After relaxing a bit in our room after dinner, we headed down to the hotel’s onsen (hot spring). The change room was super small and tricky to navigate, as were the wash stations, which were all completely full. I saw a lady with an uncovered tattoo, which I was told was taboo in Japan, and despite the 100 signs in the hotel saying “no tattoos allowed”. The main bath had a sort of green hue but was really warm and inviting.

I sat in this bath for a while, but I kept seeing ladies leave up a staircase . I can’t really read Japanese , so I decided to be brave and follow the signs up a stairwell to a roof top onsen! There were 2 barrel type baths with ladies lounging in them and a rocky pool of dark onsen water. I walked over to the rocky onsen and sat down in the mineral rich water.

Snow was falling and the setting was magic! There was a TV playing news of the Chinese spy balloon over the US being shot down. After quite a long soak I got out of the hot water and changed into my yukata (Japanese robe). A super cute lady rode with me in the elevator and as she got out she bowed and said “Oyasumi” or “goodnight” to me. It WAS a good night!

I woke up late at 6:20am and filled in my journal about the events the day before. We headed out later than usual, around 9am and walked towards the snow festival at the park. Along the way we stopped at Don Quiote, a huge variety store that literally has everything!

We got Anpanman socks, bandaids for tattoo covering, hair gel for Jives, a new notebook for me, a Kanji workbook and a pin of Porco Rosso.

We then walked to the Sapporo TV Tower to enjoy the snow festival. Around the base of the tower they had a bunch of food booths, sort of like a German Christmas market. They had mulled wine and hot sake. We wandered around all of the snow sculptures, and I mean every single one. There must have been a couple hundred snow sculptures ranging from a few metre tall to many many metres (life size buildings).

The sculptures were mostly of figures like Totoro, Anya from Spy family, baseball players, birds, castles, bears, whales etc. and then there were the big sculptures, two huge buildings from the UK and a life size Trex. What a wonderful assortment of things! We spent well over an hour exploring the snow sculptures. It was relatively warm, so many of the sculptures were melting. I bought a delicious coffee with almond milk, which seems pretty rare in asia!

We then stopped at a public washroom in the park (shout out to my friend the squatty potty) and then went on the hunt for some lunch. We went to an outdoor shopping arcade and choose a soba place to eat at called “Wa Oytane” or something very similar to that. I ordered a delicious mushroom tempura soba and Jives got a curry soba. The warm soup was exactly what we needed, we also ordered a Sapporo beer.

Next we headed back to the hotel to regroup and figure out the rest of our day’s schedule. We had a few beverages ( I had a hoppy bunny IPA) and some snacks.