A New Year before (almost) all others.

When we reached Sapporo we grabbed a taxi and headed towards The Blue Wave Inn, an affordable hotel very near Sapporo’s drinking district, Susikino. 

On the train back to Sapporo.

Evan and David were staying there, so we organized ourselves and headed off to find a New Year’s Eve celebration we could giajin-crash. We happened upon a bar full of gaijin, many of them ALTs that we recognized from Sapporo Orientation. We settled ourselves in and started the evening off with snacks and drinks. The cook was a bubbly Italian motocross rider who might have spent more time taking shots with the customers than actually cooking anything, but the fries were spot on and the guys quite enjoyed the quesadillas. After talking with an ALT who had recognized us, and exchanging numbers, we decided that we would head to the nightclub “Mole” for the countdown to 2012. We still had some time to spare so we headed over to St. John’s Wood, a british pub style bar for another few drinks. By 11:30, we were on our way to Mole. The night club was full-ish. It wasn’t to the standard of Beta the night the Will.I.Am performed, but it was definitely enough people to have a good time. The music was loud and easy to dance to, although they might have played LMFAO’s “Shots” five times in two hours. Most of the Japanese partiers acted like they were at a concert and stood along the stage staring at the DJ. Corin and I knew better and danced our hearts out, then screamed and yelled when the countdown began.

Happy New Year!

It was a crazy experience knowing that our 2012 started 15 hours before anyone else’s and it was pretty fun to tell everyone “that’s so 2011” or “that’s so last year” for the hours afterwards (it may have also been funnier with the various alcoholic beverages we had consumed that evening…just saying). We left the club as the big hand on my watch neared two a.m. and found our way back to the Blue Wave, Corin and Even climbing piles of dirty brown snow in triumph every few blocks. It was the perfect way to bring in the New Year!

The whole gang together again!

The next few days were spent picking up a JET lagged Thomas, wandering around Sapporo, cursing the stars that we hadn’t read up on the Japanese New Year tradition of having ALL of the banks and ATMs close the first three days of the year. That’s right, no money for fun shopping the entire time we were in Sapporo. These bank closings coincide with what is the Japanese equivalent to Black Friday. There were sales everywhere, each store with their “Lucky Bags” priced and organized at the entrance. The tradition is to buy one of these bags and have it contain a complete outfit, a new wardrobe to wear in the New Year. They were priced from ¥2500 to ¥15,000 so there must have been some pretty good finds inside! Fortunately, we had taken out exactly what we would need to pay for hotels, trains and most meals before we’d left, so we ended up only having to borrow ¥1000 from Tom for the taxi ride home. Nonetheless, it was a bit of a pain having to count our yens just because the invisible man inside of every ATM in Japan needed a vacation. Oh well, another of those “cultural differences” I will never understand.