Snow Day! Otaru

Snow Day!

I woke up this morning to snow once again outside. It snowed yesterday as well, but only for a little bit and I sped walked through it to get to Susukino Station to get away from it. Don’t get me wrong, snow is magical, I can’t even remember the last time I saw it snow like it has been.

But snow is very cold. And it’s cold enough as it is in Hokkaido without it snowing on everything.

So yesterday I ventured out to Otaru, which is about 38km from Sapporo, a place that all the travel websites said is a must visit when you’re in Hokkaido. So away I went. I did it as a day trip, mainly because by the time I decided I wanted to go, all the budget accommodation had been snapped up. Though in hindsight this was for the best as I saw everything that I wanted to see, mainly the Otaru Canal, in the five hours I spent there.

The canal itself was very pretty, but it is also one of the sites I would like to visit in the Spring, when everything is not covered with thick snow. Snow is nice and it’s what I wanted to see, but it still makes me wish for the beauty of Spring.

It also happened to be Otaru where I had my very first bowl of Japanese ramen. I’ve never had a soy based ramen before, I thought that maybe it would be too salty. But it was very tasty. And very cheap.

I thought about going to the Otaru Aquarium while I was there, but I said that I wanted to go to the Sunshine Aquarium in Tokyo, so I have to choose where I spend my money and not go to everything.

I ended up getting back to the hostel around seven at night, after I struggled to find the right train that would take me back to Sapporo. A few others seemed to be confused as well, which was nice to see.

Honestly it’s been quite a culture shock being here, but it also makes me realise exactly how we are in Australia.

Example, 95% of signage is written in Japanese. And that’s Kanji.

Not Hiragana.

Not Katakana.

KANJI!

Which I cannot read…

Give me hiragana or katakana and I’m pretty much good to go. But Kanji?

Unfortunately I didn’t have time in the six months before I came here to learn over 1,500 kanji characters. Even Japanese people take ten years to learn kanji when they’re in grade school.

…I may as well have just learnt Chinese.

Speaking of Chinese, there are so many here. At least I’m pretty sure there are. Seems I’ve developed quite the ears for telling Japanese, Chinese and Korean apart. And for the most part as I walk past groups of people on the street they seem to be speaking Chinese.

This goes along with 95% of the people staying at my hostel being Chinese.

Example two, they assume I speak Japanese.

Which is actually kind of nice but at the same time, I do not. At least not to that extent. They all speak so god damn fast that I end up just staring at them. But why else would I be here if I couldn’t speak the language? And then something clicks within them to be like, ‘ah this blonde haired, blue eyed girl is not Japanese.’ Go figure.

But this hasn’t made it any more difficult to get what I want. Except when I was in Otaru and I was paying for donuts. Mister Donut = delicious. Dare I say on par if not better than Krispy Kreme… And I did not know what the small bronze coin with the hole in it was. (I look everywhere on it and nowhere does it have the amount.) In all fairness I hadn’t actually meant to give it to the cashier, I thought it was the other bronze one, so it turned out that I short changed her by five cents. And this took a bit of figuring out.

Bronze coin with no hole = 10 cents

Bronze coin with hole = 5 cents

Clear now!

And I have found that people are perfectly fine with helping you out.

I had lunch the other day and of course I picked the lunch spot that had no English. So I just stared at the menu pretending like I could read it, contemplated walking out and eventually pressed the buzzer to call the waitress over.

(Another thing we should have in Australia, a button on the table that you can press whenever you need something that calls a waiter over instead of you having to wave them down. The only other place I’ve seen this was at a Korean restaurant in Northbridge and I was very confused.)

And so I just ordered what I thought looked good – Tonkatsu of course! (Tonkatsu is a Japanese dish which consists of a breaded, deep-fried pork cutlet). The only bit of difficulty I came across with this was when she asked me what size rice I wanted (we’d transitioned to English at this point.)

Now, Gohan means rice – Thank you Dragonball Z

But not once did I hear her say gohan, but we got there and I got my meal for $8 and was very satisfied.

And all of this makes me think just how hard people must have it when they speak a language that is not English and come to a country like Australia and I assume the UK and USA. Because we may be willing to help out where we can, but we don’t go out of our way to translate a lot of things.

But anyway, I’m having a good time. I’ve been trying to keep myself busy so that I don’t get bored or start missing people or something.

There are enough people here.

Oh and I think I figured out what side of the road they walk on..

It doesn’t matter as long as they’re avoiding the puddles.

Until next time,

ごきげんよう!