Afterwards, we walked around the town and visited two onsens – a small cedar public onsen and another onsen with a great outdoor bath.  Here’s a view of the town at night.

The next day we decided to skip skiing to check out the quaint town during the day and go to another onsen.  Hot spring waters flow freely throughout the town.  It pretty cool.  We also tried a foot bath in town – it was very HOT!  See the steam from the onsen water…

The area had some great food, too –  edamame and fruits.  The edamame  was yummy – I think the izakaya we tried put butter in their edamame.  Friend, food, skiing and onsen = a great weekend.

We chose one of the set courses with appetizer (Scandinavian sampler for Henry and foie gras for me), lobster bisque, main course (venison for Henry and fish for me) and dessert (chocolate cake for Henry and princess cake for me).

Also, melon and cheesecake Hi-Chew.

In Narita (on our way to Guam) we found matcha (green tea) KitKat which is very popular and kind of expensive if you buy it in Kyoto.

On our trip to Zao Onsen for skiing in Yamagata, we bought cherry and edamame flavored KitKat.

Finally, the latest flavor is Sakura Matcha – just in time for spring.

We pulled out the wallet and splurged for the dinner course.  It came with tiny appetizer, appetizer, a grilled starter, our steak of choice, garlic fried rice, and desert.  This was all on the top of the 52nd floor of the Sumitomo building at Seryna in Shinjuku.

Scallops had to be ordered!

I had the foie gras

Left is Kobe, Right is Chateaubriand

The fat was cooked up for a while and served as cracklin’s later.  It was fantastic too.

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!

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.

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!

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?