We have been to Otaru before when mom and Meg visited, but when our friends planned a Sunday trip there, we decided to join them. This all happened a few weeks ago now, but I am pretty behind in blogging and I am finally now getting these photos off my camera.
We enjoyed Otaru last time we had been there, and this time I had my mind set to visit the aquarium there. The photo above is the Hokkaido mascot holding up me as his catch - this photo's for you mom! The character's name is Marimokari. He is an algae ball - and has algae balls... It is a special species of algae that lives in some lake here in Hokkaido and this mascot is everywhere you turn in this place. I guess his "physique" has something to do with health and longevity...?
Anyway, we wandered the streets for a while in the morning. Shawn stopped in at the local glass blowing shop and tried his hand at blowing his own glass cup. Otaru is famous for glass crafts and you can buy all manner of beautiful unique items there. Shawn did really well, under the attentive assistance of a couple of experienced glass blowers. In the second photo below you can see that the girl on the left is really impressed with Shawn's skill!
For lunch we hit a sushi shop, another Otaru speciality. We stuffed ourselves on incredibly fresh fish before continuring on to visit an historic home in the city. One of the friends who came with us is Japanese so she was able to help us with figuring out directions and plans. It makes such a difference being with someone who can fully understand their surroundings, instead of us who understands about 75% and guesses (often wrongly) at the other 25%.
After the historic house tour, we stopped at the aquarium. To our surprise it was a really great place. They had excellent displays of local fauna including really well presented invertebrate displays (my fave). They also have a large collection of marine mammals - seals, sea lions, walruses, and dolphins. All of the mammals and the penguins are trained and perform daily shows. We arrived there later in the afternoon so we missed some of the shows and it was raining and cold once we arrived so we definately want to go back on a warm sunny day to take it all in again. Of the shows we saw, we were most impressed with the massive sea lions who climbed a huge ladder up to a high diving board, made all kinds of noise once up there, then dove off!!!! No kidding, here are some photos. This diving board was really high, and that animal was something like 800 kg (that's 1760 lbs)!!!
We unfortunately didn't have enough time there to see all of the displays but we thoroughly enjoyed what we did see and can't wait to go back. After the aquarium we went back to the downtown area to track down some grub. We ended up at the Otaru beer factory, an old warehouse on the canal that reminded Shawn and I of the Canoe Club in Victoria. They served great food and excellent beer (our current local favorite) and even had live music that came on half way through our meal. The band was mostly wind instruments and a bit of drums and singing and the band members wore weird flowing hippie looking pastel-coloured outfits. They looked a bit like fairies or something. It wasn't music that I would go back for, but a performance during dinner was nice.
When the band came on for their second set, they did an interactive stretching and low impact excersice routine. They had the crowd doing warm up excersices then lead everyone in more involved dancing and a congo line. We played along (how can you not when you are the "foreigner table" stuck right in the front of the stage). So we ended the night with a belly full of good food doing the congo line around a warehouse with fairies. Perfect!
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