Thursday afternoon.

Thursday afternoon the  27th. 

A few remarks about our first afternoon in Asahikawa. Walking from the station to the hostel we got a little confused about where we were on the map and it took us a while to find the hostel (the streets were numbered 1to 8 West-East and 1-9 South - North, we had got our x and y coordinates incorrect and our starting point was not were we thought we were on the map). After that small misadventure we found our hostel which was described on a hostel website as 'devastatingly hip'. The couple that run the hostel Yukari and Isao are lovely and have been very nice to us - more on that later. After dropping off our bags it was time to find a late lunch. The task of trying to find vegetarian food in Japan is always a challenge but we were extremely lucky and found a restaurant called Chaos=Heaven. This restaurant plays  jazz and reggae music and has  picture of Bob Marly on the tree centrepiece which is made up of a number of tree branches that have been tied together. This cafe sells one soup with slight variations, one of these variations  is to have no meat!  The name of the vegetarian option was 'Vegetables for health' you could choose the amount of rice you wanted and David ordered more servings of egg so that we could try and have m ore protein. This soup was fantastic!! It was full of different vegetables cooked in different ways, for instance the pumpkin, eggplant, carrot and potato were roasted in the oven, the asparagus, tomato and cabbage were blanched and the okra and capsicum were uncooked. Um um!! (we are going back tonight to have some more as it is our last night in Asahikawa.) 

After lunch we walked over to the park, now I have heard of people going to parks and feeding birds but usually they are swans, ducks or pigeons, but not in Japan. We saw a lady throwing bread into the air to feed the eagles (washi).  She would through the bread up and the eagle would swoop down to snatch it out of the air. 

After going back to the hostel for an afternoon snooze we went out in search of dinner we certainly had less luck this time round in finding vegetarian food. We ended up going to Lawsons (a omnipresent  convenient store that  live up to its tittle and is very convenient). We bought tofu, miso, noodles and beer for dinner and eggs, bread, bananas, yogurt  for breakfast the next day. With rumbly tummies we went back to the hostel  and cooked up a little feast. In the tiny kitchen ( I will upload some photos of the hostel at some point so you can have a look).  With full tummies and a plan to go out to explore Beie the next day we went to bed