Sunday, July 28, 2013

The first of many planned Hokkaido vacation blog posts :)

One of the many beautiful spots I visited on my 
most recent trip to the wonderful land that is Japan

Among the highlights of visiting the Land of
the Rising Sun are encounters with its people and 
coming across a fun festive occasion (or more) :)

Puppet Ponyo posing with plastic versions of 
some of the delicious food I ate on this trip :b

For those of you who wondered what was behind the recent blog hiatus: I was away on the longest vacation -- just six days! -- I've been on since my visit to Japan last August.  This time around, I headed over to the Land of the Rising Sun once more -- but to the northern island of Hokkaido rather than the Kanto area or Okinawa like on my three most recent visits to the country that I've grown to love visiting before it.

This was not my first visit to Hokkaido -- or its largest city, Sapporo.  But this was the first time I went beyond Hokkaido's capital city and its airport at New Chitose -- with my being based in Sapporo but taking day trips out to the nearby port city of Otaru, and further afield to the flower fields of Furano as well as further exploring Sapporo.

In addition, as those of you who know my love of Japanese food can guess, I ate a lot of fantastic food on this recent vacation.  All this I plan to chronicle in upcoming blog entries -- along with my attending a number of festivals, a couple of which I hadn't known about prior to the Hokkaido trip but one of which (the Sapporo Summer Festival, AKA the Sapporo beer festival!) I was pretty happy indeed to learn beforehand would be taking place during my visit there! ;b

5 comments:

eastcoastlife said...

I heard the seafood is awesome in Hokkaido. My dream destination!!

Ramakant Pradhan said...

The first pic shows what a beautiful place it is. I did watch the Ponyo cartoons :)

YTSL said...

Hi EastCoastLife --

The seafood in Hokkaido is indeed amazing. As is its milk, honeydew melon, corn, etc., etc.! ;b

Hi Ramakant --

As you can imagine, I took A LOT of pics in Furano. Will sift through them to pick the best for later. And yay, am happy that you watched "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea"! :)

eliza bennet said...

Welcome back. I'm looking forward to look at the photos of everything and descriptions of what you ate.

Also any tips on accomodation etc. are most welcome (not that I'm planning on going there)

YTSL said...

Hi "eliza bennet" --

Dunno about "everything" but I definitely have plenty of photos to share!

Re accomodation tips: my preference is to stay at a business hotel located close to a major railway station. Business hotels since they have lots of single rooms (and I usually travel to Japan alone these days), and close to a major railway station since I tend to do a lot of traveling by rail and also have noticed that there tend to be lots of eateries and (department) stores located near railway stations in Japan. :)