00:00:00 John Daub: Welcome to Abashiri. This is Memanbetsu Airport (Memanbetsu Kūkō). First time I've ever been at this airport. It's small. Not many gates. Not a lot to see here. Just picking up my luggage. I like the signs in English. It says welcome. I feel welcomed. You can see what's famous in this area by looking at the signs. Ice is famous here. Ice is very famous here.

00:00:29 John Daub: Oh, there's my suitcase. Alright. Welcome to eastern Hokkaido. This is cool. Very, very cool. I'm on the other side of Japan. Beef is also quite famous here, as you can see from the cattle on the signboard. And also the signs for yakiniku (grilled meat). That looks good. I'm in the right place.

00:01:13 John Daub: Let's get out of here and take a look. The airport. Very cool. This is basically like every other regional airport that I've ever been to in Japan. The layout seems to be pretty much the same. You have the boards as soon as you come out, of course showing food. There's usually a convenience store. Hot coffee. Very nice. So you can run in and grab something before your flight. Check-in is right next to the exit gate. Departures and arrivals are all on the same floor. Very cool.

00:02:10 John Daub: There's actually a bus that will take you downtown to the drift icebreaker terminal. That's actually where I want to go. I don't have a ticket yet. Drift icebreaker terminal. I guess there's not a lot of time. I wanted to show you a little bit of this airport before I leave. There's a lot of snow. I tried to Instagram Live my arrival here. So I'm going to go upstairs and just take a look at this airport before I go into the city. I have a feeling though that since there aren't that many flights to Abashiri—there's like three daily flights here—there's not going to be a lot of buses. So I better catch one and go to the area. It's cold. As soon as I got off the airplane, I could feel the cold air rushing into the gate.

00:03:17 John Daub: Here's the departure area. People are getting on the flight that I arrived on. Up here, there's some shops where you can buy gifts to go back home. I like to come up here to take a look at the gifts so I know what to get people back home. And it's a lot of the Hokkaido gifts that you would find in Sapporo. I'm seeing it right away. There's a lot of Royce chocolate. I love these. These are the chocolate potato chips. So you get salty and sweet. I really like that. That's about 777 yen. Hokkaido cheesecake. That looks really good too. These are things I'm going to have to get on the way back. Look at how good that looks. Oh yeah. I will be getting one of those for me.

00:04:19 John Daub: Haha. There's a couple of shops. I like this. Apparently crab is also popular. Crab. This is a pretty stylish little shop. It says Marine Hokkaido. That's the name of this shop. And Marine Hokkaido has the Koibito white, the white lover cookies which are really good. These white lover cookies look like this. White chocolate. Very crispy. I love these. And there's the crab sign right up there. You can see. I guess you can get a lot of seafood here. Very cool. These are good too. You see these? These are freeze-dried strawberries covered in white chocolate. It looks really nice.

00:05:19 John Daub: So that's what it looks like. There's the departure lounge. And there's some restaurants here. This is an antenna shop for [inaudible]. Waterproof headphones allowed in onsen (hot springs) and public baths. I don't think so. Thanks for the Super Chat. This is kani ramen (crab ramen). Whoa. This I will have to try when I leave. Okay. This is kani ramen. I will try this one before I leave. I'm going to have to get here early. And this is zaru soba (cold buckwheat noodles). Looks good. Then there's another shop here. And this also has really good looking food. I didn't expect such a stylish restaurant here in a regional airport, but they happen to have one or two. You can see it looks like a comfortable place to wait for your airplane. Filika. That's the name of the shop. Filika. Hokkaido curry. That looks good too.

00:06:40 John Daub: I don't see a platform where you can go out and see the airport. So I'm just going to go. I'm going to go down now. It's nice to be in Hokkaido. Oh, the bento was really good. I will post a picture of the bento. Thanks for the Super Chat for the crab ramen. I will get that when I go back or I'll get it in the city. So I'm going to put that to good use. Thank you for that Super Chat. So I think there is an observation deck. Transportation is limited. And because I'm really far up north now, it's probably going to get dark a little bit faster.

00:07:32 John Daub: All right. Here it is. Observation deck. So let's take a really quick look up here. It's kind of spooky. It doesn't seem like a lot of people are going up this way, but we're going to take a look really quick just to give this airport some respect. I brought my luggage with me. Hang in there. We're almost there. Okay. Now we're going to get some real cold blasts of air. Actually, I'm going to leave my luggage. There's a video camera here. Let's just go out and feel how cold it is. Okay. Push. You ready? Whoa. This is cold. Ah, the wind. There's snow. This is not Tokyo anymore.

00:09:02 John Daub: Okay. So let's take a look at the planes. Hey, BSFEP. Thank you. Welcome to East Hokkaido. We're here. We did it. This is so cool. You jump on an airplane and then you're on the other side of the country. Wow. That's the plane I came on. And this is another propeller plane, probably going to Sapporo. There's people coming from somewhere local in Hokkaido. It's a small prop plane. There's another JAL plane. And you can see this is the airport: Memanbetsu Airport. This is gonna be quite an experience. So I have a booking at a hotel. Check-in's at 3. It's a little bit after 2 p.m. right now. I believe there are buses but the train station is a 10-minute walk.

00:10:01 John Daub: Nausea brought a good meal and beer. Thank you, my friend, because I'm gonna need it to stay warm. Now on the other side, they wrote it in Japanese kanji. You can see that's the Memanbetsu Airport. So I'll go on the other side and see if I can see this. We're right now on the observation deck. It is minus 10, they said. You know, the flight attendant spoke a little bit of English and she didn't have to because I could speak in Japanese just fine to her, but she's like, in English, because Hokkaido is very cold, take care of your body. She's okay. Thank you. Take care of my body. Um, I have two jackets, lots of layers. Let's get back inside. Oh, it says pull but it was locked out for a second. Let's get back in. Ah, nice and warm.

00:11:10 John Daub: Hokkaido. What do you have, tires in here? That's the observation deck. Let's go outside now at the front door. It's pretty cool. So this is a regional airport in Hokkaido. Thank you, Eric. I'm keeping very warm from the exercise now of carrying my bags around. I'm looking forward to checking in. But I also contacted the prison, Abashiri Prison, to film there. It's actually a prison museum. And I'm gonna maybe go there today to go meet the people there. So I'm gonna go meet with the people there at the prison museum either today or I'm gonna be filming it tomorrow morning. But this is cool. Get on an airplane. You're on the other side of the country. It wasn't that long. I think it was a little less than two hours.

00:12:14 John Daub: Okay. Turn the camera around. This says here, it's English here. Welcome to Memanbetsu Airport. Mind your step. The floors are wet. Really? That's very nice of them to give a welcome mat like that. In many languages too. Impressive. It's cold. Alright. And then the bus is right here to Abashiri. Let's see how much it costs. Memanbetsu. It goes all the way to Abashiri Kanko Hotel. That's where the prison is actually. So 910 yen or about $9 to get there. Let me see if I can see the sign of the airport. Doesn't seem like the bus is taking off anytime soon. I don't think anyone is going to take my baggage. I hope not. This is the front of the airport. Welcome to Memanbetsu Airport from Abashiri Regional Airport, Hokkaido. Yeah. There's a couple of flights to go here. I came in through JAL. You can see what it looks like coming in through here. There's the departures in the green. And then there's the sign for Memanbetsu Airport. Very nice. And I'm going to be taking this bus going towards Abashiri. The bus right here. Seems like they're taking it off right now. There are taxis but not many. That's good to note. There's some museums I can see here. A beautiful sunset. And then there's ice. Lots and lots of ice. Boom. Icebreaker terminal. Bring it on.

00:14:33 John Daub: Okay. So. Please take your ticket with you. Excuse me. Should I buy a ticket first? No. I'll take it. Oh, I see. Okay. Thank you. Information. Pay after you get off the bus. That's good information. Not written in any guidebooks. We're making it as we go along. I'm going to take this bus. He said to put the bags underneath the bus. This is a DIY job. See, you wouldn't want to be you. Alright. Let's get in. This is Abashiri in Hokkaido. There's a link in the description to the map I'm on. Very nice rack for my bag. So it says it's 910 yen to get to the center of Abashiri. I don't know how much time it takes. But this is pretty cool. I'm glad that I was able to share this experience with you.

00:16:11 John Daub: I've never been to East Hokkaido before. So it's quite exciting. It's actually 2:37 p.m. And my check-in at the hotel is at 3 p.m. I will stream from the hotel. Because this is all funded by Patreon. I stayed at a hotel that's a step above where I normally would have stayed. Actually, this is the high season. So it's about $80. I mean, it's not like 5 stars. It might not even be 4 stars. I think it's more like 2.5. But inside the hotel, there's an onsen. So there's a bath. So hopefully I'll be able to show you a little bit of what the city's like today. I don't know when the sun sets here in Abashiri. In fact, most of you who are watching this have never heard of Abashiri, which makes me really happy because I was able to take you to a place I've never been to. It's totally off the grid.

00:17:15 John Daub: There are like three flights a day on JAL. And I believe ANA, the other carrier, has flights here. So there might be 5 or 6 flights from Tokyo. And then there are flights from other areas of Japan. But Tokyo has probably the most. Tokyo and Sapporo. So there you go. It is snowing a little bit. If you saw me a couple of minutes ago, my breath... It's like smoke. I bet you if I threw a bucket of water out tonight, it would just freeze in mid-air or something. It's really cold. And this is the kind of experience that I was looking for. Kitami (Kitami-shi) is also a regional city that's close to here. Kitami is a little bit bigger than Abashiri. Abashiri is on the coast. Dimjardo, thank you very much. Abashiri is on the coast and Kitami is inland. But Kitami, I think, is a little bit bigger. Abashiri is famous for ice. Lots of ice. And the prison. And I'm going to be going to the prison tomorrow at the top with the PR team to see about filming. I've already been sending emails back and forth to get permission to film there. And they've given me permission. Just had to narrow down the time. It's really exciting. This is the kind of stuff that I like to do.

00:18:30 John Daub: And this episode is going to be on the Only in Japan main channel as soon as I can edit it. And I'm going to be doing Only in Japan live streams. And doing some special live streams for people on Patreon. Because this trip... Sometimes the Wi-Fi will automatically connect and not actually log on because you need a password or to give your email address to log on to the Wi-Fi. The auto connect is always a problem for live streamers. I'm Raj. Thank you from Norway. Thank you very much. You're having an awesome trip. I appreciate that. The reception might not be good because once again, I'm in the very north of Hokkaido. So I didn't use up all my bandwidth. I have about 40 gigabytes left. It's the beginning of February. I got lots of bandwidth up here. Caroline, thank you very much. By the way, I know Caroline is watching right now. You're coming to Japan really soon. I saw your message. So thank you very much. I will try to respond. I try to respond to all the messages on Patreon and on Instagram as fast as I can. Facebook's a little bit harder. Yeah. But I appreciate everybody joining me on this trip around the airport. We're getting... The bus is getting ready to go. It's starting to get full of people. People who are on that flight that I showed you before, the propeller plane. And outside the window, there's a lot of snow. So I will see you in Abashiri from the hotel or somewhere nearby. Okay.