughed. "Why go to Thailand when you can come here and do this—" he pounded his thickly-swathed hands together—"with your gloves?"
  
  "I forgot mine," I said, showing him my bare hands. "Pockets."
  
  He laughed again. "Want one?"
  
  With his left hand he removed his right glove (revealing another glove beneath that one) and made a mock-throwing gesture. I raised my arms. 
  
  "No, no, that's all right." 
  
  He laughed a final time. 
  
  "Take care," I said.
  
  "You too."
  
  His grin never faded. 

• I made it to Odori Park, turned west (past a bunch of impressive snow sculptures which shall be unveiled tomorrow) and alighted at the streetcar stop. An old, clanking trolley car (just like those in Kyoto and Kumamoto) pulled me to Ropeway Iriguchi Station. 

• I took two cable cars (regular and mini) to the top of Mount Moiwa and had a look at the knee-deep drifts, bare trees, cawing crows, blue skies, and the whole massive sprawl of Sapporo below. 

I would have been able to see the whole valley (and the mountains and Sea of Japan beyond) but a huge snowstorm was rolling off it and blanketing the town in a sea of gray obscurity.

• I made it back down to Earth and took the tram to Susukino (the fun district) when the storm struck in earnest—huge wet flakes sticking to my clothes and socking me in the eyes. It drove me off the street and into a curry house, where I am now munching on a delicious seafood curry and thinking about hitting the Sapporo beer museum next.
   
  
• 2:45 p.m. Best idea I've ever had. The snow is still bucketing down. This beats everything I ever saw. Sapporo is just getting dumped on. Good thing I switched to indoor activities. 

• I'm sitting in the big 1st-floor beer hall at the Sapporo Beer Museum, sampling their classic brew, their black label (also a favorite of mine) and the KAITAKUSHI beer, made to the original recipe of the brewery, back in the late 1860s and early 70s when it was still a government enterprise. There isn't really much to the museum at all—some blurbs about Hisanari Murahashi, the original project leader, and Seibei Nakagawa, the brewmaster, the first Japanese man to learn brewing in Germany, and the history of the company and the idealness of Hokkaido for good beer-making, etc., etc. The real highlight is this tasting you can do afterward. You order your beer (or a sampler of all three for just ¥500, or $5) and sit around and drink 'em in peace. The nuts are excellent. I have no idea what to do after this—catch the 747 Chuo bus back to Sapporo Station and walk, head down and blinking, back to the hotel. Maybe I'll stop by Hokkaido University on the way and check out Clark's bust. 
  P.S. There's a French couple sitting near me, sampling beer. The dude, a slim, gaunt fellow with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, is wearing a GoPro on his head. THAT IS SO STUPID.
  

• 8:40 p.m. Went back to my hotel and read for a couple hours, then began to think about dinner. I researched a couple of seafood places (Hokkaido's famous for it, especially sushi and crab) but found they were hideously expensive—a good crab dinner will run you $200. So I rode 3 stops down the green (Tozai?) line to Susukino and found TK6 in a big shopping arcade. Brant (who was here in December) recommended it to me. Amazing burgers, loads of great beers and a thrilling selection of cocktails. They had a good choice of odd liqueurs (Frangelico, Pimm's, and others whose names I didn't even recognize, plus ouzo). As I ate and drank, a 27-year-old Japanese fellow named Dai (Japanese for "big") started talking to me. He works in translation here in Sapporo, and speaks English, Italian, and Spanish. He asked what I thought of Korean girls (whiny, childish) and I asked him what the best and worst parts of his job were (meeting famous people and pretending to care about what they think, respectively).
  
  I left and rode the Ferris wheel at Norbesu entertainment center, and got a line on eats for tomorrow (Sushizanmai in Susukino and a yakitori place around the corner).
  

Some footnotes: what I referred to as "nuts" above were actually Sapporo Beer Crackers, which are fantastic with any kind of beer.

The Kitaikushi was the name of the committee in charge of setting up a working government after the end of the Boshin War and the beginning of the Meiji Era. The brewery in Sapporo was founded to stimulate agricultural growth in the area, and the brew claims to use only water, malt, hops, and yeast—no fancy additives. It was delicious, and even gave the Black (my favorite Sapporo brew) a run for its money. I bought a pack of Beer Crackers for ¥500 and a souvenir T-shirt for ¥1600.

Yakitori means "fire chicken." Yaki- is the Japanese prefix used to denote that something's been flame-broiled or grilled or barbecued, much like bul- is in Korean. Yakiniku, bulgogi...it all means "fire meat." Yakitori is barbecued chicken on a stick. I was willing to bet it went well with beer, so I staked a place out just around the corner from the Sapporo Clark.

W.S. Clark, or William Smith Clark for short, was...well, you can just read about him here. That's your homework until the next post.