Hello Sapporo!! The first night we simply explored around a little bit and ate at another random izakaya. It was cool walking through the massive park and seeing the clocktower. The Panasonic tower looked pretty cool too, but we didn’t go up.

It was actually hilarious because my brother likes checking that we’ve been paying attention to where we’re going by asking my parents and I to find the way back. I’m terrible with directions anyway, being heavily reliant on Google to tell me where to go. For once, my landmarks weren’t food places. On the way back, I recognised the street full of bridal shops and that’s how I knew we were going the right way XD

A specialty milk specialty coffee shop! Forget single origins, here you can choose different types of milk for your coffee!

My brother tried the unhomogenised jersey milk from Biei, and my mum chose holstein milk from Hakodate. Those drinks ended up being more chocolate-heavy rather than creamy or letting acidity through, which was interesting, because I would have expected the jersey milk to perform quite well and make for a super sweet and creamy drink.

My flat white made with guernsey milk from Takinoe. It ended up tasting the sweetest and creamiest of the three which was surprising.

Otaru!! We spent half a day here and it’s a really nice place!

Taking a pic of my brother taking a pic of ice cream!

Warabi mochi!! Man I love this stuff so much!

This set of clouds was really interesting, reminded me of angel wings!

I love all the running people carts!

What a cute little seagull! I kind of wish I could have been in two places at once lol. I was too busy taking a kazilion photos of this fellow, so i wasn’t able to then back away and take photos of the crowd taking photos of the seagull XD Oh well!

I need to get myself a yukata one day…

There’s an abandoned railway here too with plenty of things to take pictures of!

Ah, a better shot of the angel wings clouds!

The sky is so nice! We stayed here till sunset to take photos of the river, but none of my photos were actually that good XD

Haha the Lawson’s here had clear mochi! So I had to go buy some. Also, there’s something here called “Mo-cheese” or similar that was also really tasty! It was cheese flavoured mochi, and it was amazing! This was for the train ride away from Sapporo.

Wow, Noboribetsu! My brother gave us a heads up that it was a little sulfur-smelling here, but during our stay, it was quite mild. But I think I’ve now got the smell ingrained into my brain and when I boil eggs all I can think about are the sulfur pits of Noboribetsu ;_;

I absolutely love that this is a demon town. So many demons everywhere!!!

We went to one of the small shops that looked like they do BBQs. All the seafood! Molluscs and shellfish are the best! Though the sea snails on a stick were not as tasty as I imagined they might be XD

Tea and sweets at our hotel!

To the bear park!! These bears were actually super lively and wave at people for food :D

They also hate the crows.

And a duck race too! The ducks didn’t look too impressed though haha

Those are the males, in a separate enclosure. And that little spot with people in it, is a place where you can feed the bears!

And the reason the bears don’t like the crows: they steal food! But the actual biscuits are too big for the crows to eat, so there was a funny moment where the bears were chasing a crow around while the crow kept dunking the biscuit in a puddle of water till it softened enough for it to eat XD

Hell Valley, a super cool place! There’s a lot of walking trails here to go through and some of them are quite tricky to navigate. One path even has a quiz about the area, which was fun to do since it also had English on it.

There’s also a spring in town that actually starts bubbling like crazy for a while every few hours. My brother’s right, it sounds like a washing machine! Pretty cool to watch!

Dinner at the hotel was pretty amazing. It was funny because as I saw all the food, I said, “it feels like a kaiseki!” and my brother responded with, “that’s because it is a kaiseki!” lol. This place had really nice food! I really enjoyed eating here!

Sakura tofu!

Sashimi

Broad bean paste stuff, with a super cute demon club shaped carrot XD

Hotpot!

We even got a whole fish, and some tempura fish. There’s so much food!

Snow crab and a delicate vinegar sauce

A strawberry dessert.

There’s a massive golden demon club here that has regular “performances” where the demons pop out and do a little dance. I can’t imagine enjoying this more than a couple of times though!

I do love this place, it’s a super nice hotel and the onsen here was huge too! There were all these different pools with different minerals and properties, and an outdoors area too. But the best bit was that this place had a dry sauna. Woah it was hot! But really enjoyable to be in there (in a help I’m a melting sweaty mess kind of way) and I liked alternating between that and the pools. There was also a section that had heavy “chunks” of water that fell down, so it was a massage for the shoulders and neck! While Noboribetsu is quite small, I wouldn’t mind coming back here again!

Oh yeah, I’m totally a local and doing the stamp collecting thing!

Bye bye Noboribetsu! Onwards to Hakodate, my brother’s favourite town..