Last Sunday in Sapporo

Last Sunday was my last Sunday in Sapporo and was quite eventful. In the morning, I went to the church at the end of the street one last time. We sang familiar Christmas songs in Japanese and I got a translated summary of the message from one of the people there. After the service, I had some good udon with most of the rest of the congregation and talked about stuff.

After that, I went out with my host mom to a children's puppet theater that she had just found out about that morning. Apparently she used to do puppet shows herself so it was rather nostalgic. I even thought it was pretty neat because it was really old fashioned style, with a crank powered record player thing, an accordion, and old marionettes as well as hand puppets. Afterwards I got a picture with the woman who seemed to be in charge who was 79 years old.

From there, we made our way to Susukino to ride the giant Ferris wheel in the middle of the city. It lights up at night and is probably pretty popular, but since we went during the day we were the only ones there. Having checked that off our list, we still had some time to kill before doing what we really came there for so we stopped somewhere to get something to eat. That took up enough time for it to get dark out so that when we went back outside the Christmas lights and illuminations were all turned on throughout Odori Park. I was definitely impressed by the bright colors and large scale of some of the displays. It was hard to get a good picture of it though.

From there we made our way to...

...the concert hall to see Hakase Taro!

Now there's a man whose hair people would pay to touch. He's a famous violinist in Japan and was backed up by seven others playing on piano, cello, guitar, drums, and sometimes flute and saxophone. I had only heard his music previously from my host mom's CD that she plays sometimes in the morning, but after seeing him in concert, I can definitely say I'm a fan. The instrumental music was right up my alley and only got better as the concert went on. The last five songs in a row were all fantastic and I wish I could find more of them on youtube to share here. I couldn't get any pictures in the concert hall or at the puppet show, so you'll just have to watch these videos that I did find instead: