Sapporo station is the place to be

A room with a view

I have a confession to make.  Although we spent three nights in Sapporo, we spent most of our days outside Spporo, doing day trips.  As a result, we didn't see much of Sapporo at all, except for the gigantic and rather enjoyable Sapporo station (co-located with a gigantic mall!)

We stayed at the JR Tower Hotel Nikko Sapporo, located at the station itself.  We took the bus from Furano to Sapporo and were quite delighted to find out that the bus station was literally on the doorstep of the hotel.  It was such a breeze checking in! We had a room on a lovely high floor with a gigantic picture window.  We would spend much time sitting here, just taking in our beautiful view of Sapporo, with the mountains in the background.

Elder-friendly shower

The room itself was pretty decent but what I thought was truly thoughtful was its elderly friendly bathroom, with an enclosed area housing both shower and bath, with a stool to sit in, and the faucet placed at a comfortably low level (taller people could use another set).  The floor looked to be non slip and there were a number of well placed grab bars.  And what I like about Japan - differently coloured toothbrushes so you don't get mixed up on who's is who's. They do these little things so very well.

The beauty of staying at Sapporo station though is that it is handy for everything - buying our breakfast buns, a simple ramen meal, food souvenirs to take home, etc.  We also tried out one of the conveyor belt sushi restaurants here too - enjoyable but my  favourite sushi experience this time continues to be in Furano with the big pieces of fish.

Crab, many ways

We also had one of the most unique meals of our trip here - a kaiseki crab feast at Kani Honke crab restaurant.  The restaurant is a few streets away from our hotel and it is famous for its crab.  We chose from the kaiseki sets available, gorging on crab sashimi, boiled cold crab, crab sushi, baked crab in its shell, crab gratin in a cute little crab shaped clay dish featured in our meal.   There were different varieties of crab available, Alaskan king crab, snow crab etc.  I think we didn't get much more than a bit of the King crab leg but the flesh was really so sweet. Whilst it was fun to see all the different ways crab could come in, at the end of it just that cold boiled crab was simply perfect.  That's the beauty of fresh sea food. 

We also tried out the regional  specialty - "Genghiskhan" or "Jingisukan", named after the conquering Mongol.  It is essentially a mutton BBQ type dish and unfortunately we probably didn't know how to order it. The lean meat was fine but there was also some strange cuts which were quite tough.

I should probably have spent a little more time in Sapporo, visiting some of the sights here. But we could only get the hotel for three nights and so we decided to travel down to Hakodate and spend our last night in Hokkaido there, before flying back to Siingapore.

More photos of Sapporo here!.