This is part 3 of our Sapporo trip. Links to Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them:
Day 2 of our Sapporo adventure started out with a traditional Japanese breakfast at the hotel. I don't know much about the food other than it wasn't anything much like a breakfast we'd be used to. I had pasta salad, veggies/roots, fruit with yogurt...I also had some rice and they had eggs, miso soup, some sort of sausages and salad as other options. After breakfast we headed to the train station to find our way to Otaru. Otaru has a few sites to see including its blown glass factories, a canal, a music box museum, and a brewery. They also have a festival every winter called the Otaru Snow Light Path Festival which overlaps with the Sapporo Snow Festival. It happened to be going on when we visited but we didn't know it at the time. We just thought they put beautiful lights out along the streets and in the canal every day! Once we arrived in Otaru it was lunch time and there was a Burger King right in the train station, we hadn't eaten at a Japanese BK yet so we checked it out. They had a couple limited edition items which I took pictures of. I had one of the regular Japanese menu items, a teriyaki chicken sandwich...it was good, but nothing special.
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| Breakfast... |
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Special NY Whopper or BK Ringo
with apple slices and other stuff... |
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How about a highball (whiskey drink)
or Heineken with your meal??? |
From lunch we went out to explore Otaru. I had found a few places online that I wanted to check out (antiques/kimonos), but unfortunately the directions were vague and we weren't able to find them. We also weren't able to find the music box museum. Part of the problem was that it was too cold to have my gloves off for long to use my phone and continue to google so we just let it go. (Later realized the problem with the directions were that they were written for someone walking from Minamiotaru Station, but whoever wrote them said Otaru Station...2 different places!) We did find the famous canal and also the district of glass shops. I was really set on trying to blow glass because I'd read that there were several locations that allowed tourist to try it. Another failure...we couldn't find a single place that advertised it. Couldn't even find a place where we could watch someone do it! We ended up wandering the streets up and down through different stores (some more than once) trying to find the perfect glass souvenir to take home. Ended up with something I don't love and a few wasted hours...sigh. I know Keenan was frustrated, as was I. We made our way back from the glass district toward the canal and found the Otaru Brewery, again after having to do some wandering first. I felt like all the directions I found to places in Otaru were horrible! Usually we don't have so many problems finding places.
