One of the big reasons we love to travel is to eat delicious local food, and we decided to hit the ground running in Sapporo with a visit to the Nijo Market.  It’s one of those hybrid “tourist destination but place where you can also just buy a big pile of food” places that you see frequently, including our very own Granville Island back in Vancouver.

We arrived fairly early, and even so, some of the places were already starting to draw a line. But we managed to find a spot at a counter and order our first donburi of the trip.  I opted for a variety bowl.  Leigh, however, knew what she wanted: “Bring me a big pile of tuna, salmon roe, and especially scallops, and I will be delighted.”  So they did. And she was.

You could tell it was a place accustomed to tourists – the manager came out and insisted on taking our picture. Also appearing – the grilled scallop included with Leigh’s combo.

After breakfast, we had some time to fill before we could go eat some more, so we went to look at Sapporo’s most famous landmark, the beer factory.

No, just kidding – the beer factory was Wednesday.

Instead, we went to the Sapporo TV tower.  Here it is from below:

And here’s the view from the top:

And here’s the tower mascot.  It’s Japan – EVERYTHING has a mascot.  This one’s name is Terebi-Tōsan.  Which literally means “Television Daddy.”  I am not making this up.

We didn’t have any formal plans after that other than just sort of wander around and soak up the city and try to recover from the jet lag. We got some fancy caffeine, looked at a clock tower and a fountain, and visited two small galleries, one for crafts, and one for photography.

Here’s some photographs of farm animals. (You can always click to make any of these pictures bigger.)

And here’s a carved bear and cub.

And by this point, we were ready for lunch! One of the foods that Hokkaido is known for is miso ramen.  The (probably apocryphal) story of the origin of miso ramen is that a drunk customer demanded that their ramen be dumped into a bowl of miso soup, rather than the traditional broth.

Whether or not the story is true, the generally agreed birthplace of the style is a small lunch counter located inside a stationery store.  Seriously – I held our place in the (long!) line while Leigh went and looked at fancy pens.  Once we got in, it was definitely a “eat your soup and get out” sort of place, but the soup sure was good.

After lunch, we decided to go visit a nearby aquarium.  This was not an enormous museum like the one in Osaka – just a small, carefully curated collection of marine life.  Including these cuddly little guys:

Also these cuddly little guys:

(Note: cuddliness not guaranteed.)

We have mentioned in some of our previous travels that we have a good friend who is a SERIOUS gourmand.  When he tells us where to go, we go there. (See our meals with him in Kyoto here and here.) We asked him where to eat in Sapporo, and he recommended Tempura Araki, an 8-seat omakase tempura restaurant. (I had to go online a month out and stab the reset button repeatedly at just the right moment to make sure we got reservations.)

It was so fancy we could barely identify the door from the outside, that’s how fancy it was.

Over the course of a lengthy meal, we were served an incredible quantity of dishes, not all of which we photographed.  But here are a few highlights:

Fried octopus:

The best tomato you have ever eaten:

Fried local corn:

A fried seaweed sheet, lightly garnished with a small hint of sea urchin:

This was a hell of a meal.  Stuffed and reeling from jet lag, we staggered back to our hotel through the crowds and called it a night.