weren’t happy, the room had cost us £46 at the end of the day and all we wanted was to be warm. We ended up changing rooms and after a good hour of being in the room the air con suddenly started blasting out really hot air - thank god!!!

We also had to venture out for dinner and didn’t want to go too far due to the artic conditions outside. We’d read that the speciality dish of the area was noodle soup, not surprising seeing how cold it was! The first few places we went into didn’t do veggie, they really don’t seem to understand the concept of not eating fish let alone meat. Eventually we found a noodle bar with a very friendly guy who tried his best with English and we tried our best with guide book Japanese and hey presto, we were promised veggie noodle soup. Even though we had negotiated this meal with the waiter we still had to go to the vending machine to pay and get a ticket for

which meal we wanted - they’re vending machine mad over here!!! Anyway the soup was great, I’m not sure the stock was entirely veggie but you wouldn’t be eating anything otherwise, so what can you do? It was just what we each needed a big hot steaming bowl of veggie noodle soup, we did our best at slurping, as this is the way the Japanese eat it. It’s really funny to watch and listen to, you see all of these well dressed people slurping and splashing their way through soup, I guess it’s like when you see Italians eating spaghetti!!!

After our soup we braved the cold one last time back to our hotel which was toasty warm by the time we got back as there was no way we were turning off the hot air once it had got going! We spent the rest of the night making use of the free internet.