A day of football, sake, and singing!

After Toya, I decided to take a day of rest in Sapporo. Despite being exhausted after Toya and only sleeping a few hours (because I somehow managed to get to bed quite late), I started the day by waking up early on the Tuesday (so Monday night in Toronto) to catch the Buffalo Bills' season opener on Monday night football...yes, I couldn't miss it! I had found out the night before that you can actually watch live NFL games around the world for free online (as long as someone is streaming it). Well, despite my best efforts, I ended up missing most of the game. I only caught the pregame show and the last few minutes of the 4th quarter. Turns out as soon as the game started, so many viewers tuned into the streams that the servers got really slow and the people streaming the game started locking out people, so I couldn't get a free spot on a server until the last few minutes of the game. And of course with my luck, the only part of the game I got to watch was the when the Bills gave up their lead and lost the game in the final minutes.

It was Christophe's last day in Sapporo, so in the afternoon, we decided to visit Sapporo one last time together. I finally remembered to visit the Chitosetsuru Sake "Museum" - it was barely a museum, more a sake shop. It was funny how the most expensive sake available was the only one with a description in English; they really know how to target the tourists. But I got to sample the finest sake they have for the reasonable price of 200 yen, and I even tried the sake flavoured ice cream! It was cold sake, and it was great, definitely the best sake I've ever had. No bitterness, a bit fruity, and very smooth. The ice cream had a rougher/icier texture than your usual soft serve ice cream, and it didn't really taste like sake to be honest. In fact, I couldn't quite place what it tasted like. I guess there might have been a hint of sake, but you really had to search for it...maybe even make it up in your head haha?

At the sake "museum".

Then after deciding whether it would be worth buying a bottle of good sake (which I didn't, I decided the extra weight for another 3 weeks was not worth it), we went for another round of karaoke...it's so much cheaper when you're not going at night (obviously). It was quite fun! They actually have quite a large selection of English songs - we kept getting the top scores (yeah they score you on how well you sing the song) because I guess the Japanese either don't know how to sing them or sing them quite poorly.


Then for dinner, I finally got to try the Hokkaido version of the Japanese dish known as oyakodon (literally means "parent and child"), which is usually egg and chicken served on rice in a bowl, but is served instead with salmon sashimi and salmon roe (since Hokkaido is big on seafood). Very delicious!


I spent the rest of the night trying get some bus schedule information for the Akan and Shiretoko National Parks, but the information was limited at best. I ended up staying up quite late...it's very frustrating to say the least, but you'll find out in my next post!