Sapporo...Oishii Desu!

It's good to be home, except for the ginormous piles of laundry, the hated task of unpacking, a commissary run on a Friday afternoon and a cranky, sleep-deprived baby. But I'm getting ahead of myself! You need to hear about our fun trip! I'd really like to refer all of you to Lisa's blog because she's done a fantastic job of documenting our experiences, but she's had to go password-protected because some random commenter creeped her out. Bummer. Now you'll have to hear my version.

So we left on Saturday afternoon and seriously, thank God we didn't leave any earlier because we would've missed our flight. It was a circus act around here trying to get us prepared to walk out the door (Millie had to go get a new cast, Jeff couldn't print his leave paperwork because every computer on base was locked up except for one guy's at the help desk so then he had to drive over there and pound on doors, Wyatt decided to have a stage 4 blowout while the car was being loaded....you get the picture). But we made it with a few minutes to spare. Whew!

We arrived in Sapporo on time but had to circle the airport while they "checked the runway for snow" so we didn't actually get our bags until almost 9 pm. Add on a 45 minute train ride, a 10 minute subway commute and my complete lack of ability to discern the very straightforward directions from the subway to the hotel and you have us getting into our room at about 10:30. Without having eaten dinner. That's a problem, so we traipsed back out into the cold and found the nearest curry shop, a convenience store for some drinks and headed back to put Wyatt to bed. Nothing like curry and a beer just a little before midnight!

The next day, we started at Starbucks (Lisa had already scoped it out, no surprise there!), let the boys nap in the morning and went to the chocolate factory in the afternoon. We had a map for the taxi driver and that was about it. Apparently there are two different chocolate factory facilities but we'll never really know because none of us speak Japanese and he didn't speak English.

Let me tell you, though, it didn't stop any of us from trying. Especially the driver. He just kept chattering even after we gave him the good ol' gomen nasai, wakari masen (sorry, I don't understand.) Lisa communicated via pointy talky that we wanted to eat chocolate so the driver took us to the one he thought was right. It matched the pictures we'd seen so we were all unloading (Lisa from the front seat and me, Jeff, Wyatt, PC & Nathan from the backseat. No, it wasn't a big car. Yes, we are a traveling circus) and the driver hopped out and (apparently) asked some women who were leaving if we could eat chocolate there. They kind of laughed and said yes. Nice. The carfull of Americans just wants to eat.

Anyway...the factory was in a beautiful building, full of chocolatey history and did NOT have an all-you-can-eat-for-90-minutes deal like we'd heard. I'm not gonna lie, that was pretty disappointing. But it did have some seriously yummy cookies (being made on the assembly line) and tasty desserts.

The rest of our activities were aimed at hitting the Sapporo highlights. Apparently it's famous for its miso ramen, so we asked our friendly hotel clerks (they probably got tired of seeing us coming, armed with questions, needing a map and directions) where to go. They circled two dots on the map that are "very famous ramen restaurants" so we asked the clerk which one he liked better.

And then we went to the other one because it was closer and we were walking.

But I'm so glad we did! It was seriously tasty. It didn't seem like it could be a famous ramen place because it was tucked into a corner of the 4th floor of a stationery store, but we confirmed we were in the right place. It was one long counter so other customers moved in order for us to have four seats together, and it was pretty much a short-order diner. I think Jeff is the only one who had the actual, famous miso ramen but my won ton soup was awesome and Lisa liked her soy ramen.

The three men working behind the counter seemed to enjoy watching us and were very friendly, although we still had that little thing I like to call a language barrier. Jeff and I took turns holding Wyatt through dinner and when the cook got a chance, he came around the counter to take him so we could finish. This happens a lot in Japan and while it freaked me out when Wyatt was five weeks old, now I think it's fantastic. Plus you get pictures like this.

We also ate ghengis khan at the Sapporo Beer Museum (it was really lean lamb cooked on our own Hokkaido-shaped grill at the table), soup curry and butter corn ramen - all of which are famous when-in-Sapporo kind of meals. All were tasty, though the butter corn ramen was a little disappointing. I actually enjoyed our corn soup from the vending machine more (yes, that's right, for only 120 yen you can get a nice little can of Kirin or Sapporo brand corn soup. We chose Kirin because it now has 50% more corn!) and we never did sample the famous Sapporo crab. Sounds appealing, doesn't it? I really wanted to go to a crab place, but it didn't really work out. Nor did I want to pay 1200 yen at the snow festival to get my side o' crab. Ahhh, something to go back for someday!

I have more to share - like, ummmmm, maybe the snow festival part? But it's getting late and I'm tired so I'll have to save it for tomorrow :)