Today was Sapporo Snow Festival day, or at least my visit to the main event(s), so I was glad that, as I mentioned at the end of yesterday’s post, I felt much better after a weird 8 hours of sleep whereby I went through a full sickness arc, down into the pits and up through recovery again.

One thing that the sickness did to me was kill my appetite last night, so I didn’t have any dinner at all, but by the time I woke up at 5 am or so I was famished. Luckily, my hotel, the Toyoko Inn, provides guests with a buffet event starting at 6:30 am and going until 9 am. It was held in the hotel lobby, and looked like this:

The dish combinations were different through all three days of my stay here too, and I partook from it every single day. On this morning, I took two bowls of noodles and side dishes, one bowl of rice and the curry soup (curry soup is a Hokkaido specialty, Gemini helpfully told me) and one bowl of miso soup.

I went back to my hotel room to rest a bit more, and then at a little bit past 11 am, I somewhat gingerly ventured out of my hotel room into the cold streets of Sapporo again. It was not as cold as the night before now, which was a good thing because I would end up spending over three full hours in the day outdoors, being blasted by the blasted wind. What a blast.

But the wind wasn’t even the worst part of it, it was the ice and slush-ice on the ground, especially around road intersections. For some reason the corner path at almost every intersection, where people wait for pedestrian crossing lights, was caked in ice, whereas pavements were hit and miss and some pavements were completely free of snow while others had up to a half-foot thick layer of ice and snow that people had to clamber up onto and slip-slide their way across. It was also not very well sanded in general, nothing like I’m used to in Edmonton anyway. Even the Toyoko Inn where I’m staying in front of has a slight layer of ice in front of its front door, but the restaurant next to the inn and a couple shops on the other side of the restaurant have not been diligent in clearing their shopfronts at all, so there’s a thick layer of ice there that everyone has to navigate across with suitcases in tow to get to/from the inn. And then past that shop it’s completely barren pavement for some reason.

I ended up slipping and falling twice today, something I don’t think I’ve done in a couple years in Edmonton now — once in the Snow Festival area while walking along Odori Park, and another time while heading to the Norbesa Building for one of the anime second-hand stores later on in the evening. And I saw my fair share of other people slipping and plopping onto the ground throughout the day as well.

Anyway, my outing on this day started with me walking back toward the Sapporo Station area. I found a slightly less outdoors path that involved walking straight south from the Inn until I was under some train tracks, and then cutting east into a tunnel from there. This was about 280 meters or so, and crossed like four roads, but past that mess in front of my inn, the paths were mostly clear except around the intersections. Anyway, that put me at a side passage next to the Tourist Information Counter, so that was nice and easy.

From there, I walked South and took an escalator down — Sapporo Station is at the very north end of a large, sprawling underground walkway called the Chikaho (local) or 地下道, which links it with the two station areas (Odori, Susukino) south of it and a bunch of other buildings and branches along the way. It’s also *mostly* warm, at least compared to the actual stations above. And most importantly, no ice! Different parts of the Chikaho look completely different from each other, so here’s a pointless photo of one of the tunnels near the north side of the walkway with no context at all.

Except to show that there were shops interspersed here and there. There were also little alcoves containing plain stairs that led into buildings, but some of them were more than plain staircases and looked like this nice sitting area by the D-Lifeplace building.

I stopped into that Lawson to grab a snack and a drink, and as I had been offloading some decisions on what to eat (based on prioritizing local specialties and food with some sort of history) to Gemini, it knew that I had no taste and suggested that I get a texture-based snack with salt to have here. I agreed and went for its suggestion, Calpis Jagariko Potato (butter flavoured), while adding a bottle of hot tea to hydrate myself. This potato snack was basically potato chips but in stick form. How interesting and weird.

After resting a while, I pressed on, heading south toward Odori Park through the underpass. There were a bunch of distractions along the side of the tunnel though, like this random Jomon Snow Festival thing:

I made an EXTREMELY important discovery here, which was that Gemini actually seems to work really well when I take a picture of a booth, rack, or table full of brochures, and ask it what I should take from there for my ephemera collection. I’d already briefed it (in my Personal Context/Instructions section) that I enjoy collecting ephemeral papers to scan on archive.org, and given it some reasons as to why (archival for the future, etc), and I learnt that whenever I fed it a picture of a rack, even with lots of incomplete information due to hidden parts of newsletters, it was able to very quickly recommend which ones to take, which ones to leave, and much to my amusement, which ones to burn, complete with reasons why. And occasionally, it’d do something like “Check that flyer, if it has this or that, take this, if not, leave it.”

It’s not just a language translation thing, though that’s definitely part of it, I think the reason this works very well is also because it can assumedly just Google up the titles and phrases that it sees on the flyers, on the fly, to figure out its actual context, which is actually really valuable to have at my fingertips, rather than having to tap out a bunch of Japanese characters with said fingertips. Though I’m also just impressed in general that it can even tell the demarcation between the flyers and, say, the rack and wall behind them or other adjacent flyers half the time, never mind that it can confidently declare that something or other is worth taking. There’s a lot of moving pieces here but it works well.

I started doing this a lot and probably will do so over the entire trip as I am really enjoying this interaction and this “free” way of forcing myself to be more alert and observant to the things around me, but this specific location was the starting point, the catalyst for me realizing that this was one of Gemini‘s capabilities, and it allowed me to curate my junk based on receiving feedback from the bot and bouncing occasional rebuttals off of it first. And before you think this is a sycophantic relationship, we strongly disagreed on the usefulness of one particular item (an envelope with advertisements for a cram school) that I still kept in the end after promising to burn it.

To me, this was basically like discovering the usefulness of the AI bot in a “specific work setting”, similar to how even the most ardent opponents of AI must agree that it has much potential within specialized fields of study and analyzing data sets for patterns and such. it’s a variation of that, for my “work” as an archivist, and I basically picked up every single item that it told me (with reason why) to keep, and snuck a couple of additional items, but not many, where it said not to bother. I can’t save everything, after all, and it’s better to save quality over quantity. Though the problem with this is that it’s so fun that scanning entire racks of shelves leads to a high quantity of saved ephemera (all with curated contextual reasons) regardless.

I learnt that it had a penchant, based on my instructions, for picking items with local context, so things that mention Sapporo or Hokkaido for example, and ephemeral things with dates on it, so it wasn’t a generic poster that one could find “in a random mall in Toronto”, as Gemini quipped at one point. Or that “500,000 copies of this exist across the country,” as it said at another point. Or “you’ll look back at this afterwards and wonder when you visited Sendai on this trip. You didn’t.” Paraphrasing that one. It also likes well-made, colourful designs, or things that look spiffy in some way, as long as the content was not too superficial. The reason being that it would look good once scanned. But it also tries to take baggage limit into account (although at this rate I might just mail a box of papers back ahead of me), so it strikes a balance and gives me advice on what to keep or take based on that.

Anyway, I really like this little back and forth that we’ve been having with me sending it screenshots of these various racks! And it’s been turning into my main fun activity to do on the trip, and it’s free to boot too. Even if I have to ship back a box or two, that’d still probably be cheaper than one Snow Miku plushie. Right, Snow Miku-chan??

But I digress. Back to the trip. After that last stop, I ended up at another nice alcove called Akarenga Terrace.

The washroom signs here were definitely very avant-garde.

And I decided to have lunch around here too. Gemini suggested I visit the third floor of this place for some more “texture-based” food for lunch, but it then hallucinated the name of a cafe that was back down in the basement. For whatever reason, it just completely strikes out like that sometimes when it should have perfect access to Google Maps and be able to figure basic stuff like this out. Another thing that it really, really struggles with is knowing which exits to take from this Chikaho tunnel system, even though they’re mostly (not all) listed on Google Maps too. It constantly hallucinates exit numbers and signs that are not there at all, and I can accept the latter since it’s not actually here to see the names of the signs and I don’t know that you can find that sort of thing in Google Maps (it guesses based on what buildings it knows are in that direction), but the correct exit numbers at least are in Google Maps for sure.

The third floor was indeed a food court though, and I decided to have something there since I was there anyway. I picked a store called Tiger Curry, and chose a minced meat and natto vegetable curry dish since I remembered reading that natto was particularly healthy for one’s health. Without telling Gemini my decision, I fed it the picture of the menu:

And it picked the same thing, but suggested I add the stamina broth for 150 yen more as it had garlic and that would also help kickstart my taste buds again. So I did that, and settled down at a nice table overlooking an atrium below.

The food took forever to come, but it was filling and probably delicious. After lunch, I set off for the festival park again, pausing only long enough to get one last screenshot for the books:

This was some sort of security robot, and the top, black part of its head was constantly spinning in slow circles, as it pointed its “gunstick” at people passing by. I have no idea why. I came back the next day and it was still there spinning.

Finally, I left the tunnels and emerged out in the open around Odori Park 4-chome, where chome is basically a street, or more accurately, a city block. The festival went from 2-chome to 11-chome, and there were souvenir and food stalls, sponsor booths, rest areas, and lots of snow sculptures everywhere. I bought a clear file and a postcard set from the first one I saw, for 350 yen and 700 yen respectively.

And, naturally, I went around collecting as much ephemera in the form of random papers inside the booths, and stickers from free giveaways. I’m not sure if it was a hallucination or not, but Gemini swore up and down that there should have been a temporary post office set up somewhere where I could get special stamps, usually on 9-chome and occasionally on 2-chome, but I never found this alleged postal shop. I even circled 9-chome three times to be sure. But the winds were chilly (although my exposed ears never hurt, so I think it was just wind chill and the actual temperature was only allegedly around -2°C) and the floors were icy, so I did my loop and admired all the statues and called it a day after a bit over two hours here. What follows is an only partially curated gallery of statue pictures — I don’t know that there’s much point posting random pictures of them, and I did cull a bunch anyway, but it was nice seeing random anime-based statues and such lying around. This first gallery is some of what I considered to be the “smaller” statues lying around, of which there were probably a couple hundred.