Day 2 dawned somewhat grey, but we had a few sights we wanted to see in Sapporo.  It turns out that a number of the things I had marked on my “possible” list were a long way out of town, but there was definitely interesting stuff nearby.  We started out at Mermaid coffee for a delicious cheese toast and pourover.

Which we didn’t photograph.  But the coffee was so good even Leigh liked it – looks like I can only find coffee to her taste in Asia. (Despite the fact that the beans in this case were from El Salvador.)

After breakfast we hopped on the subway.  We still had our IC cards left over from our previous trip, and they worked flawlessly after we put some more money on them at a 7-11.  I can’t stress enough how painless these cards make most local transit in Japan. You can install an app tap them to your phone to check the balance. (If you have an iPhone, you can even just put them on your phone and tap that on the bus, but we’re Android folks.)

At any rate, we were off to Hokkaido shrine, which is very deliberately designed to evoke a Samurai helmet.

The building dates from 1871.  Or rather a building just like it dates from 1871 – that one burned down in 1974, but was rebuilt four years later.

We had lunch plans, but we still had a few hours to go, so we decided to walk back instead of just hopping on transit.  (That, and it was a bit of a hike back to the transit stop.)  We ended up at a modern art museum, which is normally our bag, but the one exhibit on offer didn’t sound that exciting.  So we just headed back downtown and wandered around until it was time to board the bus for lunch – at the beer museum!

You’ll never guess what brand of beer is made in Sapporo.  Never never.

At any rate, the museum has a fascinating history of the brand, including why Japan started making beer in the first place, and why in Hokkaido specifically.  (Hint – easier to get ice.)  My favorite exhibit was the bottles from World War II, when all the branding was removed, and they just said “Beer.”

The audio tour had a bunch of extremely earnest actors acting out a bunch of extremely earnest scripts about imaginary vignettes in the history of Sapporo Beer.  I think Leigh and I will probably be quoting “I don’t like bitter things!” back and forth to each other forever.

At the end of the tour, we did have a tasting of three different kinds of Sapporo beer, all of which were… fine. Let’s be honest – Sapporo isn’t the most exciting beer on the planet, but it’s fine.

After splitting three reasonably large beers on an empty stomach, we were definitely ready for lunch. The beer factory campus has a number of restaurants specializing in different things, but we were after a local favorite – Genghis Khan!

What, you ask, does a Mongol emperor from the 13th century have to do with food in Hokkaido?  Well Genghis Khan is a dish cooked on a round iron plate that sort of looks like a Mongol helmet.  That’s basically it.  The Mongol empire tried to invade an entirely different part of Japan at one point, and was rained out twice. However, the dish was invented in Hokkaido in the 1930s.

So how does it work?  Well, first you put your jacket in a bag to prevent it smelling like grilled lamb, and don a bib.  Next, the server lights up the grill on your table and a robot brings you some meat and veggies. (The robot is, as I understand it, optional.)

We, um, forgot to take a picture of the grill itself, which is the thing that DEFINES the dish.  Oops.  Anyway, you grease the grill up with lamb fat, layer the veggies around the bottom of the grill, and then grill mutton or beef up on the top of the dome.  Everything smells amazing (note the SERIOUS ventilation system up top), and the lamb juices run down and flavor the veggies.

It was absolutely delicious, marred only by the fact that a) they forgot to bring us the fat until we asked for it, and b) they also forgot to bring Leigh’s meat and rice, and we didn’t realize there was supposed to be more until after we had paid.  Oops.

At this point, it was raining pretty hard, so we decamped to a nearby shopping mall to wait out the weather and maybe look for a kids manga for me to practice my Japanese on.

After the rain abated a bit, we headed back into town to see what other trouble we could get into.  We found a great little tea shop, where the host demonstrated how to prepare Japanese tea – it was an interesting compare and contrast with the similar demonstration we’d had in Thailand eight months earlier.

Even though we failed to document that, we DID get a picture of the mango pastry we had as a snack.

This was in the basement of a department store.  There’s always amazing food in the basements of Japanese department stores.

For the rest of the afternoon, we just wandered in and out of various stores, including an ENORMOUS pop culture store called Mandarake.  It would probably have made more sense if we a) knew anything about Japanese pop culture, or b) knew Japanese.  But it was still fun, in a maximalist sort of way.

For dinner, we wanted to try one more Hokkaido specialty – soup curry!  I had several possibilities on my map, all of which turned out to be absolutely full to the gills, with wait times on the order of an hour.  Reddit to the rescue, and we found a delightful little hole in the wall to get our fix.

So what IS soup curry?  Regular Japanese curry tends to have a very thick sauce made with roux cubes.  Soup curry is much thinner, spicier, and tends to have a mountain of vegetables.  Comme ça: (Or should I say, このような:)

Doesn’t that look amazing?  It WAS amazing!

Now, I don’t want you to get the idea that all we think about on vacation is food, but let’s be honest – that really is most of it.  The last iconic Sapporo dish we wanted to try before we left was Shime-parfait, which has become extremely popular in the last ten years or so.  What is?

It’s parfait.  Just fancy.  I had spent quite a bit of time trying to pick the perfect one out of the amazing spots we had seen online to try, and didn’t allow for the fact that approximately a million other people had ALSO done that, so the first two places we went to had lines over an hour.

Which is how we ended up as the only two customers in a fifth-floor bar the size of a Subaru Outback that nonetheless advertised parfait.  Was it TikTok bait?  Probably not.  Was it delicious?  Hell yes. Hokkaido is famous for melon, for good reason.

And then bed.