what do you see?

We went to Otaru (the real one this time, not Otaru Chikko, a newly created station/shopping mall/ferris wheel that we met friends at last time) on Saturday, again skirting the "beaches" of rocks and concrete on the way. It's a nice town, with actually quite a lot of apparently genuine old buildings around the place, a canal, lots of Venetian glass shops and a steam clock which hoots the correct time every fifteen minutes although the hands are inexplicably very wrong. But maybe we're learning to blank out the industry, busy roads and other developments like we suspect most people do here, in order to appreciate the "famous" attraction of a place. I'm not sure if we see things as we used to any more. Anyway, we had lunch at a Venetian restaurant (see the Venetian theme? maybe it's because of the canal), and dinner at one of the converted warehouses, now a kind of beer hall - Otaru beer is pretty good, and the interior was interesting, with the brewing equipment on view and a kind of German theme, except for the huge amount of crabs, fish eggs and other fishy things on the menu.