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...