Hokkaido

I went to Hokkaido with my parents during the Chinese National Holiday last week. Hokkaido is the northernmost island of Japan and is replete with dormant volcanoes, hot springs, clear blue lakes, and lush farmland. The abundance of nature was a refreshing change from the cold gray of Shanghai.

Our scenic drives and peaceful hikes were nourished by overwhelming buffets or hotpots that included plenty of fresh seafood. We ate one king crab that was pulled live from a tank, cracked into bite-sized pieces, and placed, raw, on our table half an hour later. I couldn't help but think about the lobster sushi I once had where I was watching the lobster move as I ate it... yech.

Though I was in Hokkaido for only four days, I did have a few new and/or interesting experiences:

• Swimming in a bath house with about a dozen different types of jets and fountains. It was like exploring a village with water jets shooting at you from a different direction at every turn. The bath house was the size of a stadium, with a larger-than-Olympic-size wave pool in the middle, various small jet pools surrounding it, and the jet/fountain village and several nude spas off to the sides. I don't know which was funnier: the occasional man getting confused on his way out of the nude spa and walking in his birthday suit into the main pool area, or the looks on the faces of the attendants who hurried over to the man to tell him to put on some clothes.
  
• Bathing nude in a natural hot spring. Thankfully, there were fewer than half a dozen other women around, all of whom were at least 30 years older than me, so I didn't feel quite so self-conscious. Still, I'm not the biggest of fan of going nude in public. And besides, it was really hot. 42 degrees C. That's about 106 degrees Fahrenheit. I didn't find it particularly refreshing. So I can check this one off the list, but there's no guarantee I'll do it again.
  
• Eating salmon roe and rice for breakfast almost every day. Small, salty orange bubbles layered on top of slightly sweet rice. Yum.
  
• Eating Kobe beef. The cows are organically fed and satiated with sake, then slaughtered at a young age to produce a very tender meat. The highest grade of beef must be ordered weeks, sometimes months in advance. Each portion comes wrapped and tagged with an ID number, which you then can look up online to learn about the cow's heritage and caretakers, not to mention see a picture of the poor animal you just ate. For the price tag ($200-$400/kg.), it's definitely not worth it. Sure, it's tender, but it's also extremely fatty. And frankly, beef is beef. I can buy steak meat in E-mart for less than a dollar. Plus, humanizing the animal does not make it especially appetizing to me.
  
• Traveling in a country where I didn't know at least a little bit of the language. This part was tricky. Our tour guide recommended that we not converse with the locals if we didn't know Japanese because konichiwa and arigato can only get you so far. And in Hokkaido, this advice was pretty reasonable: Hokkaido is fairly rural, so even at the tourist sites, most people did not speak English. I can't think of anywhere I've traveled where I didn't at least know how to say, "Where is the bathroom?" But in Japan, I was completely dependent on fairly ineffective body language and finger pointing. It was a strange feeling.
  
• Falling asleep every time the tour guide started speaking. I initially tried to be polite and listen to everything he said, but frankly, when you're on a bus for three or four hours passing by serene pastoral scenery and the tour guide insists on talking the *entire* time, in Cantonese, no less, which is not the most pleasant-sounding of languages, it's hard not to ease down in your chair so you're just out of view of the guy and close your eyes as his droning puts you to sleep.