Relaxing Day Out on the Town

After spending two solid days stuck inside with Fiona's fever, we're very excited to have her on the mend. She seemed to be doing much better yesterday, and the weather was perfect, so we decided to get out for a little fresh air. I didn't want to over do it with a big day, so we just spent the afternoon meandering.

Our first stop (after Starbucks, of course), was for a sandwich lunch in Odori Park. I am quickly falling in love with this park. It's the perfect place to spend a summer day - lots of food options, endless places to sit and enjoy the day, beautiful fountains for kids to splash in, and festival after festival to explore. What I've learned about the region of Japan that we are in, is that they know how to do summer right! With an average snowfall of 191 inches, Sapporo is ranked the second snowiest city in the world. Hey Boston - remember how much we savored summer that year we got 108 inches of snow?? The people of Sapporo clearly feel that way every summer and have turned appreciating summer into an art form. I love it!

Anyway, we had a lovely lunch yesterday just sitting by the fountain, eating our sandwiches and feeling the sun on our skin.

As a short aside - another thing I have come to truely appreciate about the Japanese culture: if they are going to do something, they do it right! Case in point - when we buy our sandwiches at a local sandwich shop, they are packaged with a mini ice pack to keep them cool and fresh until we're ready to eat them. Similarly, in the grocery packing section of the grocery store (you are in charge of your own bagging), there are ice machines available for bagging your own ice to pack around your groceries. Brilliant!

After finishing up our lunch, we headed over to the flower festival that's currently going on in the park. On our way we passed this hard working team - another example of doing it right philosophy here. Odori Park has dozens of flower beds throughout. Since we've arrived, I've watched this team work up and down the park meticulously clearing beds that are near the end of their season all the way down to fresh dirt before carefully replanting them. At the rate they are going, I would guess each of the dozens of flower beds see at least four plantings in the short growing season here.

The Flower festival that has taken over Odori Park for the week is equally impressive. Part of the festival involves a team taking over one of the park's flower beds and creating an entry in a garden design competition. Grandma, you would have loved it! Wish you could have joined us.

After taking in our fill of flowers, we headed over to play in one of Fiona's favorite fountains/water features in the park. There is a small fountain at one end that feeds a shallow meandering creek that winds around rocks and under a bridge before disappearing down a drain. She loves to start sticks off at the source and then follow them as they float down the creek. I love watching this because, to this day, one of my absolute best childhood memories was playing a similar game in a water feature near where I grew up. Who remembers that little man made stream near the Coeur d' Alene resort that spills into the lake? I think it's still there? Or, at least it was when my almost 9 years old niece was a baby...

Near the park, there is a branch of the cookie factory that we visited a few weeks back. This place, Candy Labo, makes (as you might have guessed) candy - hard sugar candies and lollipops. When we were at the cookie factory, we kept reading about a place where you can watch candy making demonstrations, but we couldn't find it. Turns out that was because it wasn't AT the cookie factory, it's located separatel, near Odori. We've passed by multiple times now and always caught the demonstration mid way through, so we've been dying to catch one from the beginning - specifically so we could see how they make the candy cane like stripes. Yesterday we finally got the timing nearly right, but still had 30 minutes to kill before the demo started, so we stopped for a cookie and some hot chocolate a cafe next door. Long story short, I need to figure out how to get Facebook to stop auto playing videos because as we were sitting there eating our cookies, I opened the app on my phone and the entire cafe was suddenly filled with the incredibly loud sound of a revving motorcycle engine. Fiona thought it was hilarious...

Until she realized that everyone was staring at us. She then became equally embarrassed to be seen with me. Get used to it lady...this is only the beginning of your mother humiliating you!

Finally it was time for the candy demo to start. Yesterday, they were making heart shaped lollipops:

Each of the candy makers wears a microphone that they use to describe the steps they are taking. Unfortunately, our basic Japanese lessons did not cover candy making vocabulary, so we had to just guess at what they might be saying... They started by pouring the melted sugar into a square mold:

They then pushed it around a bit with a spatula - probably to get the bubbles out?

Next they added the red dye to a small area of the sugar and mixed it in:

Then, while removing the edges of the square mold, they woman did an extra little something for Fiona's benefit (we were the only ones there) and made a big sugar bubble which she then popped:

After removing the portion of the sugar that had been dyed red, it was time to pull the sugar. This part looked like great exercise!

The final product after lots of hard work:

Next they returned to the dyed sugar (along with some white pieces they had set aside) and started rolling them out to make the stripes:

Stretching the stripes:

After sufficient stretching, the above was cut in half with each placed one above the other to make two rows of stripes. Then there was more stretching:

Meanwhile, the pulled sugar was being rolled into a cylinder:

And finally, the stripes were wrapped around the outside of the pulled sugar cylinder:

The final strip covered cylinder was then slowly rolled and stretched and rolled and stretched:

Until it was just the right size to be cut into a rope, shaped like a heart, and pushed into a mold.

It was amazing how quickly they filled this tray with lollipops!

After this, we decided to make a quick grocery store stop before heading home to relax.

While I'm on the topic of groceries - whenever we visit different countries, I'm always prepared for the fact that the grocery stores won't likely be stocked with the SAME things we're used to finding at home, but what I always find most interesting is the size of familiar things. The two that come to mind from our grocery trip yesterday are bread and ice cream. The bread here is delicious which is a BIG problem for me because I love it and It comes packaged in huge, thick slices. Here's a typical Japanese bag of bread next to a rare find - a more US-sized bag:

Meanwhile, pictured below is the largest ice cream I can find. Jason needs two or three to satisfy him.

Eventually I'll do another post describing all the new yummy specifically Japanese treats we've discovered!