Sapporo! Part Two

After getting the best sleep of our lives, we got up on Sunday and headed to see the snow sculptures in Odori Park. There were way more than I expected! It went on for blocks! It featured both the BIG main sculptures, and then lots of small ones (usually in the shape of cartoon characters or other famous people/characters/things). My favorite big sculpture was for JAL. It was a Disneyland-themed one with a big Stitch! It was so cute!!! It had a plane in the background with lights that lit up at night, too! It was cool! Fortunately it was facing east, as the ones facing west must have gotten dirty from the wind or something, as there were dirty specks all over them. Sad! Anyway, we wandered around and looked at all of the sculptures, which took forever! It is cool, as there were TONS of families there. It is good family entertainment, as it is free and kids love the cartoon-themed sculptures!

Speaking of families, I think the only thing people in Sapporo have to do in the winter is have sex (and eat), as they ALL had like 300 kids! There were kids ALL over the place!!! It was crazy. While I am speaking of demographics, I also loved Sapporo because it is like a college town! There were young-ish people everywhere, which was nice to see, since all of the young people run away from Gunma both for and post-college.

After the sculptures, we went to Spark, a soup curry restaurant. Soup curry is (I think) only in Hokkaido, and Spark was recommended by one of Cindy’s teacher’s sons who goes to college in Sapporo. Um, it was the best recommendation EVER! Soup curry is a mix between Japanese curry and southeast Asian curry. It is spicier (although you can choose your spice level) than Japanese curry, and more soup-y/water-y, so it isn’t a lot like Japanese curry, but it is way different than like Thai curry. I dunno, it is GOOD! We fell in love with it! We both got the chicken and vegetable curry, and it had an un-Japanese amount of veggies in it (i.e. any at all!). The restaurant itself was REALLY cool. It was like a college hangout (literally, as everyone was young) and full with a line out the door! I felt cool just being there! It totally didn’t feel like we were in Japan, as it had like reggae music in the background and it was just NOT Japan. MMMM it was good!

After that we wandered around a bit and did our oh-so-important omiyage shopping. Whenever you go on trips in Japan, you have to get your co-workers omiyage. And theoretically your friends and EVERYONE IN THE WORLD YOU KNOW. I was sneaky and never told my school I was going to Sapporo, so I got to skip wasting money on the bastards, woot! However, I refused to NOT get omiyage, so I ended up spending over thirty bucks on candy and treats for myself. Haha, I am the saddest person alive. Poor Cindy, on the other hand, had to get it for her teachers, her private students, and everyone that live in Hong Kong, apparently, as she had the HUGEST bag of omiyage EVER!!!! Crazy! Haha. Even the Japanese girl at the register was like, damn girl! Hehehe. After omiyage shopping we ended up back at the hotel for another nap. Yes, walking around and eating is incredibly exhausting, apparently!

We then woke up and did the most Jeff and Cindy thing ever. We woke up in the morning thinking we would go to this place that had a big maze made out of snow, as well as slides and other cool stuff that was very yuki matsuri-y. However, it was an hour and a half each way and we were too lazy for that. So what did we do? We of course went to Sapporo AEON!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHA. We had seen it on the train the night before and it called to us! I am totally not kidding. So we trained there and checked out the Sapporo AEON. It is newer and nicer than ours, being 3 floors and all. However, I like ours better! It has better stores!

It was worth going to AEON just for the kaiten sushi (conveyor belt sushi) restaurant we went to! We waited in a LONG line for it, and it was worth it! You order on computer screens and they have pics of everything, which is very helpful for gaijin! THEN the stuff that you order comes on this rolling track thing above your head! Like, your area will start beeping, and you look up and your sushi is whooshing towards you on a tray on tracks! It is hard to describe but it was freaking cool! And the sushi was SOOOOO GOOD! Oh my god! SO GOOD!

We then headed back to Sapporo eki (btw, Sapporo eki is the COOLEST eki in the world! It is huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge and has TONS of shops and is freaking NICE) and wandered around the streets of Sapporo. We didn’t wander just to wander…we wandered so we could eat more! Haha. We wanted man (Chinese dumplings) from the kick-ass man street vendor, yo! I looooooooooooooooove man more than anything in the world, and Sapporo loves their man, too, apparently! This place was YUMMY! So we ended up getting some, then walked some more and then had cantaloupe soft cream. They are famous for cantaloupe, too! MMMM it was good. Then we headed back to our hotel and slept off all of our food.

On Monday we checked out of our hotel and found that it was TRULY snowing outside! Like, lots of snow! It was so cool! I love snow! Maybe not super fun to walk in it with luggage, but I don’t care! We walked around and waited for Spark to open, as we needed soup curry one more time before we left, hehe. We had it and it was YUMMY, then we headed to the airport. Good lord, the Sapporo airport is CRAZY, as they must have literally over a hundred omiyage shops there. It is crazy, I don’t know how they all stay open, but they were all busy!!! We wandered around there, then flew back to Tokyo, trained back to Gunma (which was SO warm in comparison!), and our vacation was over, sad!

Anyway, I am really glad I went to Sapporo! It was my first time off Honshuu and it was nice to see the difference in culture and stuff! The city had a really good energy/feel. It was a city, but didn’t have a big city feel at all! The people were really nice and I dunno, it was just a cool place. They must not have that many gaijin as I got sooooooooo many gaijin stares!!! But I could totally see myself living there, even with the crazy snow and stuff! I recommend going there if you can!

Yay, the end. Next up, Hong Kong on Friday!