JAPAN
Japan 2023 Day 11 - Sapporo
We had a nice chill Sunday in Sapporo. We kept it simple and paid for the breakfast buffet in the hotel lobby. A friend of a friend was coincidentally also in Sapporo and she speaks Japanese fluently so she was able to find us and book us an all day onsen experience that included lunch and a massage at a hotel called The Grand Blissen Hotel.
From where we’re staying in Sapporo it was roughly an hour bus ride but that went pretty smoothly for us, no complaints. The hotel and its location are gorgeous. It’s alongside a river and up against a big hill with trees.
The beef stew was small but so good! The meat was so tender and I loved the broth.
And from there we split up by gender and headed into the tubs! Pretty similar to the onsen experience in Tokyo except this time I was with someone who knew what to do and it turns out there were a couple things I had been doing wrong. For one, bringing in the small towel to soak with cold water is a must. This place had a smaller variety of tubs by comparison although I’m told it’s more usual to only have two very large tubs.
For the massage there are a couple of options of treatments to get. You could get a facial or a body scrub down instead. I liked my massage, it was relaxing, but it didn’t exactly blow my mind and it was only thirty minutes long. That said, going back in the hot tub after having a back massage does feel pretty great.
We spent literally all day there, we left our hotel around 10 AM and headed back to the city at 6 PM. It was incredibly satisfying.
The hotel had a vending machine that dispensed beer so I got to crack open a cold one after my hot tub soaking!
For dinner we wanted to try getting lamb yakuniku again and our friend had heard that Daruma is the place to go. However when we got there the line was insane so we opted to go somewhere right down the street instead called Haramiya. It’s pretty close to the same experience we had with dinner last night but this time we didn’t have a time constraint and could eat enough food.
Even still we left room for dessert and walked a half block to a soft serve spot called KLIM. I got the caramel soft serve cup which turned out great, it also has pieces of cake at the bottom so make sure to take deep scoops with your spoon. Justin got the cassiore parfait which has fruit syrup and a macaron and was quite good too!
Now full and super sleepy from our day we are calling it a night! We were able to walk all the way back to our hotel via the subway tunnels to stay warm.