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.