Hokkaido Trip Report 5 (Final)

The day started with a visit to the Sapporo Nijo fresh seafood market. It was snowing heavily and I couldn't resist taking a shot of a school blanketed by snow before leaving the hotel. But I digress. Back to the market, there was pretty much a wide variety of seafood, albeit a little expensive. The only other people I remember seeing there were a group of schoolgirls, some teens and several businessmen . . . a somewhat strange bunch of people to be at that market.






Next up on the list was the Asahi Beer Factory, where we gathered to view some video on Asahi Beer and following that, got to sample the beer in a large dining hall. A mug of beer was provided together with some small snacks to go along, and if you managed to finish the initial mug, you can bring the empty mug to the counter and swap it for a mug containing a different type of their beer, possibly the Asahi Gold. Upon finishing that, you can swap once more for an Asahi Stout, I think. For those that don't drink, they also provided cans of milk tea and coffee.




Following that was a visit to the Sapporo Station Shopping Arcade, which includes Daimaru. Unfortunately, we were given very little time to walk and thus missed out on a good amount of shops. The amount of foodstuff in the basement of Daimaru alone would probably put the local Takashimaya branch to shame. From bento sets to snacks and desserts, there was a whole myriad of colors and understandably, it was one of the more packed areas. Unfortunately, I didn't really think to take photos of the Sapporo Train Station and/or Trains at this point in time.





Lunch today was a more interesting affair compared to previous days. Apart from the hotpot, there was also DIY tempura, as you can see from the picture. What you do is to dip the item in the batter provided and then place it in the oil for roughly 2 minutes. You can choose to make the batter thicker or thinner depending on your preference. This was also the first time that I had ever tasted Crab tempura, which was pretty delicious.




After lunch was a stop at the Chitose Factory Outlet Mall, Rera. It had a large number of familiar shops such as Adidas, Nike, ABC Mart, Levis, Guess, Tommy Hilfiger and many more. Since it was a factory outlet mall, I guess the prices were reasonable. Although you might not see it from the pictures, there were far more people then shown, perhaps all browsing within the various shops.





Dinner was scheduled pretty early at around 4.15pm due to our flight to Tokyo being at 7pm. It was chinese food this time at a restaurant located at the mall. Simple but tasty, though the restaurants here such as Crystal Jade would probably have better fare.






Below is an ad featuring Kimura Takuya at the airport. Another thing I didn't mention was that you did not need passports for domestic flights, just the air ticket. Might be common information elsewhere, but not here since we have no domestic flights locally.



Proceeded to the Garden Hotel Narita for the night, as our flight home was not due until the next morning. Visited the nearby convenience store in search of food owing to the early dinner and settled on bowl noodles as well as an Ichigo Daifuku (The very same Ichigo Daifuku as the one I bought in a previous trip). One thing I don't understand is why we seem to be lacking those bowl noodles with meat included over here, when they seem to be common in Japan and Taiwan. There wasn't much left to do after this, as the hotel was in an area without a shopping street of sorts, hence the report ends here.



It was an enjoyable trip overall.