Celebrated the beginning of my summer vacation last night by paying a visit to the Sapporo beer festival that started this weekend, an absolutely huge party with a great atmosphere that goes on every day for 3 weeks!
The festival has 6 big areas, each with a capacity of a few thousand people. The big Japanese beer breweries; Asahi, Kirin, Sapporo and Suntory has one area each, and then there's one area with international beers and one area with German beers.
If there would be a 3 weeks beer festival in central Stockholm with capacity of maybe 10 000 people (rough estimate) I am sure it would turn into a war field. The Japanese people really like drinking but tend to go home earlier and behave more responsibly than drunken people in Sweden do.
Though Sapporo might seem like a quite ordinary modern city at first, with not so many beautiful buildings (for a person coming from an old European city at least), it's actually a really nice place to stay.
There is just lots and lots of festivals of all kinds throughout the year in Sapporo. In the summer, other than the beer festival, there are also more traditional Japanese festivals with dancing and music. In the winter, Sapporo hosts the world famous Sapporo Snow Festival, with lots of huge snow and ice sculptures. Also, the city is kept very clean and very much in order, all this adding up to the feeling that there really is lots of things done to make the citizens thrive. It works very well for me at least. Probably this is the reason why Sapporo seems to have a quite young population.
Of course, in Japan, it's not okay to have one month of vacation and just relax, actually it seems like it's a sin if you have more than a couple of hours to relax per week, you should always be busy. So I've got a huge pile of papers to complete and new kanji to study during my summer holiday. As if that wasn't enough, they've put a test on the first lesson the first day after the summer holiday.
Finally, some more photos from the beer festival!
Waitress girl with silly hat.
Party!
Group photo with friends.. And some random Japanese people who were just passing by and decided they wanted to be in the photo as well.
1 comment:
Hej Brandt
Jeg er en dansker som er på vej til Sapporo. Hvor er den bedste club? I want a place where foreigners and Japanese meet. Dancing. Mainstream. Hip-hop.
Jeg så club Booty og Rad Brothers på internet. Hvor er det bedste sted? Susukino? The most popular place? The place to be on a Saturday mid-20's - 30's?
Hilsen Rune
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