Sapporo Ice Festival and Beer museums!!

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Ahhhh when I think of Sapporo the beer always brings back good memories! I spent three days in Sapporo in a nice little business hotel which provided everything one could need included a WICKED free breakfast!! Having arrived late on the first day on the 9th Feb, we ventured into Sapporo to discover the first site for the Ice Festival. There were three sites in total consisting of various ice sculptures which looked different in the day compared to the night! Temperatures were well below freezing but we also seeked refuge in underground shopping streets or 7/11 stores! After dinner, we hit the sack as the first day was going to be a belter!

Having seen two of the sites already, we decided to hit the Sapporo beer museum and one of the many sake museums, which naturally meant that some sake had to be bought! The sake museum had a water fountain where the water came directly from the mountains, which I found was a lot lighter and pure than tap water. It was more refreshing and so once again it had to be consumed! Our next move was the sapporo beer museum where we had lunch first and then some Sapporo beer to round everything off! For 400 yen we tried 3 different sapporo beers, rounding off the trip very nicely indeed! Next stop was the third site, which turned out to be very disappointing.

The site had lots of sledging hills with queues which took over an hour long! For this reason we gave it a miss and ventured into the large dome which contained activities for kiddies (although I had a go too 😊). There was a base-ball throwing competition where they measured the speed. Being a man, I HAD to have a go, however I was competing with the Japanese who happen to have Baseball as one of their main sports! I met a cool American guy who threw around 125kmh coming close to the 135kmh record. I hit speeds of 105kmh on my last couple of throws, but was improving the more I went along!

After this we headed back to the centre of Sapporo to look around Hokkaido university. The campus was MASSIVE and made Bath uni feel miniscule! We had a lovely canteen dinner on the cheap where I tried Ramen for around 350 yen (2.40 pounds). Then we hit the sack in prep for the final day and our flights back to Tokyo.

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