Author: My Husband

Before heading off to “Ramen Hour”, my wife and I spent the earlier part of the day walking around and sightseeing in Sapporo’s business district. Sapporo, Japan’s youngest and fifth-largest city, was planned much like a North American city where the grid pattern and rectangular city blocks dominate. The business district is pretty compact, and very walkable even though the chill in the air was a constant reminder that we were a little under-jacketed. But despite the cold, my wife was adamant about trying the famed soft-serve at the Hanabatake Farm retail store.

Hanabatake Farm retail store – right across the street from the historic Sapporo clock tower.

Hokkaido is famous for its agricultural products, especially milk. Milk from Hokkaido cows is so strongly perfumed, rich, smooth, and creamy that North American milk tastes bland by comparison. Hanabatake Farm is known for its range of high-quality dairy products made from the milk from their own herd of cows.

We tried the soft-serve, which turned out to be everything it was cracked up to be.

Hanabatake Farm soft serve. Smooth, rich, creamy, and redolent with milky goodness. It is very easy to get hooked on this stuff.

We also tried the milk pudding, which was packaged in a very interesting manner.

A cylinder containing three servings of milk pudding.

A closer look at how each serving is packaged up. The pudding is allowed to set in a tightly fastened balloon-like material, and is bouncy to the touch.

To eat, you pop the balloon with a toothpick and the pudding is readily released. It’s a very ingenious hygienic and green way to packaging pudding. And oh yeah, it was delicious.

Christina ended up buying several jars of condensed milk and dulce de leche to take home, and as of this writing, we’ve just finished up the last jar of it.

Our readers might remember that I had written about my new found fondness for Royce’ Chocolates in an earlier post on this travel series. In a rather serendipitous turn, we found after landing in Sapporo that Royce’ Chocolates were made in Hokkaido, and that there was a retail café in the city. It didn’t take much convincing for me to go and visit.

The Royce’ Café.

Serving their own Americano brew. It was pretty good – unlike many Japanese blends, it was actually on the richer/heavier side.

Royce’ Chocolate’s latest product – the chocolate covered potato chip. Word has it that these chips are quite tasty, but we didn’t buy any to try. Next time we will.

The café had the complete line of Nama chocolates. Suffice it to say, we bought a few to take home as souvenirs.

Royce’ has a range of ice cream flavours as well.

Royce’ also had a wide range of other products – cookies, teas, coffees, even cocoa based skin care products!

To end this post, here are some photos of Sapporo in no particular order…

The Japanese people are really big on machinized help – this is a contraption that helps you get your wet brolly wrapped in a plastic sheath. No need to get your hands wet!

Sapporo Clock Tower – the oldest standing building in Sapporo.

Sapporo Station – this is pretty much how everybody gets into the city.

Ah Daimaru – home to expensive, but excellent shopping.

Vending machines are huge in Japan. This one is for cigarettes…

… and these ones for drinks. There are countless other selling all manner of products all over the place.

Sapporo’s Poletown, an underground shopping complex. Very handy when you are under-dressed for the weather outside.

And in the spirit of preparedness anytime and anywhere, there are defribillators installed at several locations in Poletown.

Next post – Hokkaido seafood!