hokkaido summer trip day 2

I ate my first breakfast since February at the hotel restaurant. It felt a bit weird having food in my stomach at this early morning after such a long hiatus. Then we left the hotel at 8am and arrived at the Otaru Unga Craft Museum (小樽運河工藝館) at 9am.

The craft museum specializes in glass craft and there were thousands of uniquely hand crafted glass pieces on display and on sale. The main purpose of visiting the museum is not to just look at glass art, but to try to make one!

We were given a clean glass as a canvas for our first glass art. I don’t find doing all this any fun at all, so I came up with some random designs that should reflect my emotions at that time: bored. They say that it would take them 3 weeks to finalize and polish our glasses. I think by that time, I will totally forget about this.

After finishing my art, I went downstairs to have a look at their souvenir store. Everything was so very shiny and glimmery, especially when I look at the price tags.

Our next stop is the Otaru Music Box Museum (小樽オルゴール堂). As the name implies, they display and sell all kinds of music boxes, ranging from traditional looking ones to the more metallic look.

Otaru City is a really pretty city. The whole feel of the city is more European than Japanese. No wonder it’s a pretty famous tourist spot here. For lunch, we stopped at the Otaru Sea Port Market. They’re serving crab! It was said that crab in Hokkaido taste the best, and I guess it was not a lie. The dish was delicious!

After lunch, we went straight to the main attraction of the day: the Asahiyama Zoo! We arrived at 03:15 pm, it was raining and there were lots of people. The tour guide said that we could only stay for 2 hours, so we waste no time by going to the lesser panda first. The little bastard is really cute, even during rain.

..

Then we went to see the penguins, the north pole white bears, orang utans, fucking chimpanzees, seals, giraffe, rhinos etc. I liked the penguins and the white bears the most because at the time when we went to see them, there were not so many people and we could see them from a very near distance.

This might be my first time being in a zoo in Japan, and surprisingly, it was not so bad. It might be a better experience if it was not raining, but I’m more than satisfied because this is the first time that I got to saw lesser pandas, white bears and adorable penguins. Penguins, I want a penguin pet! But that might be a bad idea because I would probably lost interest in it after a few days and it will probably die a terrible, painful death from malnutrition and dehydration.

After the zoo visit, we went straight to the place where we are going to stay for the night, the Asahiyama Washington Hotel. I stayed at Yokohama Washington Hotel once, and it was a really nice hotel. The same thing could be said to the Asahiyama one.

I was quite tired after the zoo visit so after having my dinner at the hotel’s restaurant, I went to my room, took a long warm bath, shampooed my hair, brush my teeth, took a crap, went through the adult channel catalogue, smell the bed sheets and played with the air-conditioning.

It was quite boring so I went to the Dato Seri Najibian girl’s room to ask her out. Right after we left the hotel, it started to rain again so we decided to just take pictures in front of the Asahiyama Train Station and went back to our hotel.

Then I went to sleep; nothing funny happened.