d&h : in Japan for 2 years

Guam – Where America’s Day Begins

We went to Guam (less than 4 hours by plane from Tokyo) for a 4 day weekend to get out of the cold and enjoy some r&r in basically the good ol’ U.S. of A.   We stayed in the touristy part of the island but rented a car so that we could check out the rest of the place.  On our drive around the island we found a beautiful natural swimming pool right next to the ocean.

The whole island is duty free, too, so we did some shopping as well.  We did some snorkeling from the beach at our hotel.

This not a lump of poo – that is a sea cucumber and there were so many at the bottom.

We also drove to a beautiful beach on the north side of the island where we saw fewer than a handful of people the whole time we were there.

We watched three movies and checked out a local bar with live music.  The Chamorro food was yummy.  And we thoroughly enjoyed our trip to Guam – Where America’s Day Begins!

Snow and Girls in their Skirts in Hokkaido

We’ve been living in Japan for a while and it’s quite common to see girls in the short skirts just walking around even during winter.  Some people (like Maggie) will describe it as “in skirts and walking pigeon-toed and knobby kneed”.  It’s very true.  I could be wearing a wool coat, and it’s 2C outside and the girls are still out there walking around Tokyo.  I really must be that important to look good…

At the Yuki Matsuri (snow festival), the girls were still out in their wear.  I just don’t get it.  I was totally freezing.  Negative 12C!  I even used pocket warmers and had taped some sticky warmers on my feet (both sides).  Sometimes these girls aren’t even wearing hose!   Maybe it’s just the Tokyo people flooding the scene.  But well, here they are…

Please notice… This girl is even wearing heels.  We definitely saw a good number of women in skirts through the weekend.

Hokkaido Eating

The eating in Hokkaido was fantastic.  In fact, Hokkaido is extremely well known (and popular) for sourcing most of Japan with amazing produce, fish and meat.  Anything and everything here tastes great.

We were sure to eat ramen on the trip because Hokkaido ramen is world class.  We hit up すみれ (Sumire) ramen since we had gone to the smaller version in the Yokohama Ramen museum.  Our hotel was in an excellent location near すすきの (susukino) station, so we just walked across the stree.  We arrived at 10:45am and basically opened up the ramen place.  Our group was second in line.  Awesome.  The line was incredibly long at 11:10am.  So we were proud of being there early!

The broth had this layer of fat on it.  Apparently great tasting ramen needs fat floating on top.

Hokkaido is also known for their crab.  They have king crab, snow crab, and a type of hairy crab.  Sam’s co-worker highly recommended an all-you-can-eat (tabehodai) crab place (B-set for 3700 yen).  So we had to go.  Sam and Wendy had actually eaten it the day before, but they loved it so much, that they went again with us the next day.  We ate 5 plates of king crab amongst 5 people.  The snow crab wasn’t terribly great compared to the salty and meatiness of the king crab.  To top it all off, they had all-you-can-drink (nomihodai) for 1050 yen, which all of us took advantage.  The only downside of this place is that their beer is Kirin and not Sapporo Class (only sold in Hokkaido).  I guess they had to make some margin from their nomihodai.

As with all festivals, there’s tons of street food.  We had some scallops and grilled conch on the street before lunch.  The sea scallops were awesome.  They were large and very tender.  The conch was a little chewy due to the grilling, so we ended up having it again later in our sashimi.

One of our friends, who lives in Sapporo, recommended that we try her favorite sushi restaurant, はなまる (hanamaru), so we did.  The sashimi platter was an awesome deal for the amount of sushi.  It was a serving size for 3 and was under 2000 yen.  The sushi was great also, but we were getting pretty full since we had the street food earlier.  This was the first time that we had crab meat, barely cooked, in our sashimi.  There was also one piece of sushi that was crab meat too.

Our sashimi platter was so large, I had to rotate and take photos (4 total).

Our sushi chef also gave us complementary octopus “suckers”.  It was very good.  Kinda crunchy.

The middle sushi on the top row is crab meat.

On the way home, I bought some packages of fresh ramen which was also made by sumire (すみれ).  It came with a packet of oil!

Yuki Matsuri

We went to Hokkaido again (northern island of Japan) for the Yuki Matsuri.  It’s the once a year snow festival with snow sculptures, snow activities, ice sculptures etc.  We also saw a snowboarding competition and was snowed on constantly.  I think the lowest temperature that we felt was -12C  (10.4 F).

Some of the snow sculptures were sponsored by other countries.  This one was created by Korea.  They definitely spent time and money on this one.

More sculptures

There was an interesting section of smaller sculptures.  We like the cartoon ones the best.

Getting snowed on…

Sapporo tower is in the background.

Some ice sculptures had fish and crab frozen in them.

“Gundum in Odaiba”.  We saw the non-ice version in Odaiba also!

Lastly we rode the Pokemon painted ANA 777 back to Tokyo.  Crazy huh?

Food, food and more food!