Sapporo Snow Festival: Hitting the bars...

Tweedle dum....making me cringe

Being the prepared person that I am (and Maylee more so) I’d quickly printed off a “guide to Sapporo nightlife” at work hoping no-one would notice. Unfortunately in my haste I failed to realise I’d printed out some juvenile English teacher part time cassanova who only talked about bars and clubs in Sapporo that were good for a lay or a "hook up" (if you don't believe me read it)

But crap, we were two civilised and older Western girls looking for a civilised nice time! By this time it was too late, I had crammed the print out in my bag and we found ourselves in the first bar called Rad Brothers in the Susukino area of town. What a dive! Some wannabe Japanese hip hop dudes, a group of Russians straight off the Navy ship, some butch Americans with attitude and drunken clingers on wandering about.

One double vodka and red bull later we were out of there remarking on how “awful” and “crass” the place was and how the club/bar just down the road called Booty looked the same. We cockily moved onto our next bar called “VIVO” but after getting a million contradicting directions from bouncers and doing a few circuits of downtown Sapporo in sub zero temperatures we were forced to admit defeat. By now it was midnight already, we were freezing and needed a drink.

With our tail between our legs we agreed that to save ourselves from freezing outside we’d have to hit Booty (the place that we turned our noses up earlier) and was as bad as expected. Well ok if you’re into R&B or you’ve had an obliterating amount of alcohol I'm sure it'd be bearable. We sat upstairs in the lounge area (thankfully huge with big comfy sofas) and finally sat down to have a drink which was disturbed within minutes by Japanese tweedle dum and tweedle dee, two far too young drunken idiots trying to chat us up. The one I got stuck with had limited English vocab, in fact he had only learnt 2 expressions in English (which maybe worked for him in the past?) which were “I love you” and “what are ya talking about”. I did find it mildly amusing and had to film him actually saying it, see below.

We later saw them getting ticked off by about 5 cops (Japanese coppers must get soo bored, hardly any crime happens here)

We then try to sort out another bar/club to go to and with our limited knowedge of the area coupled with the fact that it was far too cold to stand about on the streets gulped back our pride and went back into Rad brothers which had slightly improved (but maybe that was the number of drinks we’d now had?)

Oh god, another dumb enlisted.

Some enlisted military guys from the US Navy then came over and started talking to us. Not too much offence intended but this is the second time I have talked to US military folk and I’ve never met such stupid unintelligent men! So I was making small talk saying how I didn’t find Japanese men very manly as a whole and were a bit whimpy. The American guy turns round and says “Well you know why that is though don’t you?” He then tells me that in fact they were manly, heroic and courageous etc before the Americans dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Oh wow. What a bloody insolent statement especially for a guy who is stood in a bar in the middle of Japan, I just couldn’t believe my ears!
We stayed until about 4.30am chatting to a group of “normal” (considering who we’d met earlier) Ozzie lad and girls who were in town from Niseko where they worked and were also clueless about nightlife in Sapporo.

We headed back to the ryokan around 4.30am drunk and suddenly not feeling the cold at all despite me taking a pic of the electronic weather dial!