japan

yay yay so i went to japan for a week... hmm let's just say it was a very interesting experience.

went to hokkaido for the most part... but since there arent any straight flights there, we had to stop over in tokyo to take a domestic flight to hokkaido.

day 1
flight from sg to tokyo international airport... narita international airport.
almost 7hrs long. zzz. tried to play some games on their in game entertainment system. the gamees were boring.... no nintendo!!! wat??? japan airlines got no nintendo in their in flight entertainment??? :( wah! sad. my sis sat SQ in her trip to thailand... SQ got leh:(...

anyways... food on the plane was ok lah. had some beef meal thingy. ani thing...

reached tokyo at abt 5pm? cant really remember already...:S but by the time we got through the customs and took a short bus ride to the hotel it was almost 6... 1st day no tour guide. only tour leader (the one follow us from sg, dunnoe much abt local stuff) bring us take public bus (200yen per trip per pax) which stops right in the hotel lobby! diff from sg eh? to shopping center... bus service is called the narita circle line. serves a few hotels and bring ppl to a few shopping centers in the area. Aeon shopping complex. then we own self find a place to eat dinner in there. and take public bus back ourself. we stayed in excel hotel tokyu for two nights, the 1st day in tokyo b4 taking a flight to hokkaido the 2nd day, and the last day b4 taking a flight back to sg.

Click here for a look at the bus schedue

anyways we took the 6 o clock bus to Aeon shop mall - 3 stops. route A, then took the 9.30 bus back... last bus... a lot of ppl tried to get on the bus... the bus wasnt very crowded per say... esp by japan standards... but those ppl already ont hat last bus were mostly tourist... who arent used to squeezing on buses... there was this huge sized ang moh that refused to move in... so in the end a bunch of ppl (not from my tour tho i think) couldnt get on the bus... :( taxi fare in jap in damn ex... heard from the tour guide that a short trip from the excel hotel to narita airport (abt 15, at most 20 mins?) would cost around 25,000 yen. which is abt S$300? or even more... scary eh?

anyways we found their food court in aeon shop mall n ate some udon, tako yaki (however that thing is spelled... not tako pochi, that's just a brand name!) and guess wat? pepper lunch! they (and many other shops/stalls) have this vending machine thing where u buy a piece of paper and show that to the vendors... instead of having to order from the stall holders. cute i guess... then the person gave me this remote thingy that beeps ultra loudly when ur food is ready... so u can return to ur seat while waiting... but then end up the place freaking nosiy with occasional beeps... cos the device is ultra loud. and u know japanese ppl are very si wen one. they talk softy and dont make a din in public... unlike in sg where our shopping centers and food courts are ultra supper dupper urber noisy. so that beeping device was kinda irritating...

then we shopped for a while... looked at their department store... called jusco... malaysia oso got... then we went to their supermarket! wah... we brought fried chicken... some instant noodles (which we brought back to sg and just ate for dinner yest) and yes sea urchin and octopus!!! the octopus was damn nice! unlike in sg where its very hard, chewy... like cannot bite through, tt one is soft!!!! very tasty, and yeah duh both were much much cheaper than in sg:D sea urchin.. eh well of cos we'd never get to eat so much of it in sg, but that one wasnt very fresh already.... compare to the one we ate later on in hokkaido.... :D

yeah we walked around for a bit there... saw and visited their daiso 100yen shop there, or rather 105 yen after 5% gst, which is equivilant to only abt S$1.40... hey sg one more ex!!! all $2!!!!) got some chocs and drinks from there.

so yeah. that's it for day one. went back to hotel after tt. and oh... we stood outside for quite a while waiting for the bus... damn cold! yeah. cos i was wearing a normal t-shirt... and a normal jacket... the one my sis just brought for me from thailand... the sea games jacket:D like... how thick can tt jacket get? so yeah. cold. standing out at maybe 3 degrees on a winter night in tokyo... lol. nope did wear any of my wool colthing or thermal. just wore wat i would in sg maybe in air-con room. (for u troopers... the jacket is just like the one i wore in sch) lol kinda crazy maybe? but actually, the temperature itself aint that cold. sometimes it feels just like when we turn on the air-con to insanely low temps in sch or in rg... (rj dont remember being tt cold) or like if u go genting in dec then u go out at night. but when the wind blows... gosh. cold man! the winds are like biting... well still not so bad in tokyo, but lol, i wasnt exactly wearing winter clothes. in shopping centers or bus etc its a totally diff story tho. the heater makes it real hot... feels like its even hotter than in sg. u can walk around in a singlet... no probs. its even colder in some of our shopping centers.

day 2.... at last i go to day 2 le... eh... how long did i write on just one day???? oh btw did i mention tt i took a grand total of over 1600 photos on my digi cam??? even more than the 1400+ my dad took on his cam!!!

so day two. had a city tour around tokyo with our 1st tour guide. called tomi sawa. went to their red light district - shinjuku (which is red light no more), then their asakusa kannon temple + nakamise shopping street, and akihabara, the eletric town. had lunch there too. oh btw, all our breakfast where taken at hotels... the pretty standard japan + western mix hotel buffet breakfast. they like to eat a lot of their dishes cold, which i'm not used to, and they also season their food/have sauces that are either rather salty, or rather sweet, or worst a mixture of both. of a while its fine... but then u realise that for every dish its the same kind of very heavily sweeted/salted taste... its kinda boring and not so nice... so i ended up eating a lot of potato salda (pretty normal, like the ones we have in sg) and spagetti/macaroni. oh we went to this underground shopping place also... but nothing much to shop lah... mostly all those fashion stuff that none of my family were interested in. oh we did buy like 2 bottle of avian mineral water there tho... cos cannot bring water onto airplane... n we didnt bring our water bottle to jap also... so we (at least i know i was) desperatly in need of water! yeah... after that we spend a lot of time in the hotel boiling water, pouring them out into glasses for the water to cool fast, THEN pouring it into the water bottles... like everyday... yeah. otherwise no water to drink arh! and yeah i have a habit of drinking a lot of water... esp since there very dry, so it made me all the more thristy... like me n my sis could finish a bottle (500ml) of water or more through the night and in the morn just after we wake up! i never drink tt much in sg!

oh yeah... had lunch b4 going to the asakusa kannon temple. after visiting the temple and the shopping street we went to a nearby supermarket there... brought mandrain oranges and pears (oh we brought those big fuji apples in the supermarket on the 1st day, very nice!) at the suggestion of the tour guide... n of cos we brought a few beers too. oh the beer there, was nice... and damn cheap! a big can for less then 3 bucks! in sg dollars! like 3bucks cant even get u a small can in sg (i'm talking abt the cheapest one available in sg... not the jap brands which are even more ex!)??? wah sg beer and alcholic drinks damn ex sia! yeah the fruits in tokyo very nice. hokkaido got no fruits in winter... they gotta ship over from tokyo and the main land....

after tt we went to haneda airport for domestic flight to hokkaido. hmm after visiting all their airports... and seeing that in thailand and beijing... i understand y sg is like the worlds best... sg one is very spacious, brightly lit, new, and organised. well i'm not saying that japan's ones are messy or very old. well i think the narita airport is rather old already tho... - they developed much eariler then sg did. the one in sapporo was very new and well decorated for the holiday season. but sg one slighty more organised and certainly a lot more spacious. the japan airports were just a little too cramped. lol, not that it was VERY impt any way. but looking at how the narita airport has gotten old and hence not as beautiful set me thinking abt how sg's changi airport will look like in the future. we may furish it nicely, keep it clean, but eventually someday the building is gonna get too old and we'll have to tear it down and build another in place of it. when that day comes... are we going to build a new terminal before closing down the old one or wat? do we have the space to build new terminals? now we have terminal 3 opening real soon and a budget terminal already in place... i wonder how many terminals sg will have in the future?

ok back to the holiday trip... flight to hokkaido... also on japan airline, or JAL for short... well in fact all my flights were on jal... took abt 1 and a half hours? yeah smthing like that. to memanbetsu airport which is ont he east side of hokkaido. hokkaido is on a seperate piece of land from where tokyo is. in fact... japan is divided into 4 main areas... anyways. the map of hokkaido... eh... kinda looks like that of sg. just that the top part is sharper and theres more land sticking out on the bottom of the left side... u know the part where tuas is? yeah... there's more land sticking out over there. yeah i find the shape very similar to sg... but hokkaido is certainly a lot bigger than sg! so yeah for the 1st few days we visited the east side of hokkaido b4 going over the the west side.

reached memanbetsu airport at around 10 plus? cant really remember.. oh yeah.. japan time is +9GMT (sg is +8GMT in case u dont know, same as hk and beijing), so basically they are one hour ahead of sg time. i think its cos of daylight saving time otherwise they are in the same time zone as sg? not too sure abt that tho... and oh yeah in winter the day is ultra short... at 6pm its as dark as its 8 or 9 pm in sg. the sun sets at around 4.30 or even earlier than that in winter. and of cos they have long days and short nights in summer. the sun is still up at 8pm in summer! (if i didnt remember wat the 1st tokyo tour guide said wrongly... )

met the hokkaido tour guide at the airport (in total we had 3 diff guides. main one was the hokkaido one, we stay in hokkaido for 5 days). apparently our sg tour leader had never met this guide b4... 1st time working together... and the 1st time the tour guide 9as int he hokkaido one... his name is..... dunnoe how to spell. diff ppl call him by a slight variation of his name. cos he only intro us his name on the night we met, and we were all like zzzzzzz, plus i'm not gd with jap names. i can remember his name in chinese very well tho, he got tell us which are the 4 characters some more. yeah the sg tour leader pronouce his name as jing san. and then the 3 tour guide i had pronouce as kim san... anyway... around the say lah... some ppl in the tour pronouce in some other ways... awyways he responds to all of it so its fine... lol...) yeah. so we were like the lab rats... cos this jing san never br such a big group b4. my group had 32 ppl. and the most he brought along was 10 ppl... in fact he even got bring around like just a family of 4 one. so yeah... 1st time for everybody. i like his chinese a lot... those beijing chinese like my weiqi lao shi... even more beijing chinese that yang lao shi i think... loved it a lot! his a korean but his parents came to japan n gave birth to him there... then he went to china to study... so he can speak chinese, korean n jap... pretty cool... lol he says its very messy tho... like it gets mixed up in his brain... smtimes when he is speaking jap some korean words come out tt kinda thing... lol... like how we mix chinese n eng so much tt some times its hard to speak proper chinese w.o mixing in a single word of eng... just tt ours... is ... erm... worst... lol. yeah once he started speaking to the sg tour leader in jap after taking a phone call (to some local shop, duh in jap) and got 'scolded' by her... haha yeah anyway his tour guide is a very well mannered guy whos fun loving at the same time...

1st night went to akan view hotel, where we will stay for 2 nights. had a set dinner at hotel. quite a gd meal, then went for a hot spring bath. quite fun... went to the outdoor one also... walking naked in the sub zero weather to get to the pool... wah damn damn damnn cold! not a VERY long distance... but long enough for us when u are naked, wet and out on the FREEZING cold. the path to the hot spring pool was frozen over at the side already.... they had to spray warm water along the path to prevent it from freezing over completely! it was quite an experience. the coldness of it all... and darkness + foggyness making the visibility TERRIBLE. plus the pool had rocks all along the side so i was damn scared i'd fall/bump into some rock and sratch meself... yeah. quite an experience. the warm warm pool water and the freezing cold outside. like i keep trying to keep my hair warm cos outside was really really cold. at the same time u feel that the hot water the boiling you. esp at the toes it feels as tho u are being cooked in 100 degrees water!

day 3
went to see this mou zhou lake 1st. very nice scenery... oh we spent a lot of time on the bus the whole time in hokkaido... the east side is very sparsely populated and the tourist spots are rather far apart. a trip from one place to another would take at least 1hr... and we only spend maybe 15-30mins at the site... lol... so we hardly get to use the winter clothing we brought... so yeah we took a lot of pics from the bus... hokkiado = snow everywhere. i think the highest temp there in winter is like 0degrees... pretty much enjoyed the winter scenary... but well... its all abt he same so yeah u'll get real bored if u are a resident there... like i guess our tour guide is... his eyes only lits up when talking abt playing in the snow/skiing. lol guess so... everything would be pretty boring there for locals. then we visit the ice glaciers hall... n we saw this cute little creatures called cliones... angels of the sea... lives below the ice of those glaciers that flows down from siberia russia... had lunch there too... steamboat... normal food... the worst meal we had in the trip. then there was this small simulation room that was set at -20 degrees that day we went i think... lol very cute... they gave us this moist towel too bring in... which of cos froze into one striaght dish after a while... nice for photo taking:P i think the coldest they can make tat place is -40 degrees... but i think tt day was only -20. not too sure... the guide didnt say properly. his not experienced enough i guess. esp when handling such big groups. so he left out some impt details. but yeah he's a very nice man alright. he helps ppl off the bus to make sure u dun fall... well when there's snow on the floor anyways... and i sae him kicking away the snow where the bus door was to make it easier for ppl to get up... but yeah some pertinant details he failed to inform us/was misinformed himself. still, i'd say his a young guy with room for improvement. he's 34 but doesnt look as old... and certainly behaves more like 24? (picked 24 cos i just subtracted 10 from his actual age.)

yeah after that we went to this lake that doesnt get frozen over in winter... dunnoe the name... cant remember rather... very interesting... cos there's plenty of vocanic activity there in hokkaido... u know jap always have earthquakes. so yeah... the magma there heats up the water and the sand... so if u just dig below the sand maybe 10 or 15cm... u can feel the sand is warm (even tho the temp outside is like below zero) by then it was abt 4 and starting to get dark... so we headed back to the hotel...

after that we visited the shops/village of their local tribal ppl... like the moari tribe in austrilia... dunnoe how to spell the name... cos the whole trip is in chinese mah... gosh it was cold there.... those ppl worship the owl as god's messenger... smthing like dat... then we walked back to the hotel from there... abt 15mins walk or so? quite a nice experience. i realise walking in the snow really aint as hard/scary as popl might make it out to be? dunnoe... never fall down b4... even though some other (young and old alike) have fallen down once or twice... but yeah we didnt really walk in like ankle deep snow... and there wasnt a lt of ice. ice is slippery but well... its managable... like walking on the path in my condo on a wet day... my condo they pathed some part of it with like small stone which are ultra urber slippery when wet... :( stupid designers... yeah... walking on ice is kinda like tat but maybe just a bit more slippery at times... but didnt had to walk on ice much anyway... walking on snow was just like walking in the mud. those kind of sandy soild with water when the snow melts... yeah... that's abt it... i didnt even get my sports shoes wet like a lot of ppl did... dunnoe how some ppl even manage to get their trousers/jeans wet... so that ends our day... oh yeah we had dinner of cos... cant remember where n wat:S

whee i wonder how long i've wrote le?

day... 4 out of 7.

1st thine is the morning we went to lake saroma... which is right beside the russian sea... joined with it in fact, but due to the 14 tributeries flowing into the lake the water moves fromt he lake into the sea, not the other way round, so its a fresh water lake and we saw the layer of ice on it. this lake is the 3rd largest in japan and the largest in hokkaido...

then we went to the kitsune fox village... for lunch and then we saw the hokkaido fox... very cute... just like those keychains or dolls they make... apparently the white ones are the most ex, followed by the grey then orange ones. ex as in most valued for their fur. but lol... i think the orange ones look nicest leh? didnt see any pure white foxes tho... foxes are cute! oh there are many animals in hokkaido. the tour guide tells us that foxes are often spotted along the highways in summer. just like how ppl feed the monkeys in sg making them very bold and expecting ppl to feed them... its a similar situation is hokkiado where, as the guide explains it, the girls find the foxes very cute and fed them, resulting the foxes waiting along highways so as to be fed. bears are pretty common there too. (but they hibernate in winter!) my guide says he met a mother bear bringing a baby bear to cross the highway once when he was driving...

after that we visited the ryu sei no taki and ginga no taki... ie the shooting star and milky way falls. the ginga no taki was frozen over already... but the shooting star one wasnt. nice scenary there... snow n more snow... u can see the layers of snow forming... took a whole bunch of pics there... it was there when we experienced the 1st snow fall too. small slight snow fall but still it was our 1st.

then we head to the hotel ... one that was in the gorges near the water fall. its a pretty hotel. dinner was buffet int he hotel... nice dinner lah... lol the tour guides stayed there for a long long time... normally they would eat ultra fast one... 1st time they ate for soooo long... so yeah... i guess cos the food is better and cos its buffet at the hotel so they didnt really need to run around n make sure everyone is fine and stuff. and we went for hot spring bath again... well not exactly again.. it was the 2nd n last time we went. erh... i'm getting tired of writing this... so long and never ending... :P i'll come back and cont writing later...

Day 5
woke up real early in the morning. breakfast, then 3 and a half hour long bus ride to the west side of hokkaido! i told u hokkaido is much bigger than sg yeah? and no we didnt tranverse the entire width of hokkaido.... its a big place eh? went to otaru, the sea port around there for lunch. hmm the luch was great! fresh crab, scallop n best of all, sea urchin! oh yeah we have salmon sashimi too, but i think the best of it all was the sea urchin, followed by the crab. and oh talking abt food, forgot to mention that we loved the raw prawns there a lot, esp those we had during the breakfast buffet at the akan view hotel... it was supperb! sadly the salmon there aint so gd, think its cos the season has just passed. their breeding season is in october and that's when the salmons supposed to be the best. so yeah we missed the period. the salmon is still gd tho, the meat the very refine and soft, but the strong, unique taste of salmon that i curve for was sadly absent, and the salmon isnt that kind of fatty salmon that taste best. i guess its cos we just missed the season:( well the scallop was kinda dissappointing... it didnt have much tase... it wasnt sweet or anything... just rather tastless:( but i realised the seafood and food in hokkiado were generally more plain... and simple in tastse... the food there dont have a very strong taste... its more plain. the crab was like i just mentioned. the tase it rather plain and a little blend when compared to the crabs we get in sg. it was sweet and u can taste the freshness, but no, its not like those sri lanka crab we get in sg where u can smell the strong 'crab taste/smell' from miles away. we tried the crab raw as sashimi but its quite strange to eat it completly row... cos the meat is likda hard to bite off... kinda like how its hard to cut the raw skin of fish or chicken? so we tried the 1st tour guides advice of dipping it a few times in the hotpot so as to cook it slighty b4 eating. i think that it really taste better when slighty cooked. for one, its so much easier to bite off the meat and the meat wont stick to the shell of the crab. 2ndly, the slighty cooked meat taste sweeter than the raw one. and it was much much easier to chew.



after that went to see their rive in otaru... its a man made river... kinda like our big cannals or the sg river... nothing much very special abt the river per say, but some buildings around the river were pretty unique. after that went to this street there were they had lots of shops selling music box or orgels and cute little glass ornaments. some of the music box were pretty normal, but most were real delicate little lovely pieces. well i wont say that the designs were completly new or creative, but most of them were fine grand pieces of art. my sis got this doll that turns its head and i think the hands moved too... when it is winded up of cos, and i got this glass angel... nice copper blue and gold. the colors i like! boy i love it! many many many music boxes there, not tooo ex lah... think they are around 20-30 each. oh there are the expensive ones of cos, but many of them had reasonable prices. my mum got a music box for herself too. i went there snapping pics n more pics of the music boxes. so even though we only brought 3 home phyiscally, i had pictures of just abt every nice music box in the shop... nah... maybe not most, but certainly more than half... there was just too many designs there. the 2nd floor was a musuem displaying all the music box of the past. like the 1st music boxes made or smthing... didnt spend too much time there cos we already spend like 30mins looking at the music boxes downstairs out of the entire 1 hr we were given to visit the entire street! so yeah we didnt spend much time looking at the glassware... it wasnt really that speacial tho, u can see them in sg too... then we went for ice cream... 5 diff favours in all. melon, strawberry, milk, lavenda and chocolate. the melon tasted kinda funnny, but all the rest were nice! ooooh we saw the russian style steam powered clock too. saw it blow notes using the steam at 2 pm... pretty cool lah. and then there was this other clock tower too that plays some music right after the steam powered clock finishes its performance. that one didnt have much to see, but its an 8 note bell tower... still, the building with the clock tower was great for taking pics:P

visited the white chocolate factory after that. the factory is currently closed cos apparently it sold food past the expiry date a while back... so we cold only see the outside. but it was pretty cute, they had little dolls coming out and stuff like that every hour for 15mins... like a performance kinda thing? some piggies would pop their head out of the piggy house and some windows would open to reveal bakes instead playing music instruments. smthing like dat. kinda like disney land maybe? (not that i've been to one b4 oh wells) quite cute lah... then... erm... say... where did we have dinner? oh yeh... we went to some shopping place in sapporo 1st. saw the lights display and stuff... and walked around the supermarker for a while. yeah its their central park or smthing like that. the unique thing abt that place is that their street names go by things like west 24 north 5... with the center point of referance being the park. so the place is arranged like a weiqi board, literally such, the width and breadth of each street is 100meters. all nice and organised. so there were some pretty christmas lights at the park (which was quite big!) and there was lights of the flowers found in summer of hokkaido too. oh yeah... there was a tower similar to the one found in paris... liknda like a replica actually... and before tt we visited this old clock tower that was once part of a university or smthing... lol the guide didnt know wat's so interesting abt that place and y he must bring us there... he seems very reluctant to go there... only going there cos its on the itinary... so got no choice... lol. but yeah they changed the itinary a lot. didnt take out anything from there (expect we all agreed to go the snow mobile place instead of skiing) but they added a number of places + changed the schedue a lot. yeah... nothing much special abt the tower... looked like some of the churches is sg? not very big either. then we went for dinner at ramen street. the ramen very damn... nice soup as well as noodle... not like the other noodle we had which are frozen and not freshly made. no this one is much better. cost like 700 yen i think? basically its a really small and narrow alley with quite a number of stalls all selling similar stuff. each stall is quite small... like smaller then our classrm. so yeah the tour had to split up into all the diff shops... like one or 2 families in one shop... in any shop that had space... damn hot instead the shop i went to... my dad was sweating like crazy. tour guide was running around making sure everyone got a seat, then he ordered and paid for everyone (while asking for receipt, we already paid for this meal in the tour package!)... hm n e sg tour leader came back to the shop i went to like way after we started eating... n ordered for the two of them. but he finished eating at the same time as my family did. :S and yes, he finished everything... dunnoe how ppl can eat so fast one...? esp hot soup like this... rice i can eat fast... but not noodles in hot soup.... but yeah, it was gd, the ramen is kinda like our instant noodles that type, but the taste was much better. oh got a slice of pork inside also, delicious! got the strong taste of pork.... which i absolutly adore!

day 6
went to the sapporo fish market in the morning... saw load of sea food and we ate raw osyter there! wah damn cool! raw and fresh! tasted pretty salty... cos of the sea water... but still its very sweet. very nice and smooth texture.... sweetness of fresh seafood and the saltiness of the sea water. yeah liked it a lot. and we brought sea urchin, salmon roe, and some preserved squid to br back to sg also... eh... after that i think we went to the rusutsu ski resort for a buffet lunch. italian style. quite nice lah. 1400yen per pax. after lunch we played around with snow at the skiing area in the skit resort. tour guide got naughty and started throwing snowballs (or rather blocks of harderned snow) at the sg tour leader... offered to help her wash her face lol! haha poor boy... we changed from skiing to playing the snow mobile already... otherwise earlier on the offered to give us skiing lessons. yeah he loves playing in the snow lah... well, nothing much you can do in hokkaido i guess? every kid there plays in the snow and knows how to ski... yeah after hanging around there for a while then we went to the snow mobile place. we rode up the mountain... scenary was nice but its was damn freaking cold! 1st cos we are going up a mountain, 2nd cos we are moving... i drove on the way back... really baad at steering cos i think few ppl changed partners on the way down, so everyone else was already used to the steering and stuff and they went real fast... things were really slow at the beginning when we rode up, but when going down? i lost sight of the snow mobile in front of me like ultra fast! and when going up it was more like we were hoping real hard for the ppl in front to move faster so we dont have to keep braking... yeah... the ride down was shorter. we came back from the same we we went but we stopped at halfway down to take photos... and tt's where we swapped places. so sadly by the time i kinda got used to the controls we reached already:( but it was... freezing cold... my toes, feet and fingers were all frozen stiff... numb and feels like u're gonna get frostbite if we were to ride on that snow mobile any longer. the whole thing lasted abt an hour or so, interesting experience, was a lot more fun when driving and also partly cos we rode faster when going back. but say, i still like cycling... how you can lean on one side when going past a curve more specifically... been doing a lot of that lately while cycling... didnt remember myself doing that last time. yeah that's the thing you cant do with a snow mobile... unless u are going up a slope that is. but sadly u can ride a bike in the snow too. oh wells. not that there is snow in sg for me to ride over anyways... night time or windy days are the best u can get in terms of cool weathers. i still got a lot of stuff to learn on my nike:S:X like how to got through curves w/o slowing down cos currently i snow down when going through curves... dont dare to take it at such a fast speed. oh and i need to get better at riding without hands too (oh another thing u can do on a snow mobile... the least u gotta do is have one hand on the accelerator else u wont move:P) i can ride ok with one hand... but if there are sharp bends i wouldnt really dare to take it while riding single handly unless i'm going real slow. tried to riiide w/o hands that time when i went out with ya troopers at pasir ris, as i'm very sure sandra can recall. however it didnt work out well... cos paris ris didnt really have a straight path for me to practice on, and the park is rather old already so the paths were fairly uneven, and most of all the bike seat has very wide but not long enough, so i couldnt control the bike with the thigh... oh well anyways, back to the trip. yeah the snow mobile thing was quite an experience, i guess skiing would be more funn cos its faster... but only when u know how to ski:S and since at most we could have spent maybe 3 hrs skiing (plus we gotta rent all that skiing equipment), its not quite enough for you to become at least an average skiier in tt short period of time... went skiing in 02 in beijing last time... erh... spent most of my time walking around in the snow... trying to get up the slope so that u can ski down... eh.. didnt remember much but well its just not very fun when u cant ski, just like i remember how batminton sucks last time cos we would serve, then pick up the shuttercock, then repeat... so yeah, the snow mobile was a much better alternative, kinda like driving go karts or bumper cars... u dont need any lessons for those. but driving in the freezing weather makes all the difference between driving go karts and snow mobiles... and yeah. the winter scenary was gd. sadly i didnt take any pics on the way up or down. i stuffed the digi cam in my pocket and zipped it up... so couldnt unzip during the ride... and anyways my fingers were frozen stiff already... lol even the guide was feeling cold up at the mountain... cos he was like jumping around to generate heat... but yeah.. those local ppl... wear damn little only... he only wear thermal and a sweater... plus a thin leather jacket outside. and for his legs? even better, normal pants with ankle length socks... no thermal or knee length socks like we do... (and my feet were still forozen after that!) yeah they are used to it duh... like after the snow mobile ride some auntie on the tour was rubbing her hands together to keep warm... then the tour guide was like 'cold meh?' then he touched her hands and he was like saying her hands are colder than his but he doesnt feel that its cold... so yar...

after that we went for dinner... like soul gardern style.. nothing much special abt the food… just that they had a lot of choices… like many diff kinds of beef/chicken etc.

then we head off to Sapporo airport for flight back to Tokyo… *sobs* I miss our tour guide… he’s veri nice lah, shook hands with everyone and bowed and thked us all prior to our departure… aw… miss him… *sniffles*

flight back to tokyo… greeted at the airport by this loud and ultra talkative Taiwan tour guide who has lived in japan for 30 yrs… gosh… 30 years and she still acts like the typical Taiwanese… loud and… obnoxious? Sheesh! Damn freaking noisy… heard earlier on the bus that my Hokkaido tour guide was complaining to the tour leader abt this loud and very rude Taiwanese tour guide… now I know who they were talking abt…:S seriously cant stand her man… she talked crap for like 45 mins of the 1hr journey from haneda airport to excel tokyu hotel! WOW. And it was like 11pm when we landed at Tokyo. How nice of her… damn noisy lah, else I would have sleep on the bus. Can imagine jing san would have turned off the lights for us to sleep instead…
yar, that’s abt it lah, last day just went straight to the airport… went shopping a bit at their duty free place in the air port… then b4 we know it… tada… back to sg le…

haha funny thing was that, I later found out that sw went to japan too… but diff parts of japan lah… met her and hc at the rg cca open hse and we had great fun talking for like dunnoe how many hrs straight… and I exchanged gifts with sw… lol luckily both of us never see each other’s gift b4:P