The Narrative of Sapporo I: The Fellowship of the HIF Students (Or not)

(I’ve got a lot to post about Sapporo. To make it easier for everyone at home, I’m going to break the Sapporo blog post up like an epic film—trilogy time! Here’s the first installment.)

Last weekend HIF set me and 33 other students loose in Sapporo.

Sapporo never saw it coming.

Just kidding. Despite the fact that nearly all of us are old enough to buy alcohol here in Japan, shameless shenanigans did not ensue. Indeed, we kept it to levels of dilute debauchery. (And here’s some additional aggravating alliteration!)

Here are some pictures that I took in Sapporo the first night that we were there:
Yup, there’s a Ferris Wheel on top of one of those buildings.
Our room in the Sapporo House Youth Hostel was a little less glamorous:

The best part was you didn’t need an alarm clock because the train tracks ran right over the hostel. I now know that if I ever need to take a train late at night or absurdly early in the morning, the Sapporo train station has me covered.

I took the chance to gallivant about the city on my own as much as possible. As nice as it is to hang out with groups of other HIF students, when it comes to sightseeing, I’d like to see what I’d like to see, not just go shopping and bar-hopping all weekend.

(I have a particular disinclination to group sightseeing after my trip to France in high school – at that point, staying with the group was mandatory. When the group of my high school peers was given the choice between the Louvre and shopping, can you guess what the group of mindless consumption driven* teenagers decided to do? Yeah. Shopping. I was robbed of my chance to explore the greatest art museum in the world and subsequently dragged along to the Louis Vuitton store where I was used as a human calculator to figure out the dollar cost of various purses). (Gee, did that sound bitter?)

Anyway, during my travels on Saturday, my friend Meagan and I went to the Shiroi Koibito Park and Ishiya chocolate factory. Oh yes, I found a chocolate factory in Japan. I’m a chocoholic—I’ve got radar for these sorts of things.
They had a museum with all sorts of cool stuff, like these over-the-top decorative antique hot cocoa cups:


And then all these old school chocolate boxes:


Heck, even the trash can was pretty ritzy (apologies for the awful picture quality on this one!):
And they had these adorable signs when there was a staff entrance:
I’m not quite sure where the cat theme came from, but you also had to follow cat paw prints on the floor throughout the museum.

After the museum and an exhibit about how they make chocolate (that was in a tunnel that was designed to look like it was made out of molten chocolate) you got to see the factory:


You can see them making the Shiroi Koibito cookies that the Ishiya chocolate company is famous for and that the park is named for. They’re comprised of these two thin buttery cookies with white chocolate between and they’re sold exclusively on Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island. We got complimentary ones as part of the tour. :)

After the tour, we stopped in their Chocolate Lounge, which had an amazing view.
I got white chocolate milk (so decadent!) and some chocolate cake (ganache, maybe? At any rate, it was delicious!). Meagan and I were goofing around a bit so I have this lovely picture of me. I am clearly unable to keep a straight face when posing with chocolate goodies. (Actually, I find it difficult to keep a straight face in any situation, desserts involved or not).


After that, Meagan went to meet her Japanese teacher from her home university who was also in Sapporo, and I found my way to the Hokkaido Modern Art Museum… which I will describe in The Narrative of Sapporo II: The Two Beers!

*Bonus points to anyone who can figure out the movie reference here.