A short hour later our plane was circling over fields covered in snow as we came in to land at New Chitose Airport. We grabbed our bags and wandered toward the train station. The train station was a few levels down in the New Chitose Airport. However, my belly was grumbling and I think my husband could see the 'hangry' on my face, so we decided to grab some breakfast before getting onto the plane.
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| Hokkaido Milk |
Japanese airports and train stations are sort of amazing. Typically, they have a labyrinthine shopping mall attached to them, and New Chitose was no exception. We found a little milk cafe who sold all of about 5 products - plain milk, iced coffee, a custard style pudding, milk sponge and toasted flavoured milk sponge. Hugh had an iced coffee that he says was one of the best of his life. Milk and milk products are very famous in Hokkaido. Next to this little milk cafe was the Royce Chocolate World, which spanned 4 shop fronts (three actual shops and one display).
If you've never tried Royce Nama chocolate, then you need to. I have successfully managed to get my family and several work colleagues addicted.Royce Nama Chocolate is decadently creamy and the ultimate chocolate treat. I usually allow myself 1 small piece at a time. At about $10 for 9 small pieces, it's very expensive. Royce chocolate world had a variety of flavours and I made a mental note of which ones to stock up on for when we left.
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| Royce Chocolate World - Shop 1 of 4 |
After our breakfast we headed down to the train, and in true Japanese style, we paid all of ¥1000 per person for our tickets (Super cheap!) and had gotten on a train bound for Sapporo within 2 minutes of purchasing our tickets.
In Sapporo, the sky was blue and the sun was shining, creating sparkles in the snow across the ground. We found our way (eventually) to the subway Namboku line to Nakajima Koen. Our hotel was right across the road from Nakajima Koen, for which I was thankful. Wheeled bags are not snow-friendly. We made a quick stop at the hotel to dump our bags (we were too early for check in).
The bright day meant that some of the snow had started to melt, creating a lot of ice on the footpaths. Convenience stores in Japan sell a truly amazing (and perplexing) amount of weird items, and I was able to get some small cramp-on style attachments for my shoes to provide extra grip in the ice. They were about $7AUD and had rubber that stretched over the back and front of whatever shoes you wear, and a studded area that goes on the heel of the shoe for grip,
Once I was no longer at risk of serious physical injury we decided to spend the day exploring the city of Sapporo and wandered into Susukino (the shopping district/city center) which was a few kilometers from our hotel. We visited Don Quixote, which is a huge 24 hour tax-free department store that sold pretty much everything I could think of.
We had warm ramen for lunch which was great in the cold, before walking back to the hotel to fully check in. After checking in, we had a quick nap, and then decided to catch the Subway back into Sapporo station. There was a Yodobashi Camera store that Hugh wanted to visit and where we found some cheap data sim cards to use in Sapporo. It cost ¥2400 (just over $25AUD) for 1GB of data over 7 days which was perfect for us. I wish we'd known about these sims last time rather than paying a mint for overseas credit.
By this time, it was getting late, so our stomachs made the decision to find some dinner. We caught a cab (again, so cheap, about $10AUD) out to Sapporo Beer Garden. Unfortunately we didn't realise that if you want to have dinner there, the very first thing you should do, before checking out the displays or anything like that, is to book your dinner tickets. The wait can be long, even in the middle of the week, and I get the feeling that weekend reservations need to be booked over the phone. So we didn't book our dinner tickets, and instead walked through the free beer museum, then gift shop. After that, we walked across to the restaurant, only to be told that we needed a reservation ticket, which was to be collected from the museum *sigh*. So we trudged back across to the beer museum, booked our tickets (it was now 8pm) and were told that it would be a half an hour at best wait.
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| Outside of Sapporo Beer Garden |
Half an hour later and we were finally sitting down to dinner at the hall. At the hall, patrons pretty much cook their own food. Vegetables and meat are brought out (as much as you can eat) and you cook them over a grill at your table. The air in the hall was thick with smoke from hundreds of people cooking their food in a closed-in space. It was an interesting way of eating a meal. We clocked off the day at 25,000 steps and headed back to Nakajima Koen for some much-needed rest.
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| Dinner! |
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