Matsuri is the Japanese word for festival. Summer is the season for matsuri in Japan. It’s also this past long weekend that the 39th Annual Powell Street Festival was held down in Japantown. I missed last year’s edition that was kept out of the usual Oppenheimer Park location by a tent city. This year, the festival was back into full gear in the park.
Here’s a few photos from this year’s Powell Street Festival.
A post because we need a change from the everyday from time to time. I hope the song and video brings a little Happy to your day. Continue reading A little “Happy” for the Day
This may (or may not) be the last entry in Eating my way around Hokkaido. This time around I look more at some of the last of my random meals across this northern Japanese island.
Sukiya is a “fast-food” Japanese restaurant in the same vein as Matsuya and Yoshinoya. Sukiya is best known to me for their beef rice bowls. My wife had an obsession to eat at these type of restaurants while we were in Sapporo. It’s not fancy food by any stretch, but it is filling and economical to eat at Sukiya. Just look at the side dishes that came along with my simple beef rice bowl. Tasty, cheap and quick.
Eating my way around Hokkaido continues with another round of meals. It’s a review of things eaten within my fourth and last week in Sapporo.
After our onsen day trip up at Jozankei, we had returned to Sapporo and hopped off the bus in Susukino in search of dinner. We had wandered for quite a bit looking for food when we stumbled upon a place serving Genghis Khan BBQ, or jingisukan, as it is known in Japanese. It’s basically mutton grilled on a large convex dome grill along with other veggies and meat. Mutton, though, is the primary ingredient in the set up.
We couldn’t have picked a better day to end our 4 weeks of classes at Hokkaido Japanese Language School. It was our last day and we would be going to see fireworks in the evening. However, along with fireworks, comes yukata. Yukata are traditional Japanese clothing similar to kimono, but they are much lighter and less complex to put on. However, to us, the uninitiated, we needed help to put on these wonderful traditional pieces of clothing.
Let me start by saying I thought that we were going to be making fans from scratch for my last workshop at Hokkaido Japanese Language School, or JaLS. Maybe I read the itinerary wrong. In any case, we didn’t make fans. However, we did get to do some neat stuff with our fans.
Here’s number 4 in my posts on Eating my way around Hokkaido. This time, I’m focusing on the food places that I went to with my shared house mates.
One of the great things about staying at our shared house was meeting all the different people. Luckily, most of us got along really well. So a big group of us went out for dinner one night at this pork rice bowl restaurant called Kotachi Butadon Ippin, or 十勝豚丼いっぴん in Japanese. It’s a chain of restaurants in Hokkaido specializing in just pork rice bowls.
Time for the third installment of Eating my way around Hokkaido.
I heard about this wonderful underground dessert cafe on YouTube just before I left for Sapporo. Somebody had posted an entire episode of Journeys in Japan featuring Sapporo. The Sapporo guide for this episode is a fellow Canadian, Isis, who moved to Sapporo many years ago and is now a DJ and a TV show host.
My wife and I ended up going one afternoon after classes with one of our classmates. We had a free afternoon and I had wanted to visit the Sapporo Sweets Cafe. I had a little trouble finding the place. The underground city in Sapporo is quite large and all the shops seem to look the same. When I could finally find a WiFi hotspot, we were able to locate exactly where the Sweets Cafe was.
Disclaimer: I hate cooking and I’m really bad at cooking. Perhaps I was emotionally scarred as a child against cooking or maybe I’m lazy or maybe I’m incompetent. I don’t know. Cooking is one of the most stressful things in my life. It makes me extremely anxious and grumpy whenever I cook.
Given my disclaimer, it’s amazing that I actually enjoyed our afternoon workshop on making Japanese sweets, or wagashi. This was yet another cultural experience workshop put on by the Hokkaido Japanese Language School, or JaLS. A whole gaggle of us students walked over to the Susukino area and to the Chuo Ward Office all the way at one end of Tanukikoji.
Here’s more food from around Hokkaido. I just put all of my smartphone food photos from our month in Hokkaido into one single folder. It came out to 141 photos and 1.4 GB worth of foodiness. Here’s a smattering in this second installment of Eating my way around Hokkaido.
metro babel 