Freezing Sapporo

The guidebook said that Sapporo can get bitterly cold, and they were not wrong, it was about 6 and the comfort level -2. Conveniently, however much of Sapporo is connected by underground walkway. A fact we discovered after dinner, not before.

Sapporo is the place for crab and we sought it out with the crappy assistance of Google maps, which really has no idea what it's doing in Japan. It took us to a commercial building 2 blocks from the crab restaurant we were looking for. But crab we eventually found which was pleasingly served in our own private room.

Fast train to Hokkaido

I put some northern action in our itinerary to hopefully catch the cherry blossoms which we had missed by about 3 weeks in Tokyo. I can now say after 3 days in Hokkaido that we are about a week too early here. Very disappointing. But we have been to some cute little towns; Hakodate, where people said hello to us on the street, and Noriboribetsu where I had a great outdoor bath experience. We also stepped back to the 80's in at the sun palace lake toya. Which  seriously had a Nintendo 64.

Some sightseeng

We did finally focus on something other than food and went for a volunteer run walking tour of Asakusa. We saw a shrine and a temple - apparently different things. And checked out the sumida river.

 We also finally found the place where you order food off a screen and it arrives automatically on a conveyor belt thing....loads of fun.

More Tokyo food

After more culinary adventures we wandered down to Harajuku to try and track down a set menu place I had read about. It was down a side alley And we parked ourselves at the bar for a 9 course intensely Japanese meal. I think I like Japanese food quite a lot, but a lot of this food challenged me. Particularly a custard with bits of fish suspended in it, topped with a green pea jelly. More umami flavour than you could poke a stick at. We couldn't compete with the  the other Japanese customers who really can pout away some food and we bowed out a course early. The attached picture is course 5 which was a meal in itself.

Tokyo- mostly about the food

We arrived in Tokyo at stupid o'clock and spent a few painful hours wandering around in the rain waiting for our room to be ready. We are staying at the Granbell in Shibuya, which according to the guidebooks is teenager Mecca and the home of the famous Shibuya crossing. At 10.30 on a Monday morning it was positively prosaic.

We read about Good izakaya near the hotel. After walking around the block and consulting numerous maps we found it directly across the road and up a few doors. The Japanese quirk of numbering buildings in the order they were built rather than their location to each other provides a significant and ever present challenge. The izakaya, or neighbourhood bar, was loads of fun, lots of shouting and meat on a stick being cooked on a huge grill.