Final day in Japan
Day 22 of Japan 2017 trip
View of Sapporo looking west
It was my final day in Japan. I said bye to Adrian as he left early for his morning flight back to his hometown via Sendai.
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Nijo Market
For breakfast I was going to check out Sapporo's Nijo Market. The Nijo market is a public market dedicated to seafood and only occupies about one block. Quite a smaller presence when compared to larger markets like Hakodate.
Menu at one of the market stalls
Fish for sale
Nijo Market
Anyway, the thing to get at this place is meant to be a sit down meal at a sea urchin (Uni in Japanese) restaurant. The prices for these places weren't cheap and they offered various different combinations of seafood to go with your sea urchin. Most typical combination was the Uni Ikura donburi (Sea urchin with Salmon eggs on rice) which I managed to order once I found a place with a decent amount of people inside and a decent price.
Sea urchin with Salmon roe
Sapporo station area
After breakfast I took the opportunity to try and find some last minute souvenirs and explore a bit of the town on my own before I left in the evening for my flight back to Sydney via Tokyo. Walking through the station area I was actually finding it a bit difficult to find some decent souvenir shops. Many of the items were food based and not really something I could gift as easily.
Wandering through the Sapporo Station complex I decided to have lunch. I had spotted an omurice restaurant close to the where the Ramen Republic area was. Back in Sydney there used to be an Omurice restaurant I would frequent all the time complete with fake food displayed out the front. Omurice is simply an omellette over rice typically served with various different combinations of food with it and it was one of my favourite Japanese dishes. The omurice place in Sydney closed down and that was probably the last time I had had omurice. About 10 years or so ago.
Omurice menu
This omurice place (Pomme's) in Sapporo was completely dedicated to Omurice. The menu was essentially a giant book of various omurice dishes. But what really blew my mind was all these omurice dishes were intended to be shared and you could order some really massive portions. I settled on a quite hefty portion of chicken katsu curry omurice.
Massive Chicken Katsu curry omurice
After lunch I decided to splurge on a ticket to go up Sapporo tower and see a birds eye view of the city. It was a nice sunny day with a few clouds about. The tower offers great views of Sapporo from all directions, including from the men's bathroom!
View of the station from Sapporo Tower including directions
Toilet with a view at Sapporo Tower
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Hokkaido winter
Earlier the Sapporo station information desk pointed me south in the direction of the Tanukikoji shopping street for my souvenirs. The sun was still shining when I left the windows of Sapporo Tower. Sapporo's sub surface pedestrian walkways are quite extensive and stretch for kilometres. The extensive network isn't for no reason, as Hokkaido can get quite cold but commerce and economic activity can continue underground away from the weather outside. By the time I surfaced onto ground level, the weather had completely changed to “Hokkaido in Winter” weather. It was basically a blizzard outside. I kinda didn't really want to stick around much longer and opted instead to just head back to my hotel. In my head I was debating whether to take the expensive airport train which would involve me having to take my luggage all the way back to Sapporo station or catch the cheaper airport express bus which stops right outside my accomodation.
I was an idiot for choosing the bus considering the weather.
Blizzard conditions in Sapporo
Sucks to walk outside in this
Whilst the bus from my accomodation arrived reasonably on time, the weather effects on the traffic was getting worse. With blizzard and poor visibility, traffic moved at snail's pace. The bus ride was scheduled to take 45 minutes and I figured it would prob get delayed about 30 minutes due to the traffic. Giving me more than enough time to check in and probably find some stuff to buy at the airport as I had some spare yen I wanted to get rid of.
The airline I was flying, ANA, allowed check in up to 20 minutes before departure (including checked baggage). This was exceptionally generous but understandable considering they needed to compete with Shinkansen times which basically are a turn up and go service. Sitting on that bus as it crawled its way towards Sapporo's Chitose Airport was ridiculous. If I missed this flight, I also missed my connecting flight in Tokyo to Sydney. The bus took a total of 2.5 hours to reach the airport. I sprinted off that bus like a madman and scrambled to the check in desks. I had 22 minutes until the flight departed by the time I checked in my bag. Holy moly. Didn't even have time to look around, I just went through security and straight onto the plane. Which ended up being delayed an hour anyway due to the massive amounts of snow that were bucketed onto the wing. They had to get a cleaning crew to get rid of the snow.
Sayonara Japan, I'll be back one day again.
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