DYA717 Air & Sea Sapporo Ice & Snow Festival Tour Feb 15, 2016
Last night we had ramen at da Hotel Daiheigen – da little ramen shop along the way to the public bath opens somet’ing like 9 to midnight (don’t quote me on dis). ONO, ONO, ONO!
Forgot to mention that dis onsen is famous for its high contents of all kinds of minerals, excellent for skin-moisturizing. So, I guess your skin supposed to become better looking. You just gotta remember to dip your face in da pool to moisturize your face otherwise no make sense. Having said that, since I got up really early this morning, I went for one extra quick furo and made sure to splash the mineral water on my face. Never help my face but was a nice furo.
Breakfast at 6:45 a.m. Nice spread that you foodies out there would have enjoyed! We then went boogie on down to Kofuku Station on a nice blue skied morning. This is a defunct railway station but is famous – why? Kofuku means happiness/contentment. People used to drop by this station just to buy tickets and keep them for souvenir. Or, they got married there. There is an old waiting room/shack where people used to tack on their business/name cards. Check my video. The walls, ceilings become over loaded so the caretender periodically removes the old ones so people can start pasting new name cards.
Continued on down to the Chitose region. One rest stop and after 3 hours we got to what seems to me was another roadside restaurant called Hokkaido Marugoto Ichiba, catering to large tour groups. They had about 8-9 buses there so our bus double-parked. Check out the video cause we had one big, nice lunch. I couldn’t eat it all. Oyster/rice, salmon sashimi(still covered in da video), some boiled veggie/fish/tofu dish and one nice fried(?) fish. ONO, ONO, ONO! Then we went HE-LE on down to the Chitose Salmon Aquarium but AU-WE, was closed for 2 weeks for maintenance. So we headed to Sapporo. We had to cross a mountain and ran into snow flurries. Got really cold. Downtown Sapporo was also cold, like around 18 degrees. Stopped at a Duty Free Shop for more shopping. The we had some more free time to explore Tanuki Koji which is like a 7-block shopping arcade which means get roof but no doors to block the wind from the streets – was freezing cold. There were UNI-QLO, Don Quixote, Daiso 100-yen, etc also close by. Tonight we were free to have dinner by ourselves. Since I’m not a shopper, I went into the Lion Beer Hall restaurant to warm up. Had one extra large beer and one chicken/rice dish. ONO but too much for me so I had to waste some rice. Went BURA-BURA to look for the next place to explore which is close to where the group was supposed to meet and ran into our Honolulu tour coordinator, Ryan. Since we had one more hour, we dropped into this restaurant across our meeting place and shared a dish of gyoza and of course, Sapporo Classic draft beer.
At 7:00 p.m. we met our bus and checked into the