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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
#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…
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…
It’s Snowing at our House!
Sunday, January 15, 2017. It is snowing today (actually right now – this blog post is real time!)!! It actually started very lightly yesterday. But when we woke up this morning it had actually stuck on the ground overnight and it continued to snow through the morning off and on. We can actually watch the snow fall from the windows in our house. The kids went out to play in it for a little while. But there really isn’t enough to have a long snow play day. It would be fun to play in the field across the road from us, but alas it’s actually a rice field and that would be very bad if we ran all over it….
Green Bike Tour & Cat-pooccino
Day 5 Bali, Thursday, December 22. So far: Kecak Fire Dance. Totem Escape Room. Bali Treetop. Waterbom. Today is the Green Bike Tour. It’s hard to say what the best activity was in Bali, but my vote is for the Green Bike Tour. Our friends in Japan that have 4 kids recommended this outing to us. It was an all day event. The Green Bike Tour company sent a van to pick us up at 7:30 am. Breakfast was included in the tour, but I was afraid it might not be much for our hungry crew so I got up early and made peanut butter toast and jelly toast and glasses of water for everyone. Just a step above prison…
Waterbom Bali
The agenda on Wednesday, December 21 is Waterbom. This is a large water park that claims to be the largest (or best?) in Asia and #2 in the world. I’m not sure according to whose rating system this is measured but it was a good one. Waterbom is in Kuta, the happening area with the shopping, eating, nightlife and all around lively end of town. I would say Kuta is the “Waikiki” of Bali. After another morning visit to Cafe Moonlight we asked Yoga to drive us to Waterbom. It is pretty pricey to go to this water park, so it is really aimed at tourists. When we asked Yoga, who is in his early-mid 20’s, if he’d ever been…