JAPAN
Japan 2023 Day 9 - Sapporo
Our cab ride back to Sapporo was about 2 hours from Niseko and all went off without a hitch.
We’re staying at the Tokyu Stay Sapporo which for better or for worse is back to the small, utilitarian city hotel room. What it lacks in roominess or luxury it makes up for in practicality and location – we were able to leave the hotel, turn a corner, and be in a main mall drag.
Thus we wasted little time settling in to the room and headed out to explore the area. We needed to caffeinate with boba at Sin an ju where I once again got brown sugar boba tea. It’s probably the first time I’ve noticed being able to select which type of black tea you’d like in your boba though.
I’ve never seen it before but the Tanukikoji Shopping Arcade is this long covered hallway and stretches across many street blocks. It has everything from shoe stores (where we bought boots for one friend), stalls for snacks (we got hard sugar glazed strawberries), bars, casinos, convenience stores, restaurants and more.
As we walked along it was a little overwhelming but also pretty cool. It’s also funny because the tanuki (raccoon) is a mascot of this mall. But the tanuki is also well known to have huge testicles so there were periodically just horrifying statues of raccoons as decor.
Speaking of horrifying things with boners (bad topic and bad segue, love that) we saw this weird dude in a souvenir shop:
I believe the Japanese by him – Marimokkori – translates to mossball bulge which is a play on words of sorts. Basically growing little mossballs in water is a thing in Japan that people do and this character is a mascot of the area. I’ll let you do some more reading here.
For dinner we were recommended soup curry at Rojiura Curry Samurai as “the best food” a friend of a friend had in Japan. The truth of that seems dubious but it was pretty good curry. It was also our first big dose of vegetables in a week as each curry comes with a minimum of 12 vegetables, with the possibility of getting 20.
Afterwards we spent a little time in Mega Don Quijote Sapporo Tanukikoji which is sort of like Japanese Walmart except I would argue more of a spectacle. It was in a 7 floor building with escalators and had all kinds of stuff inside from sex toys to nerd paraphernalia to snacks to body pillows.
Upstairs there’s even a floor with gaming card stores and tables to play Magic or other games. We wanted to buy some snacks but it was super busy that night and the lines were way too long.
We weren’t ready to call it a night yet so we went to an izakaya to hang out and have a few drinks. We went to Izakaya Rukku & Uohei which has a ton of indoor space. We had to go up the elevator to sit upstairs where we were compelled to order a small amount of food before we could drink umeshu sours to our heart’s content. I think this place was fine but nothing to write home about.