Sapporo Shennanigins Day 2

The next day I didn't get up until after 11:30. I actually hardly slept at all and spent most of the night staring at the ceiling. I woke up a few times to use the public bath in the hotel to try and kill some of the boredom.

Two of the friends I was sharing the room with got up and ready comparatively early while Jun slept through about everything. Eventually the two of them went down for breakfast and met up with the rest of the group. I opted to sit in the room and stare at the ceiling as I waited for Jun to wake up. He finally did about 11:30 and was ready to go at about 12:30.

At that point the group had given up on us and had gone to eat lunch and see the festival by themselves. I was also anxious to see the festival but the two of us were in desperate need in food ASAP. We decided to eat soup curry, one of Sapporo specialty foods, for lunch. We asked the front desk what their recommendation was and the lady circled her favorite spot on our map. She said it was only 10-15 minutes by foot so we decided to walk to the spot she had circled.

We made our way toward the area but briefly stopped to see some of the snow sculptures from the festival. The sculpture that grabbed our attention was one that was supposedly of Al Gore but looked much more like Ronald Reagan. Being easily amused, we snapped a few photos and continued on our quest for soup curry.

We got to the spot circled on the map but there was no soup curry shop to be found! We wandered in circles for a little bit until we decided to ask a woman who worked in a nearby department store. She had no idea where the place was, but in true Japanese fashion she ran into a back room and ran back out a few minutes latter with an address and a phone number. The address she gave us was in a completely different area of town and we were wondering how the reception desk could be so wrong. We decided to go that curry shop anyway out of principal and hopped into a cab.

The cab driver began to drive to the address we provided him. He wasn't sure of the exact location so he had Jun call the shop to ask for more detailed directions. Upon calling we once again discovered that we had been given completely wrong directions and that the curry shop actually was back in the area where we were looking for. Jun gave the phone to the taxi driver to get the exact location and soon we finally arrived at the curry shop about 10 minutes shy of it's closing time.

We were starved by then but of course there was a good 15 minute wait for lunch. We sucked it up and patiently waited to be seated. I ordered the chicken and vegetable soup curry. It was good: the chicken was well cooked, the vegetables were fresh and plentiful and the curry was soupy and kind of spicy. It was decent....just not worth the hour+ quest to find it and the 1000 yen price tag. At least we were able to cross it off our list.

We got in touch with our other two roomies and decided to meet back out the hotel. Jun and I were still tired and nursing hangovers so we decided to just head back to our hotel and rest for a couple hours while waiting to meet up; the snow festival would look better at night anyway. We took another cab and went on our way.

To be continued because I'm tired of writing...

Sapporo Shennanigins Day 1

Let me first apologize for the layout problems on my blog. I was experimenting with various templates and I didn't realize that doing so would erase all the customizations I made. The biggest casualty of all was the poor hit counter. Now I have nothing to remind me just how few people read my blog!

Anways, I had been looking forward to this trip since we began planning it in late October. Sapporo, the capital city of Hokkaido, has a word famous snow festival every year in February. Each year hoards of Japanese and other tourists flock to the coldest part of Japan to witness hundreds of sculptures made from snow and ice. I, as always, was also looking forward to partying and pigging out in an entirely new place.

A group of 11 of us arrived at the airport about 2:00 PM and we made it to our Japanese style hotel around 3:00. The hotel was small and pretty basic, but we were only looking for a place to pass our for a few hours every night. We were feeling tired and not-so-adventurous so we decided to just head back to Sapporo station for lunch.

I should probably mention that my buddy Jun and I were pretty buzzed already by this point. In typical Japanese-on-vacation fashion we begun drinking that day as soon as we had met at the airport. We had 11 coupons for 700 yen off at this ramen shop. That only fueled his and my drunkenness.


I'm not sure if I've expressed my hatred for ramen in this blog before. I'll make it clear now just in case: I hate ramen. It's everywhere in Japan and I'm sick of it. Unfortunately most of the people I was traveling with love it. We also had to make sure to eat it since it's one of the foods that Sapporo is famous for. Anyways, I choked down a bowl and put down a couple of beers before we went back to the hotel to prepare for our first night out on the town.

Jun had made reservations at all-you-can-eat/drink karaoke place called K-factory (ケイ・ファクトリー）in downtown Sapporo. We had to wander around the Susukino area for awhile before we eventually found the place. We also were partially distracted by the several ice sculptures in the area (see pic).

At dinner we sang/ate/drank like crazy for a good three hours. The food was surprisingly good considering the fact that it was cheap and made at a karaoke place. Other than that, the only memory the really sticks out from this experience was our karaoke version of the old power rangers theme song, probably because somebody facebooked me singing it. Go go power rangers!

After our binge extravaganza we decided to go our separate ways for the night. A smaller group of us wandered around Susukino thinking that the place would be buzzing on a Friday night (since Susukino is the entertainment area of Sapporo); however, the place was surprisingly and disappointingly dead. After checking out a few lame bars and clubs the group decided to split up again and a few people went home. I stayed with the group hoping to find a place to have some fun.

We eventually asked some random college age looking girls if they knew of any good spots to have fun in the area. They took us to a small flair bar just down the street and introduced us to the bar tending staff. This introduction might have actually really helped us out because these kinds of places in Japan can really rip you off. We actually ended up having a fun night there for pretty cheap, but I digress.

Anyway, this was my first time at a flair bar and for some reason it took me forever to realize they were going to put on a show. I was just happy that the place had a cool vibe and the bartenders were really cool. Meanwhile, my buddies were chatting up the girls that we had come in to the bar with. I somehow got distracted by this crazy color changing ball toy for the entire night. We stayed long enough to catch the flair show and to get some free cocktails out of the wait staff. I left a little early because I was tired and bored (nobody was talking to me because I had been more interested in the toy ball the whole night). I made it back to the hotel at about 3am and crashed on the futon the hotel staff had rolled out for me.