My Adventure Abroad

Mata Ne Sapporo!

See you again, Sapporo!  We said good-bye on Sunday, February 12.  Here are some final fun shots around town.  Avalon saw some Hello Kitty neckties at this Sanrio store and she thought they would look good on Uncle Chris.  Hello Kitty is everywhere in Japan.  Even on construction sites.  These HK barrier holders below are keeping the fence in place around a street construction project.   Above:  These bananas looked very festive and yummy.  We thought for sure they must be frozen bananas on a stick, like in America.  We’d seen them at other festivals but never got one.  The kids and John decided to buy one.  Guess what – they are not frozen bananas.  They are chocolate and sprinkle…

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Skiing, Skating and Eating in Sapporo

On Saturday, February 11, we got to go skiing on Hokkaido.  This was a special treat for us.  As I’ve mentioned before, the snow coming down from Siberia is super light, fluffy and dry.  This special snow makes for some of the best snow conditions in the world.  However, either it’s been a light season or they just haven’t gotten their big snowfall yet, because the piles of powder I’ve heard about were nowhere in sight.  We met Mayumi and her family at the Sapporo station where the buses line up.  We got on a bus headed for Teine (tay-nay), a ski resort about an hour away from the city. After we arrived, we rented our ski and snowboard equipment…

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Jingisukan at Sapporo Beer Garden

Friday, February 10 and Sunday, February 12 we went to arguably the two best restaurants in Sapporo.  Maybe in all of Japan!  It’s just my opinion of course, but Sapporo cuisine is very famous and there’s a good reason for that.  And anyway, I think John agrees with me.  We had been really looking forward to having some amazing food.  Mayumi warned us ahead of time that our waistlines might expand during our stay there.  Sapporo is famous for several things, among them are: BEER of course, ramen, seafood, especially snow crab, cheese and soft serve ice cream, which is called soft cream here.  A signature cooking style on Hokkaido is called Jingisukan.  You kind of have to stretch your…

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Susukino Ice World

Friday, February 10 is day two in Sapporo.  First we’re stopping at the hotel breakfast room for our complimentary breakfast – which consists of all you can eat fresh bread rolls and croissants with juice, coffee and tea… not good for anyone’s waistline but it’s so hard to stop eating the bread.  Every Japanese person in the room put their bread in a toaster oven to heat it up.  We were the only ones who would dare eat cold rolls.  I toasted my croissant though and it really was so much better!  You can order a traditional Japanese breakfast in advance for an extra 400 yen (about $3.75) but it looked to be miso soup, seasonal vegetables, salmon steak portions…

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Sapporo’s Famous Yukimatsuri

On Thursday, February 9 we got up very early and took the bus and train to Osaka Itami Airport.  This airport is so convenient for us!  We took the monorail straight there and it took only 20 minutes.   We are headed to Sapporo, the main city on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island.  Sapporo is the fifth largest city in Japan and home to Sapporo Beer.  It is a hop, skip and jump from Siberia.  I bet Sarah Palin can see Russia from Sapporo, too.  We had already taken the cats to the pet hotel the night before.  Poor kitties.  I hope they like it there.  They are becoming regular guests. We had two main objectives to going to Sapporo:  to…

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Lucky Owl Cafe

Saturday, February, 4.  Our plan on this day was to go to a free event called Winter Hobby Fair ’17, which was a huge, free, hobby and gaming expo inside Kyocera Osaka Dome.  (This arena is home to one of Osaka’s oft-losing baseball teams called the Orix Buffalos.  I actually thought they were minor league because no one ever talks about them.  The Hanshin Tigers are Osaka’s most loved baseball team.)  The next Nintendo gaming system called Nintendo Switch was going to be previewed at this event and the kids were looking forward to playing it in advance, since its release date isn’t until next month.  And a large exhibit of Pokemon Sun and Moon was going to be featured…

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Gotta Love Wacky Japan

Here are some thoughts about Japan I’ve been storing up in my head.  You will have to add some pictures in your imagination to go with my thoughts.  Friday, February 3. Japanese houses are freezing in the winter!  I don’t think I can overemphasize it enough.  FREEEE-ZING.  NO central heat makes our house an ice box.  Sometimes you can see your breath inside the house.  Okay, that’s an exaggeration.  In the US we really take central heat for granted.  When you adjust the thermostat you know that any room you walk into, including the toilet/bathroom, is going to be nice and toasty.  This house we are living in is only two years old so even new houses don’t have central air or…

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Mochitsuki

On Saturday, January, 14 we were invited to a mochitsuki event at our friends’ church.  Mochitsuki means “mochi making” and it’s a traditional New Year’s activity for Japanese folks.  Mochi is sweet rice that has been soaked, steamed, pounded and formed into little round shapes.  I have been making mochi my entire life.  My father’s side of the family gets together at the end of the year to make mochi and has done so since before I was even born.  When my grandparents, my father’s parents, were alive we would get together on the family farm in Riverside.  The photo above is a past mochitsuki from 2013. My family cooks the rice the traditional way with a roaring wood fire…

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#Stories#Best#SorryYouHaven’tHeardFromUsKids

Avalon’s full blog post title wouldn’t fit in the title space: #Stories#Holiday#Fun#Best#ByAvalon#SorryYouHaven’tHeardFromUsKids Saturday, January 21, 2017 Hi!!!!!! This is Avalon! And previously, we were in Malaysia.  This might be a long post cause I have to say a lot! The plane flight to Malaysia was 7 hours! (From Japan) So once we got out of the airport, we had to get a cab,  I don’t know, maybe 20 minutes in to the drive to our hotel, then cab driver had internet problems! Which could also be said as… he got lost. And so in the end, it ended up taking an hour to get to the hotel!  And once we got to the hotel it was about 7:00 so we…

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Nusa Dua Parasail Fright

Our last day in Bali was Friday, December 23.  We took the red eye flight out at 1am on Friday night/Saturday morning.  This put us back at Kansai International Airport in Osaka at around 12:30 in the afternoon on December 24, Christmas Eve. On our last day John said we needed to go to the beach because we’d been in Bali for nearly a week and still hadn’t seen the beach!  From my research, it seemed like Nusa Dua on Bali’s south end was a nice place to go.  I would have liked to have seen the famous surfing beaches, or the small secluded beaches that require a hundred steps to get to, but we just didn’t have the time…

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