You know, I had wondered the day before — the floor that I was on, floor 13, was as high as the elevator went, so obviously I was on the top level of the building, but yet the elevator lobby on that floor had both an up and a down button. Why did it have an up button when the elevator only went to floor 13? Well, there are TWO elevators, and I noticed that the one I had been using only went to level 13, but the other one apparently had buttons that went from 1 to 14. Hmm. So there’s a secret level 14 that only one of the elevators go to. Exploring hyperdimensional spaces was not on my itinerary though, so I passed on that adventure.

The hotel breakfast buffet this morning looked like this:

I had two big bowls of food and then a bowl of miso soup, yum.

After yesterday, I had had enough of crowds and a curated downtown experience, so on the menu today was a visit to a smaller block of malls a couple of stops away from Sapporo Station. This cluster of malls is kinda called Shin-Sapporo Arc City, I think, but the way the Japanese name things can be kind of messy and vague so I’m not certain that this actually refers to all three malls, Sunpiazza, Duo-1, and Duo-2, and/or if it includes the surrounding area with the Science Center, Aquarium, housing, and other amenities too.

But anyway, it looked like a good place to spend an afternoon, and Gemini spouted some nonsense about this potentially being a nice, liminal place to explore too since I mentioned liking liminal places in my instruction set. It was wrong, though, as it was a fairly busy place all in all, and a couple of places it claimed to be architectural weirdness, I just mostly found to be a boring old brick corridor that was slightly out of place.

Also, on the way down to the train station, I saw this:

I’d seen plenty of little snow ducks around downtown Sapporo and the Snow Festival, and wondered about them. Gemini gave a crack at this one and said it was linked to a craze that the Korean boyband BTS started in 2021 (local), and while I don’t care about the band, I did like the cute ducks and mentally added a snow duck mold to the shopping list to get at some point.

Anyway, I took the train down from Sapporo Station to Shin-Sapporo Station, and beelined for the science center and aquarium first as those were the time-limited parts of the day. I had to pass into and then through one of the malls in the cluster, Sunpiazza, on my route to get to the science center, which was nearby but not quite connected to the building.

Along some corridors, up an escalator, then out an exit on the far side from where I entered, and that put me in a nice area with shop balconies, criss-crossing walkways and paths, and the aquarium which I would visit later, but for now had to pass by to get to the science center first. This kind of residential-commercial architecture I like a lot.

I think there was a park there too, but I wasn’t 100% sure since there was snow everywhere. I figured maybe I’d check the map board that I saw:

Never mind. I went to that nearby Sapporo Science Center instead. Despite having such a grand name, it was a rather small science centre with two levels, a bunch of exhibits on the top floor and a planetarium to watch movies in on the bottom floor. They were playing some Miku-related science or astronomy thing in an hour but it also lasted FOR an hour and I could not afford that sort of time for something I would only be able to understand 25% of, so I passed on that. The exhibits cost 800 yen to enter, but I had my University card on me and it said Student still, so this made it 400 yen.

The exhibits area was not very big either, and I think I spent about 20 minutes here at most. It also didn’t help that everything was just in Japanese:

Although of course the visuals and interactive buttons made some things easy enough to understand the coolness factor of, like this thing that showed the effect of wind from different directions and how it affected the climate around Sapporo:

There were a couple of other groups of people around, and this racing thing was mildly popular with the kids:

And a large 1/3 globe took up one corner of the exhibit, for no reason at all than to look cool, I think. None of the exhibits surrounding it seem to be relevant to the globe other than vaguely being “about Earth” in general.

There was a section about the Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki and a curation of items she used, which was neat:

And I finally found some English! “The moon is full and they are a chip and an orbit.”

400 JPY was about right for this though. I also picked up a bunch of free brochures and paid for a “NYASA” cat astronaut sticker for my scrapbook.

I then plodded over to the aquarium, which was significantly pricier — 1,200 JPY in all for entry, and no discount for me. This was a two storey aquarium, and started out with the usual small tanks of random fish:

It felt very… local in places, in a way that I did like. Like for example this one, with a sign that looked like it was less an official aquarium and more a school project submission.

There was also some monster fuel:

And this little thing that I could have dipped Tigey inside of to let little fish nibble on him:

And this pool where I could have let Tigey ride a starfish or whatever was in the pond.

But he didn’t seem to be enthused at any of that, so we didn’t do it. Moving on, I think this was the largest/most normal tank that they had:

And not long after that, there was this huge fish in a distressingly tiny tank. I felt like this was cruel.

And a Japanese aquarium staple! The chin anago, or garden eel, sticking vertically out of the sandy ground:

And a staple of aquarium visits in my blog, the underside of a starfish:

They also had a tube tank of these really, really tiny starfishes that Tigey was enamoured by, partially because they resemble a certain other plushie:

There was also this interesting electric eel tank where a sensor detected electricity from the eel trapped in there and I guess lights up the giant light bulb with it as well as the voltage signs above. While I was there, it just fluctuated between 0v and 100v a lot though.

There were also lost penguins who were huddling in a corner of their pen, wondering what they were doing here:

Lastly, I paid a visit to the aquarium gift shop on the way out, and would probably have gotten something if the price of admission wasn’t so much higher than the museum to start with. But I was all tapped out. These fish plushies were interesting to look at though. They all seemed unique in their own dorky way.

But also i don’t want to be jumpscared at 5 am by one of those rolling off my plushie pile onto my face. There were a pile of little handmade penguin plushies that I almost got as a souvenir for the family too, but there were only four different colours, so I passed on those as well. Oh well. Five or bust.

I went back to Sunpiazza, taking pictures of a pop-up candy shop that I noticed afterwards had No Pictures Allowed signs on them. Maybe if you don’t want pictures taken of your goods, don’t hold a fair and make money in the middle of a public place? I politely and discreetly ignore all such signs.

Lunch was Gemini‘s choice, and I do enjoy letting the bot pick lunch as well since it has connections to Google Maps data. I ask for local specialties, food with interesting history behind it, and just non-chain/touristy food places in general, and this time it suggested a nearby bakery in the mall called Donguri, which it claimed invented or popularized something called a chikuwa pan, bread wrapped around a thin fishcake with tuna in it. That sounded neat, and I found the place fairly easily:

But it was a two-part bakery, with an unmanned cafe on the left side and an actual bakery with cashiers on the right side. Even after translating the sign, I needed to watch the locals do their thing for a few minutes to figure out what was going on.

It turns out that the bakery on the right sold both bread in bags as well as loose pieces of bread on trays. You could go in with a tray yourself and pick out what you want, in a way that strongly reminded me of Akira‘s trips to the bakery with me way back in 2022 in Kyoto. Then you brought your tray up to the front, where the cashier would ask you, for your loose pieces, whether you wanted to eat them here or pack them for home (or a combination thereof). The ones that were already in bags were obviously for take out, and the ones that were loose could be either. You could also order some tea from the cashier at that point:

And the idea is that before you actually go in and do this entire bakery stuff, you were first supposed to book a spot in the cafe if you planned on eating here, by taking one of the numbered placards and putting it on the table. At no point in the process is the number actually used for anything though, except I guess for you yourself to remember what number you took.

Anyway I thought it was a weird little ritual, but fun as well to try, so I had lunch here, picking up that chikuwa pan that the bread bot suggested as well as three other ones that I fancied.

They don’t show well since they’re in bags, but the Bacon Egg bread on the left was great, but part of the egg white kind of crumbled to pieces as I was eating it. The Chikuwa bread one to the right of that was actually amazing too, I really liked the thin layer of tuna inside the fishcake. The one to the right of that was Shio bread, the inside of it was hollow and the bottom of the inner area was coated with what I thought was sugar, but Shio means salt, so. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t blow my socks off. The last one on the right was a tiny sausage bread thing called Otsumami Minikuro, I grabbed that because I saw a baker refill it with a fresh tray just in front of me, so there was some impulsiveness there for sure. From left to right, they cost: 253 yen, 231 yen, 132 yen, and 99 yen. The oolong tea at the back cost 280 yen and was a ripoff, it wasn’t nice and was also partially filled with ice in what was already a pretty small cup, so there wasn’t that much tea anyway. But it was a neat and satisfying lunch.

I continued walking through the malls after that, avoiding what seemed to be the more standard Sunpiazza side and exploring the Duo-1 and Duo-2 buildings instead, which I think were a bit more strata. In a Seria dollar store, I found a card holder from that Kokuto Novita brand that I now know I like quite a bit — this one also had an expandable spine the more things I put into it, and was otherwise flat for easy carrying, but instead of A4 size paper, this one specifically was for cards. I had been looking for a container for my collection of transit cards, and this one was simply too perfect to pass up, especially at the price point of 110 yen (after tax).

Look at that nice little collection. If only I knew how much money was left on each one.

Anyway Duo-1 and Duo-2 were interesting, as were some of the tunnels that led between them, like this:

But only insofar that they were different from the malls on either end of the passage, and that there were parts of the underground passage area that sometimes had weird floors like the one in the picture. Certain parts of the tunnels also had a scent of Asian spices or groceries that I like a lot, but that Japan tends to not have as much as say Singapore or China.

One random passage that I followed also somehow led me right into a narrow bus stop waiting area, and while trying to escape from that I found myself summarily ejected into some outdoor platform/walkway area, so I took a couple of pictures there too. It was a very relaxing, peaceful moment in time.

But I had about enough of Shin-Sapporo anyway so I went back to Sapporo Station soon after. I hadn’t had a proper meal all day, so why stop now — I asked Gemini for some convenience store recommendations and it told me to try a Seicomart, and look for their “Hot Chef” rack for fresh, piping hot onigiri to try. It specifically wanted me to look for the sujiko flavoured one, basically salted salmon eggs, that it said were considered a local delicacy. It also suggested a drink, Soft Katsugen, which it said tasted like a stronger Yakult, a drink I do like, and it described the drink as a probiotic for my recovering self. Sure, why not.

I had to visit four different Seicomart located around Sapporo Station before I found all these items, since for some reason two of them had their Hot Chef section closed and just selling leftovers even though it wasn’t particularly late yet and Gemini figured that the hot food sections would all be open late. The temperature was not cold at this point though, so I took the opportunity to walk around on the surface streets and take some pictures of the nightlife, while also stopping by a Tokyu Hands to pick up more Kokuyo Novita files, and a cinema in one of the buildings to pick up more lovely movie flyers.

Not bad, not bad at all. Finally, at the very last Seicomart next to my hotel of all things, I found a whole bunch of the hot onigiri, including the one Gemini really wanted me to try. Eureka! I bought that, as well as a bacon okaka flavoured one, and brought them back to the hotel to eat. They were both really good.

I wasn’t that cold this night so I dispensed with the hot bath and just took a shower, then settled down for the dinner and to sort and organize my loot before working on the blog a bit. Here’s a couple pictures of what I bought as well as some of the movie flyers I collected:

This was my last night in this Sapporo hotel, as I would be moving to a Chitose hotel the next day to be closer to the airport on the following morning, but I still fully planned to partake in the hotel buffet one more time before I left in the morning so I made sure not to eat too much nor sleep too late. To the next day we go!