Another morning, another buffet. I was scheduled to check out of Toyoko Inn by 10 am, but was in no hurry because my check in time at the next location, Chitose Station Hotel, wasn’t until 2 pm. It was about a half an hour away by train, and the New Chitose Airport Station, where I had first arrived in Hokkaido from three days ago and was going to leave from the next day, was another five minutes beyond that. The idea was that I was going to go kill some time at the New Chitose Airport and do some shopping there, and then circle back to the Hotel to drop off my gear closer to 2 pm and maybe even get to check in early.

All this was just for me to say that I was certainly in no hurry to check out of my hotel this morning, and I leisurely wandered down to the lobby at 7 am to have the buffet breakfast for the third morning in a row. Mmm.

That pot-au-feu soup bowl was very nice.

Then I equally leisurely wandered back upstairs to do some work and then some blogging. A very nonbiri life, as the Japanese call it. But all good things have to end, and soon it was time to pick up my bags and head out on the road again.

I did like my stay here for the most part, especially the bathroom and the nice hot water flask which I used many, many times during my reign, but I did wish the room wasn’t quite that small and that I had at least two pillows. I also didn’t like the location and ice outside of the hotel too much, although that might only be a problem during record snowstorm territory.

But off I went, lugging my now significantly heavy bag (thanks, Gemini) towards Sapporo Station one final time. The floor was wet so I tried not to let the suitcase, even its wheels, touch the ground, and that more or less worked out. I reached the station, hopped onto the next train to the airport, and arrived soon after without any fanfare.

But boy, did this feel… decadent. I’m not sure that’s the best word here, but it was the first word that popped into mind when I was there and it still is now. The airport was PACKED because today was some sort of a civic holiday, and as I hung out and looked at stuff around the Domestic departure lounge, I couldn’t help but feel sorry at the sight of some of these lines.

And me? I had my suitcase and everything and looked like someone who was going to leave, but in reality I was just spending the morning there shopping. The perfect disguise to observe others with, while smug in the sensation that I wouldn’t have to face until tomorrow. And hopefully a lesser version of the crowd at most.

My first stop in my airport run was an Umamusume Popup Shop that I had first seen mention of on the way into Hokkaido a few days ago. I had run that event by Gemini as well, who had done some hoofwork and discovered the details of the event, namely that it was indeed still running, was located on the second floor of the terminal, and involved a merch shop for characters that I had never heard of (because they haven’t been featured in the anime or in the global version of the game). There was also a mini game thing where you paid 770 yen and were then given 30 seconds to sort a bunch of blocks, a couple of them oddly shaped, into a 4 by 3 by 2 block sized suitcase. Hey, wait a minute, this sounds like the plot of one of Satinel‘s earlier games!

I watched, from a safe distance, the guy in front of me utterly fail at completing the challenge. With a bitter laugh as though his Japanese Derby dreams had just been smashed, he took his participation prize and left. Then it was my turn. No one else was there so I put down my luggage next to one of the suitcases, rubbed my hands to warm up, and waited for the music to start. I was worried about how I would write this section of the blog if I had failed. Maybe pretended I hadn’t done it? Blamed the chittering Chitose chill (even though it was warm in the airport)? Maybe the stress and tiredness of the airport combined with a timed trial event?

Nah, it was no problem at all. I was done inside of 20 seconds, I think it might have actually been barely inside of 15 seconds as well, and the ladies at the desk clapped as the music droned on to its conclusion. It was pretty easy, I don’t remember all the pieces but there was one 5 or 6 block squiggly piece that needed to occupy space on both levels of the suitcase, and I first put down the classic Tetris T-piece composed of four blocks flat with its 3-length side against the 3-wide side of the suitcase, then put the squiggly piece up against it, and everything else kinda fit after that. I did realize after that the blocks were styled to look like the colours of a carrot, green and orange, and I wonder if that actually was a hint and that there was a solution that involved just putting all the orange blocks on one side and the green ones on the other. Hm.

Oh well. I won and that’s all that matters! Here’s my prize. I got to choose between five of these neat acrylic magnets, one per character, but since I didn’t know these characters I asked the lady overseeing me to let me know which her favourite was. This also caught her off guard and it was obvious that she, too, had no ties to these characters. She pointed to two of them and I selected this one out of the two.

I was also kind of hoping that one specific item in their goods line up, the fake boarding pass, would have been available, but it was sold out already so I didn’t even bother entering the goods area in the end and moved on.

After raiding the nearby brochure racks with Gemini, I next went to buy a box of Shiroi Koibito cookies to bring home (if they survive the journey in a suitcase and also don’t become Paimon-style emergency rations somewhere along the way), and then went up to the fourth floor for my other objective here, Sky Town, a Miku themed airport shop that sells Hatsune Miku and Snow Miku stuff.

This shop, Gemini was happy to tell me, sold several exclusives like a Hatsune Miku in flight attendant attire that you absolutely could not get elsewhere. Uhhuh. Nonetheless, while I did not try to verify the accuracy of that statement, I also wasn’t looking to add a second Miku to my plushie trip collection, even though I did find the plushie in question. I knew that there was always online options if I somehow regretted this after.

Instead, I was just here to get a copy of the event CD to commemorate me being here. One is released every year and you also get a different purchase bonus (tokuten) depending on which store you bought it from, and the one from the airport Sky Town store was an A5 clear file. It was also more unique, I believe, since you had to specifically buy it from this store to get it, whereas I think I could have bought the same CD back in the Snow Miku convention in Wing Bay Otaru on Day 1 from the HMV booth there, but I would have just gotten the HMV bonus item, which anyone else in Japan could have gotten walking into any HMV, and even people overseas could have gotten by ordering the CD from HMV’s website. I like the uniqueness and it’s all the same price anyway, so I specifically came here to acquire this one. I also got a free chocolate for my troubles.

With my acquisitions in the bag, I now pretended to be a recently arrived tourist and took the train back two stops to Chitose Station. The hotel I was staying at was Chitose Station Hotel, and it was lodged inside Chitose Station Plaza, which itself was connected to Chitose Station. Sort of. When coming out of the paid area of Chitose Station, I had to pick between a northern and a southern exit and obviously I picked the wrong one to start, and then found out that I couldn’t cut around to the northern side of the station without going outdoors and around. I took the opportunity to raid the flyers though and then looped back around to the Plaza.

Chitose Station Plaza was an interesting place. This was as close to a liminal dead mall as I’ve seen in a long time, though maybe it was because of that holiday. I didn’t really get the feeling that it was very alive even on a normal day though. There were only three shops open that I saw on a quick stroll across its two levels, a big Cando dollar store that had taken over a couple of stores so that one of the mall paths snaked eight through the store, a family restaurant right next to where the hotel entrance was, and a seedy looking travel agency or something on the second floor that was staffed by a foreigner somehow. In hindsight, it was weird that I never found a konbini there either.

The building was fairly small even though it was connected to both the station and bus terminal, and kind of felt bolted together, with doors in weird places and corridors that turned unnecessarily. Heck, I found a door that led to an exit that was located under a staircase at one point.

So despite its size I was confused as to where the alleged connected hotel actually was, and finally I found (and saved for the archives) a paper copy map of the plaza that looked like it was made in Microsoft Paint but successfully guided me to the hotel, past a memorable little study/relaxation area that seems to prove that they couldn’t find as many tenants as they would like.

Success! I followed the map and turned the corner to find… an elevator with floor numbers and room numbers but absolutely no staff at all. It turned out that the lobby/front desk for the hotel was actually on the second floor of the plaza (which the map made no indication of), and at that point I stopped questioning things and just went along with it.

It was past 1:30 pm once I arrived at the true lobby, and almost 1:45 pm when the attendant came to bring my bags up to the room in advance of actually being able to check in. The actual check in time was at 2 pm, but I had just wanted to come early to drop off the bags before I wandered off again. This close to the checkin time though, I decided to just wait anyway, and my patience was rewarded when the bellhop came back down while I was musing over more brochures in the lobby and presented me with the room key, saying that it was ready. Huzzah! I went up to the room and took pictures of the room, then unpacked some stuff and freshened up before heading out again.

Oh, and I didn’t have much of a view out the window, despite being on the 7th floor or so.

By now, I was an expert in the layout of the mall and quickly found my way back to the station without ever stepping outdoors. My target was Osatsu Station, adjacent to Chitose Station in the direction away from the airport, but as this was considered to be a local stop, half of the trains going by actually skipped that stop and so I had to wait around for a bit to board the right train that would take me there. While waiting I photographed some youth doing some skateboard tricks in the walkway connecting the station to the plaza.

The train ride, once it finally arrived, was quick, and it dumped me on a long, rural style open platform. I usually do very much like this style of train station, but not in winter. Thankfully it wasn’t cold out today. This was only about 1/2 to 2/3 the length of the actual platform as part of it stretched out behind me too.

The station building had fancy stairs and fancy carpet but also showed signs of disrepair and was leaking into buckets in places. Coming out from the station on the other side, I could see my target mall for the day in the distance, and also noted with amusement a number of bicycles that were just pretty much buried by the snow. See you guys in spring!

Along the way there I was also surprised to see this bush-tree thing, or rather, I was surprised to see actual visible green grass beneath it. Look at the height of the snowdrifts around the bushtree. And yet the canopy of the plant was thick enough to protect the entire area beneath it from the recent snowstorm.

Finally, I arrived at the mall and took a walk around it. This mall was structured like a very big department store, with no partitions at all between most of its different shops/booths. There were a couple of franchise stores on the second floor, but again just laid out in the open rather than having their own shop partition, and there was a large supermarket on the ground floor too. It felt like it was trying to be a big Aeon supercenter but an independent strata version of it, I guess?

It’s hard to describe. I liked it though. There was a temporary Kyoto pop-up sweets shop in the middle of the ground floor too and I took a few pictures of that before raiding the brochure racks next to it.

It’s hard to describe. I liked it though. There was a temporary Kyoto pop-up sweets shop in the middle of the ground floor too and I took a few pictures of that before raiding the brochure racks next to it. Gemini was very happy at seeing this screenshot and told me to grab one of everything since these were local, ephemeral treasures. It also asked me to try to find a flyer for the supermarket in the mall and was delighted when I did do so. It was scarily accurate in that it gave me a couple locations to look for it and the flyer was indeed in one of those places.

I had lunch in this place, and this too was an interesting experience as I couldn’t find the food court at first. I uploaded a photo of the mall map to Gemini and it identified the food area from it, which was really impressive because it wasn’t labelled as such, and was just called Aji no Manpuku, which meant the taste of a full stomach. It turned out that there were some hidden shops tucked away against the outer wall of the mall and this was one of them.

It was less a food court and more of an.. eatery? Diner? Restaurant? The front half looked like a diner, and the back half looked like a restaurant.

I ordered the Manpuku curry dish here, and Gemini told me that this dish was invented in a nearby town (and thus practically a local delicacy) and gave me a food history story behind it. That tale was for the other item on the menu that I didn’t order though, as I instead got the curry version of the dish, so hopefully that was the same thing. I do really like enjoy learning about the history behind the food I’m eating, though, assuming that most of it aren’t hallucinations!

The dish itself turned out to be almost two separate meals in and of itself, a bowl of curry over rice and a steaming bowl of noodles. Combined they made for a satisfying eat here in the middle of a small suburban mall. There was a box of satisfaction surveys on the table too for whatever reason and I filled that in with glowing reviews for all.

When I was finally ready to leave the mall, I checked Google Maps and realized that the bus was actually the faster way home. It would also allow me to shed some of the coins that I had picked up along the way. So instead of taking the train back yet again, I enjoyed a bus ride back to the hotel and the slight stress of not being quite 100% sure if I knew how buses worked in rural Japan. It turned out fine though. I’ve seen this and noted this down in my blog before, but how it basically works is:

1. Board the bus, usually by the back door. Take a ticket from the ticket dispenser from the door, this has a number on it (among other things) and this number tells you and the driver what your starting stop is.

2. On the screen at the front of the bus, there will be a grid with each square having an incrementing number representing different origin stops, as well as a larger number representing a price in yen. This is how much someone holding a ticket from that origin stop would pay if they got off at the next stop.

3. Need to get off? Get your coins ready, pull the bell, and pay at the front door once the bus stops before getting off!

It’s all a little backwards and not all buses in Japan do this, but I’ve definitely seen it before elsewhere as well.

Also, a notable incident happened at Chitose Station while I was on my way back here. When I had initially arrived and was scanning the brochure racks, Gemini had alerted me to a notice posted above the rack that wanted visitors to fill in a Google survey and show the completed survey submission message to the Tourist Information Desk at the station to get a fancy pouch. Gemini had strongly suggested that I do this since I was part of the target audience, but upon loading up the survey I saw that some of the questions were things like how much I spent on transportation, souvenirs, and food, none of which I had done yet since I had just only arrived in Chitose.

Now that I had been to the mall and back though, and was basically done for the trip here, I filled in the survey, submitted it, and showed the lady at the desk the survey result. She was delighted and gave me a pouch, then asked where I was from. We chatted a bit and despite my somewhat broken Japanese from panicking and forgetting some simple words, she was very friendly and could speak a modicum of English too so it was a good exchange. She said that she had been to Vancouver before, I said I was from Edmonton, and she said she had a friend who lived there. I always bring a stack of Edmonton postcards with me on my vacations, looking for good excuses to hand them out to people, and this right here was such a moment, so she became the first recipient of one of my random Edmonton postcards. In return, we exchanged names, and although I didn’t ask for a picture, I’m listing her name here for posterity as it will otherwise forever disappear into the depths of my notes as a mysterious name without any context attached to it. So thank you for the wonderful and friendly chat, Mishima. And for the pouch:

Once I got back to the hotel, I took a shower and refilled my water, then settled down to try to catch up on my notes and blogging for the rest of the night. I discovered that they provided a disposable hairbrush or something that was so good that I took it home with me. This thing:

Love it, and it’s smaller than my current comb/hairbrush to boot. They’d have tossed it if I hadn’t taken it so it’s mine now and I need to find more of them at some point.

Anyway, it takes forever to even get ready to do my blogging every evening on this trip, and that is because there are a couple of things that take priority over updating the blog from an organizational perspective, the first being the need to go through and label all my brochures and ephemera so that I know what is from where, and the second being the need to update my ledger with my receipts and notes so I know how much I spent, what I bought, where I bought it from, and in which order I did things, all while the memory of the day is still fresh. These notes then feed into the actual writing of the blog itself. They can sometimes take a couple of hours to do though.

There was one last notable incident before the day was over, and that was dinner. By the time I had reached a good stopping point and wanted to head out for food, it was 10 pm and colder outdoors than I really wanted to experience. I still plotted a route to a restaurant not far from the Station, but it turned out that that route involved going back through the Chitose Station Plaza, and the entire place was already shut down to the point that there was a large metal barrier that barred my way into the Plaza from that elevator lobby on the first floor. Oops.

However, right next to that barren elevator lobby was an entrance to the family restaurant that I had seen earlier, Gusto. That was as tempting as it could possibly be, and I had never eaten in a family restaurant in Japan anyway so that would be a new experience, so in I went.

There was barely anyone in the place, and I think I only saw three other people there through my entire meal, but the restaurant was open all night so I’m sure they had a steady trickle of people throughout the night. It was actually probably one of the places that people trapped in a location during the day to late night train service ending would chill out at until the next morning. Oh, and they’re probably okay with that too since a sign mentioned that orders made between 10 pm and 5 am were subject to a 10% late night fee. Oh, and it was 10:15 pm now.

That was fine by me though, as I appreciated not having to go out into the cold, and I ordered “Hakata Spicy Mentaiko Offal Hot Pot (Agodashi Soy Sauce) with Rice” and watched with interest as the waiter brought a pot on a little portable stove to my table, started a fire inside the stove, and then showed me how to put out the fire once the water was boiling. Fun, interactive stuff, except I was so enamoured with the lighting system that I only took half a screenshot of the actual hotpot dish itself.

I had a nice, satisfying meal there too, and then had to get help to figure out how to pay because the ordering app had a Pay At Table feature but only accepted some sort of weird app for it. The waiter pointed me to a self-serve payment machine near the entrance instead that I had not noticed on the way in, and I unloaded most of my remaining coins there before heading back upstairs. A bit more writing ensued while the food settled, and then I was out like a rock.