Hokkaido Day 14
Sapporo to New Chitose to Otaru - Mikudayo?
Day 14 - two whole weeks - in Hokkaido have come to an end. Today was probably the most relaxed day so far, despite being a travel day - made our way to Otaru from Sapporo, and stopped by Chitose to check out the @cfm_miku_official Miku Sky Museum for Snow Miku. It was a lot of fun to check out this exciting and wonderful part of the culture of winter festivities in Hokkaido.
While at New Chitose airport, we found that some of the routes back to the train station on the bottom floor were blocked off by staff who advised alternative routes. It wasn’t until we arrived at the station to see that there were cancellations of some of the trains heading out of New Chitose, which made me realize that there is expert traffic control at play. At many places along the route within the station, there are chokepoints that are intentionally designed to be able to be tightened or relieved by staff, finely controlling the number of people through the gates and who get to the platform. Why? Because the worst thing you can get is too many people on the platform itself - the trains run very regularly, and it’s dangerous if there are too many people for people to safely disembark the trains, which isn’t even to mention the inherent danger of being pushed around on a train platform.
The point of stopping at New Chitose, however, was to see the mall that is on top of it - which has a special shop set up for Snow Miku. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Snow Miku (the Snow-version of Hatsune Miku) is absolutely everywhere in Western Hokkaido. Wherever we go, we see cafes that have tie-ins, posters on trains, at stations, in malls - Snow Miku is a force of nature not unlike the snow itself.
After this, we made our way out to Otaru where we are now in a hotel on a mountain during a bit of a snowstorm. The vibes of this Western-style hotel are... Murder-Mystery-Esque, so I’m hoping for the best for the next couple of days! Given that we arrived pretty late in Otaru, I’m not quite sure how to characterize the town, except that it’s colder than it was in Sapporo, and given that it’s a coastal city, there are canals and waterways that sort of remind me of home - except that instead of the Puget Sound, you’re left looking out over an endless expanse of Ocean.
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