Sapporo reminds me of Japan's version of the Midwest. A large, well laid out city with wide boulevards, city parks, and a more subdued spirit. The only things that I knew before coming here were that Sapporo is known for its beer, ramen, and onsen, Japanese bathhouses. And heck, it already sounded splendid!

I am staying with the Osani family. I met Nanae Osani, the daughter, at Harvard Summer School this past summer. She was studying genetics and was having a hell of a time, especially considering that science was never really her forte. I imagine her strolling the Louvre in Paris, not slaving away at a genetics lab. Although Nanae is not with her family at the moment, I managed to meet up with her in Tokyo before I left, so at least I had the chance to touch base with her before I barged into a household of people I have never met. So far, however, the Osanis have been more than wonderful. They are accommodating to the point of being almost too much! It is amazing that we communicate at all given our mutual lack of understanding of the other's language. So we babble along in our own languages despite it all and somehow manage to get along without any major miscommunication.

The Osanis live about 45 minutes by foot and streetcar from Sapporo Station in a mostly residential area. Their house is three stories in both Western and Japanese design. The most impressive part (other than the ultra deep bathtub with an electronic thermometer where you can stew and feel like royalty) is the kitchen, where Yuko, the mother, holds her Japan Home Baking School courses. This baby comes equipped with a marble countertop, two professional ovens, one proofing oven, and a really need temperature controlled refridgerator. The really fun part is a storage room off to one side that holds all sorts of tins and pans and supplies. She does not take her baking lightly and it shows.

It sounds a bit ridiculous, but I have come all this way to Sapporo to learn Western style baking from a Japanese woman in Japan. I did not realize that was what it would be, but it actually turned out for the best. I get to see the Japanese perspective of Western cuisine. Today we made cinnamon rolls, cheese buns, raisin buns (the way she said it was raisin-cheesin buns) , and a red bean paste gelatin called misuyokan. The cheese we used was processed and looked like a large stick of butter. I found it amusing that the three students in the class- all housewives learning how to cook- were open jawed at the hand held cheese grater. No one would have looked twice in America.

Nanae's grandmother is an unbelievable cook. She has been cooking traditional Japanese dinners for us the past two nights and I just sit in the kitchen watching, with camera, notebook, and dictionary in hand.

This evening I went with Yuko to her cake-making class downtown. We made Pave a la Ardeche, which means 'street like a small town in France called Ardeche'. This cake is called such because the chestnut cream is piped on top of the cake to look like paving stones. It took nearly 3 hours to make this chestnut cake, but gosh darn it, the thing reeked 'professional'. It has an almond merengue base coated with chocolate below, then a layer of creme grande (i.e. white chocolate cream), a layer of Genovese biscuit (white cake), another layer of grande, another layer of biscuit, a final layer of grande, and a neatly piped on layer of chestnut cream. This rectangular delight is decorated with chocolate leaves (which I piped by hand for the whole class, thank you very much), chocolate covered chestnuts, and a nifty little cookie banner that read 'Pave a la Teri' in my case (though secretly I think that the careful cake students were horrified at my originality- all theirs said 'Pave a la Ardeche').

The walk that I took this morning led me up the mountainside on narrow stairs, under a red wood colonnade, through marvelous autumnal trees, and straight into a small temple. I was there early enough that I was the only human in site, though the ravens can really fool you sometimes with their throaty calls. I look forward to other moments like this in Sapporo, so stay tuned...