I nearly missed the flight to Chitose this morning!

I set the alarm to wake up at 6.30am so I can go have breakfast at 7am and check our by 8am. However, I got a call from Epson’s General Manager to ask me where am I. I casually answered in the room and I looked at the time, it was 8.37am!

He told me that they are on the bus already and on the way to the airport. The headcount was wrongly counted as well because there was another person on the bus, taking my headcount.

I quickly brushed my teeth and grabbed my stuff to check out. Thank God I packed my stuff last night!

I took the taxi to the airport and it cost 4,810 Yen for a 15 minute ride! Epson reimbursed my taxi fare because they said they counted the headcount wrongly. I was truly sorry about it and he said things like this happen. Anyway, I managed to get to the airport in time and the gate wasn’t ready for boarding.

The flight to Chitose took about 90 minutes and the moment we got our luggage, we saw snow! It’s been a while since I experienced snow and it really was a nice experience.

We went to a hotel nearby for lunch and we played with snow for a while as well. We left to Epson’s Plant in Chitose after lunch.

The presentation was not easy to understand because they spoke Japanese and the translator couldn’t really speak English. I recorded everything and I hope I’ll be able to decode what he said.

When they opened the blinds (it was closed during the presentation), it was snowing VERY heavily, just like the first snow I experienced back in Hull. Epson had a large field in front of their office and we played more snow and took more pictures there.

After nearly 30 minutes of taking pictures and stuff, we took the bus and went to Sapporo.

We got into Sapporo and checked into the hotel. The hotel is pretty strategic but the room is small. I’m going to be sleeping one night here anyway. We had 2 hours of free time so I went to this underground shopping centre and got some souvenirs. I came back to the hotel and then we took a 10 minutes walk to a restaurant for dinner.

The meal we had was pretty good. VERY good in fact. It was an 11 course crab meal, since Hokkaido is famous for their crabs. We were really stuffed like mad. After dinner, when we went out from the hotel, it was snowing heavily, very very heavily!

We walked to a pub nearby and had some drinks. The pub was really small, with only 10 seats available but the pub was really nice! We practically had the whole pub to ourselves.

We’ll be going on a tour in Sapporo tomorrow and leaving for Tokyo in the afternoon. I won’t repeat my mistake again. Will be waking up really early tomorrow!!!