Asahikawa - Day Two

One of the localized manhole covers

The river

We spent the morning walking down to the 

Asahikawa Science Museum

The lobby had a waterfall thing with video projected onto it

Bacteria and Viruses

There were a lot of displays about various "Science-y" stuff. Most of it seems to be aimed at children, probably late primary school/early high school.

This tempura shrimp is teaching you about digestion for example

There was a section about illusions, mostly visual, but some auditory as well.
It included some standard ones 

But also had some that were tailored to the museum.
(Both top and bottom Hokkaidos are identical. You can close the panels to prove it to yourself)

There was a giant marble contraption

This moon jump simulator

And you can be strapped into this thing

and vomiting can be induced

Some of us watched a planetarium show.
Some of us had a nap.

In the afternoon we visited a sake "museum"

It is an area upstairs in this brewery

You can look down into the brewery

but most of it seems to be bigging up the awards that the sake has won

There was a section about wood print art that is tangentially related to their sake 

And a room with a bunch of old sake making stuff

But it mostly seemed to be a ploy to get you to taste the sake in the gift shop

(you can taste most of their sakes for free, but you have to pay $1 to sample the award winning premium sake, or the special variety that is only sold at the brewery. Both are quite good)

We wandered back through the pedestrian mall

in addition to some random stuff in the middle

each side of the mall had carved statues, and we'd only looked at the statues on one side the first time around (knowing that since it was one way to get from the station to our hotel that we'd come down the street more than once, so there was no point in going up and back both sides just to see all the statues the first time, and not being any closer to the hotel as a result)