Hokkai-go! day 4

June 5th. the last day in Sapporo was jam packed with action. we (again) got up early and headed to Maruyama Zoo (円山動物園).






it was fairly fun, the walk from the station was nice, the zoo itself was fine, a little sad... a lot of solo animals and all the elephants had died. i did see my 1st タヌキ (raccoon dog) and some other stuff.bad combo...
after zooing out, we grabbed a cab (because it was raining) and went over to the white lover factory (白い恋人). Shiroi koibito is a very famous treat from Hokkaido and it's basically a little sandwich cookie with white (or milk) chocolate. pretty decent, but the factory is set up a bit like a little theme park,no rides, but a kind of animated display about the process of making chocolate and (for some reason) a toy museum with pictures of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa... after the little self guided tour of the factory we went over to the office to have our picture taken for our own box of white lovers (gotta be one of the all time top 10 worst pics of me) and while we waited the 40mins it takes to personalize the tin, we went across the street to a place called Owl's. (click the pic to see it better)Owl's is rad! i highly recommend it if you go to Sapporo. it's named so because the J league team that reps Sapporo (コンサドーレ札幌) has an owl on its team crest. the reason that's important is that the restaurant looks out over Consadole's practice field, kinda where you would expect a press box to be. it's really, really cool! although the team wasn't practicing that day, and the food was just a'ight (i had teriyaki tacos) the location is off the charts! I'd freakin love it if Frontale had something like that!
after lunch, we went back to the factory in an absolute downpour! got our tin of cookies and then bellied up to a cake buffet that mornin was all about! pretty good i must say
after we had our cake and ate it too, the weather had turned beautiful so we took a couple shots amongst the flowers:
we stopped off at the little clock tower (時計台) in town. fairly unimpressive, but historical i guess.
to round out Sapporo, for dinner, we dined at the Kirin beer garden near our hotel where i had crabs!
actually, just parts of one crab... also, feeling pretty bad, i could only muster up about 4 beers :(