Today, in order to make our travels around Sapporo more efficient, we decided to get ourselves some wheels. No, not a car... but a couple of rental bicycles from our hotel. For $10 we could ride two bikes for 8 hours. Now, these are not the most attractive bikes -- they look like something that a school teacher would have rode in the 1930's but they are comfortable and they get the job done. Laugh at the baskets if you will but they are great for hauling groceries!
Each bike has an ingenious locking device on one of the wheels, making it difficult to steal a bike simply by driving it away. Certainly a bike could be carried away but this is highly unlikely for two very good reasons:
- Japanese are pretty honest and theft like this is not very common.
- These types of bikes are as common as dirt -- everyone seems to have one thus, there is very little incentive to steal them.
If
there are a lot of foreigners around though -- apparently it is a lot
more likely for bikes to get stolen -- go figure! A locking system like
I described above would be totally ineffective in North America.
We got our bikes and immediately made our
way over to the Hokkaido University Botanical Gardens. What a
beautiful place! It was not on par with something like Butchart Gardens
in Victoria (after all, the gardens are also used for research) but was
certainly an oasis of green and calm in a sea of buildings. There were numerous types of gardens from tropical plants in the
greenhouse, to a rose garden, to the Canadian Rock Garden, to displays
with various shrubs and trees. We saw an incredible variety of plants
and insect life. The gardens are a very relaxing and inspirational
place.
From the gardens we got on our bikes and made our way over to a place called Sapporo Factory. It's basically a large, enclosed mall with all of the usual global retailers that you can think of (ie. Gap, Eddie Bauer, Toys R Us, etc...). Is it just me or are these global retailers basically boring beyond belief? Talk about the promotion of mono-culture! When one is on vacation, it is nice to see unique shops operated by local retailers not these behemoths that clone themselves from city to city and country to country. If I want to shop at Eddie Bauer, I'll stay in Regina! But, I digress....
Sapporo factory was interesting for one historical reason. It is the location of the original Sapporo Brewery (does everything in this town seem to revolve around beer?!). In fact many of the original buildings dating from the 1800's are still here and have been incorporated into the architecture of the mall. We went into one which claimed to be a beer museum only to discover that it is not only a museum but also a working brew pub. Basically, a small part of the old brewery is still in operation making some truly unique products. I tried a red beer that has as one of its ingredients red cabbage. This was truly unique -- a lot more like drinking soda pop than beer. This was a very unique place -- such a contrast to the mono-culture promoted by the other stores.
The mall had one other unique feature -- almost an entire floor dedicated to outdoor stores like Timberlake, The North Face, etc... This made so much sense given that Hokkaido is basically a "frontier" area of Japan. Outside of Sapporo there isn't much beyond small towns, mountains, hot springs, and prairie. Thus, this place is a backpacker's dream. I'm sure that these stores probably do quite well.
We finished off the day by taking a long bike ride by one of the rivers before heading home. One of the things that we saw was a rather large Ford dealership. The salesmen here must have the life of the Maytag Repairman. There weren't too many people around and most of the cars in the lot were Jaguars and Land Rovers. Only a few Fords and all of them were left-hand drive like in North America and Europe. Japanese cars are all right-hand drive. What are the marketers at Ford thinking?
Overall, our bike ride was great but, if you haven't rode a bike in a long time, it can be very tough on the rear-end. We're both suffering a bit this morning but the sights were great and it was good exercise. Well worth it....
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