Three days in Sapporo: the least Japanese-looking city in Japan, and the best fed

A strip of park a block wide and fifteen blocks long, cutting the city in half. In summer it is fountains, flowerbeds, sweetcorn stalls and an open air beer garden that runs through July and August. In February it holds the Snow Festival sculptures. In the weeks between those two things it is a pleasant walk and no more, which is worth knowing.

A covered alley in Susukino barely wide enough for two people, lined end to end with tiny ramen counters, most of them seating eight or ten. It is touristy and locals still eat here. Order the miso, and add butter and corn, or crab, or scallop. Go early, because the queues outside the best-known shops start before seven.

A 531 metre hill on the southwest edge of the city, reached by tram and then a ropeway. The view from the top takes in the entire grid, the port of Ishikari beyond it and the mountains behind, and it is one of the best night views in the country. Dress warmer than you think in winter: the summit is a different climate from the street.

Finished in 1923 so that barges could unload straight into the stone warehouses along its bank, and saved from being filled in for a road by a long public argument in the 1980s. Half of it survives, lined with gas lamps that are lit at dusk. It is ten minutes on foot from Otaru station and it takes twenty minutes to walk.

Otaru has a street of sushi restaurants and the fish comes off boats a few hundred metres away. A lunch set here costs what a snack costs in Tokyo.

At the far end of Sakaimachi, the merchant street of converted banks and glassworks, in a brick and timber building from 1912. Three floors of mechanical music boxes, from cylinder machines the size of wardrobes to the ones you assemble yourself at the workbench upstairs. A steam clock stands outside it, a gift from Vancouver, and chimes on the quarter hour.

Back in Sapporo, in the old brick malt house of the brewery that has been making beer here since the 1870s. Jingisukan is what you come for: mutton and onions on a domed iron grill at the table, with an all you can eat and drink plan that runs to a hundred minutes. Vast, noisy and good. Reserve, because it fills every night.

A compact covered market of fish stalls and small counters, trading Hokkaido's catch since the Meiji period. Crab, scallops, salmon roe, sea urchin in summer. Half the stalls will build you a kaisen-don, a bowl of rice topped with whatever you point at, and it costs a fraction of the Tokyo price. Cash is easiest.

The old prefectural government office, an enormous American-style red brick pile from 1888 with a dome and a pond in front of it, built when Hokkaido was still being colonised and the architecture was imported along with the railways. Free to go into, with rooms on the history of the island's settlement, and one of the most photographed buildings in the city.

A small white wooden hall from 1878, built for the agricultural college that became Hokkaido University, and the oldest building left in Sapporo. It is also famous for disappointing people, having been voted onto a national list of underwhelming attractions, and knowing that in advance makes it rather good fun. Ten minutes, a photograph, and a small exhibition inside.