I closed the black-out curtains so I could finally sleep in.  This means sleeping until 5 a.m. instead of 3:30 a.m. Yay. Today, I found a nebaneba breakfast at 7-11 around the corner from the hotel. Nebaneba is as it sounds.  It was a breakfast full of nebaneba or slimy foods–grated yamaimo (tororo), mozuku (mekabu), and nameko mushrooms. I would have even added natto to this awesome combination.

After breakfast we headed to Furano which is famous for their lavender farms. We were there while the lavender was in full bloom.If you are planning a trip to Furano by train, be aware that the trains to Furano go very slowly.

Once we got to Farm Tomita, we had Yubari melon and enjoyed a cool, refreshing melon and milk soft cream.The lavender flowers were in full blooms and were beautiful, but it was a hot, hot day! As I mentioned earlier, the trains run slowly and there are not that many trains that run between Furano and Sapporo and back. We had a long wait between train transfers. It isn’t that easy to maximize one’s travel time to Furano. If I were to return, a better idea would be do take a trip there by bus or car. I think there were probably a lot of other things to see in the area but we were limited by our train time so we just stopped at Farm Tomita to see the famous lavenders.

After we got back to Sapporo, we met up with some Hawaii friends who just arrived that evening and we finally got to eat something other than ramen for dinner. We had dinner at a local izakaya (Japanese pub) and ate all kinds of yummy things. More than the food, which I did love–I loved the shoyu bottle!  It is a squeezable bottle that releases the shoyu drop by drop so that you don’t overpour the shoyu. I went to the supermarket later in the trip and bought a bottle for me to bring home.  Awesome day exploring Hokkaido.