Probably one of the shorter posts considering we don't get to do much on travel days.

Woke up, packed up and checked out. The only thing left on our agenda is to have butadon for lunch at this place at Sapporo station we found online, reviews sounded pretty good and we wanted to tapao yesterday actually but got caught in the great New Year Eve evacuation. Their website says they are open on New Year's Day though so resolved to go there and be their first customer lol kiasu much.

So dragged our luggage to Sapporo station, we were gonna hang around in the malls but everything is still closed sigh. New Year is one of Japan's biggest holidays apparently. Totally reminded me of that one year I spent CNY in Singapore and everything was closed and I ran out of ideas on places I can bring family to (forgot where we went in the end).


Decided that it's a good idea to go up to the restaurant and just camp outside and it turned out to be a good idea. We were I think second in line and quickly registered ourselves. Quite a number of Japanese restaurants we have been to have this system where you have to write down your name on the clipboard they provide outside which is pretty primitive in this day and age really (and considering that Japanese are ahead of everybody else when it comes to things like automated cash registers - seriously why aren't there more people who thought this is a good idea - and vending machines I really expect more in this aspect).

So anyway back to the food. It was THE BEST. I think it was literally the best meal I had in the entire Hokkaido I kid you not. The sister didnt feel as strongly hahah. The meat was deliciously charred to perfection and the sauce was so gooddd. Imma go back to Sapporo one day just for this hahahah.






Anyway after lunch there's nothing much left to do so headed downstairs, refunded the sister's Sapica card (reminder - don't buy Sapica card. You can only use it in Sapporo. Get Icoca or sth else), bought train tickets to airport because our JR Hokkaido Pass expired the day before. Thought it's a good idea to get to airport early despite our 5pm flight because we were planning to buy goodies from Chitose Airport. And it proved to be wise.



There's also this episode where we happily declared everything for tax refund only to realise that there are some items which we were planning to consume in Japan itself - LeTAO cheesecakes for one - and the cashier very kindly helped us cancel everything and redo the tax refund process. Paiseh max. And both of us have to repack slightly because self-check in machines are super anal about weight limit - joke's on you, coz we repacked down to the last 100g (i.e. 19.9kg, i think the sister managed 19.95kg even hahahah). Nahhhh take that.



Back to Tokyo! GoogleMap-ed and it wasnt too difficult to get to city centre though we do have to switch lines once but relatively hassle free. As compared to Narita from two years ago which I remembered was a hassle like have to exchange tickets somewhere or sth like tat (wasn't the one planning so just follow only). The only difficult part while changing lines was that we got lost halfway while looking for the station we were supposed to change to, took a while (and we had to carry luggage up and down stairs a couple of times sigh.

Got to our hotel at about 9 plus. Haven't really had dinner and the yakiniku place opposite the hotel smelt really good (so-so reviews online) but by the time we head out after settling in the shop had closed. So just settled for whatever option left and ended up in this place called Sukiya - which is kind of like Yoshinoya.






And that's it for the day. Told ya it's uneventful.

Labels: holidays, japan, travel