Emiiichan Blog ☆ : Japan trip Spring 2016 Part 3: Day 2 - Nijo Market, Sapporo Beer Museum & Tanukikoji in Sapporo

May 15 was the second day of the trip with the weather supposed to be a bit chillier than the day before. This gave me an excellent opportunity to wear my Liz Lisa floral sweater dress!

Earlier in the morning, before we were headed out for the day, S and I quickly went to Don Quixote because the sunblock I bought the night before didn't work for him. Luckily it's open 24 hours!

We returned to the hotel to quickly finish getting ready and met up with my parents. Then we all headed back out in the same direction through Tanukikkoji

and arrived at Nijo Market! (It's hard to see but there's a small purple sign above my head declaring it haha. This isn't the most "main" entrance" of the market.)

We looked around for a bit before settling on a restaurant for breakfast.

They ordered -

And then we continued to look and shop around! (for some reason I don't have many pictures of this lol, sorry)

We left the market after buying what we wanted decided to walk a slightly different way back to the hotel where I ran across these! -

and a big Daiso, which was great for my mom! (And also good for us because it's most convenient to shop there right before going back to the hotel so we don't have to lug the items around everywhere.)

on the way back to the hotel, we also ended up stopping at Uniqlo -

and since I hadn't really eaten anything at the market (since I don't eat seafood), I stopped at Family Mart to pick up something quick to eat before lunch and it wasn't actually too bad!

Dropped off our items and then dropped into Odori station to catch a train to our next destination - Higashikuyakushomae station.

From there, it was about a 15 minute walk to Sapporo Beer Museum because we went the wrong way for a little bit lol. I believe most people will opt to arrive and depart from this attraction by bus.

First activity of interest here was eating lunch. We were directed to Sapporo Bier Garten based on what we wanted to eat. The restaurant is on the second floor.

We ordered 3 beers...and my water lol. The highlight of eating here is actually "Genghis Khan" which we unexpectedly had to cook ourselves. But on a really cool Hokkaido shaped grill! Due to the self-cooking, during high volume times, it gets really smoky in there though. We also ordered an onion ring tower and a few sides.

We were provided bibs/aprons and even plastic bags for our purses and jackets too so they wouldn't get oil, etc on them.

After we were done eating, we looked for around for a few souvenirs

And then we went to check out the free self-guided tour of the museum itself.

It was pretty interesting even though we're not really beer people. The exhibits had an English translation as did the video at the beginning.

And then we were done!

Since we had "accidentally" started our JR Rail Passes for this day unnecessarily, I wanted to catch at least one JR train, so instead of returning to the subway station from that we had arrived, we trekked it for about 15-20 minutes to JR Naebo station which I do not recommend lol.

It's just one stop away from Sapporo and not really worth the walk. I would definitely advise trying to figure out how to catch the bus to and from Sapporo station or just use the nearest subway station instead.

Once back at Sapporo station, we went to check out a fishing store that was advertised on one of the area maps from the hotel. S didn't have high hopes for it because the type of fishing they would do in Hokkaido isn't the kind of fishing he is interested in.

And sure enough, we left with nothing lol.

S and I did some brief omiyage shopping in Sapporo station since we would be leaving the area soon and returned to the Odori Park area by walking aboveground on the streets instead of catching the subway from Sapporo station or taking the underground route just to try something a bit different and the weather was accommodating.

We had (unintentionally) done a lot of walking by then, so we just rested for a bit in the hotel until it was time for dinner. We went to Miyoshino in Tanukikoji because my family had seen it featured on the "Love Hokkaido" tv show lol. It was an easy find but a really small restaurant, only able to accommodate maybe 10-12 people at a time! We ended up waiting outside so as not to crowd the inner area with the limited space and two girls ended up getting seating and eating before us even though we had waited a lot longer than them wtf.

It was a super simple curry meal but pretty good IMO! The best I've ever eaten? Probably not but I'm also not much of a curry aficionado and the price really can't be beat. I can't see us waiting in line for this again more than just a handful of minutes but if we ever needed something quick and convenient otherwise, I think we would make this choice.

We were all pretty tired, so we just quietly returned to the hotel after a brief convenience store run -

And packed up and sorted out our suitcases because we were checking out of the hotel early the next morning! (This always takes longer than you think it will lol.)

Day 2 was definitely a lot more low key compared to Day 1, but that's probably because we were able to accomplish so much of what we wanted to do in Sapporo already! Plus the jetlag was probably finally catching up to us after a day or so, and we did more walking on this day than most other days of the trip as well lol. We did still manage to cross a few things off the list (eating more seafood/crab for breakfast, eating Gengis Khan, checking out Miyoshino), so I'd consider it tiring but successful!