Thursday Doors – Sapporo Shiryokan

The Sapporo Shiryokan, also known as the Former Court of Appeals, sits at the western-most end of Odori Park. Amidst explorations of the Sapporo Snow Festival, I took a moment to stop and admire this regal building and its neat gardens.

From what I gather from this website, it’s now used as an art gallery and museum of sorts. (Side note: it’s so weird seeing a photo of the gardens (on the website) with so much colour, and none of that snow it was buried under when I was there!)

Unfortunately I didn’t have time to spare to go inside (kind of a long story, but basically I wanted to spend more time at the actual Snow Festival; my friend KF was already resting back at the hotel at this point). To be honest, I was also a little bit put off by the fact that you had to take your shoes off to enter (snow boots are not easy to take off / put on! (or I’m just lazy…))

Nevertheless, I was perfectly content with admiring it from the outside. I particularly like how the snow just sits so neatly on everything…

…including these neatly trimmed trees:

I particularly like the little cylinder of snow on the tree on the far left. Positively adorable.

And I probably spent as much time admiring these icicles hanging from the eaves as I did admiring the building itself. Can you tell that I really like winter?

But, of course, we’re here for the doors, right? When I saw this building, even at a distance, I knew it’d have photo-worthy doors. Buildings like these usually do.

Looking at this photo now, I wonder if I really should’ve gone in – there were probably some beautiful doors inside too. Oh well, I found plenty more interesting doors in Sapporo, and all over Hokkaido anyway. So many more posts to do..!

Thursday Doors is run by Norm 2.0. Please visit his site to find links to other participating blogs (or to add yours to the list if you want to join in!)

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