two art-filled days in hokkaido 🏛 sapporo art park & otaru art base 👩🏻‍🎨 札幌芸術の森 & 小樽芸術村 🎨

hello again,

here’s another postcard for you. or, well, here’s two!

on the 6th of july in 2019, my friends and i took the subway to the end of namboku line and got off at makomanai station.
i'm a pretty bad navigator when it counts, so after a bit of fumbling around and some help from a nice guy (he spoke some english), we finally made it to the right bus stop, but of course we got off at the wrong station. it couldn’t be helped — i was the only one with a sim card, google maps uses up a lot of data (i had to stretch 2 gigabytes over the course of 3 months), and, well, you kind of just get lost in the scenery whenever you leave central sapporo.
in case you wanted to know, sapporo is a good place for international students. the grid system makes the streets easy to navigate, it’s only ever crowded when there’s something going on (like the beer garden or some kind of festival in odori park), it’s only hot for like two months in the summer, and international students get free admission to a bunch of their more “cultural” sites. like museums!
so here’s one of them. parks in sapporo are nothing like the parks you see in american movies. they’re kind of like little mountainsides with a fence around them. sometimes there’s a zoo, or an observatory, or a tiny lake, or a museum.
we trekked around sapporo art park and tried to make sense of all these modern sculptures. it’s always a hit or miss for me, with these kinds of things, but your best bet is to try to make sense of it based on the piece’s title (or so i’ve heard).

then, a few weeks later in august, i took the train by myself to a little seaside city just a bit north of sapporo.
i’ve always wondered what it would feel like to live in a tourist spot. like in otaru, where old warehouses have been repurposed into restaurants overlooking their hundred year old canals, and hundreds of tourists walk down sakaimachi dōri to pop in and out of little shops and cafes, and old banks are turned into museums filled with stained glass and some other art i can’t take pictures of.
i wonder what it’s like, waking up to the clinking of furin wind chimes and the tinkling of tiny little music boxes everyday. well, it’s probably normal everywhere outside of central otaru.

going on adventures in new places probably needs more planning if you want to do anything aside from getting lost. but every time i set out to do anything by myself in japan it usually went like:
1. go to a museum
2. figure it out when you get there
and i can’t say that i hated it.
lately, i’ve been thinking about the word “perfect” and how many things i’ve missed out on because i held onto that word a little too tightly. i’ve always been a slave to my own mood/s and the 🤙🏼vibe🤙🏼, but waiting and planning until everything is perfect usually results in nothing ever happening. things in real life are only ever half-baked versions of things in my head, and no matter how hard i try, it’ll never be close enough to that real, “perfect” thing.

ah, that took a turn. my point is that sometimes you just have to do things as the need arises or when you feel like it. like spending a thousand yen on transportation to take advantage of free admission or taking a train to go look at pretty things by yourself.
perfect things don’t exist. but it’s alright, because real life does and there probably isn’t any other way to live than to just live.

see you soon.

Robin

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