#202 Day 21: Kutchan - First Bar Crawl

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The Road to Hokkaido Tour 2006
Day 21: Kutchan

There are a lot of cool bars in Hirafu because it’s a resort village. But most of the people staying at the hotels in Hirafu don’t come down to Kutchan so the bars here aren’t really aimed at tourists. And Kutchan is a pretty small town, so I wasn’t expecting much when we went out last night. Some izakayas, a few old snack bars ... that’s about it.
I was genuinely surprised by what we found ... there were some cool places after all.

A few doors down from our place we went into a building which had several small bars inside. The only bar which sounded lively was the Korean one on the third floor. But we listened at the door and the only sounds were of old men singing and young women giggling so it was a definitely a hostess bar.

Next door there was another building full of bars. First we went into Bagus café. This was an Asian restaurant. In Japan when people say Asian they usually mean what I would call South East Asian – Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia etc with a little bit of whatever else that seems to fit the style thrown in ... Polynesia, South America ...
I liked the design of Bagus café but I think they need to study up on their l’s and r’s.

Next we decided to go into Vincent Valentain. The reason we went inside was because it said “shot bar” on the sign. Shot bar basically means it’s not a hostess bar, snack bar or izakaya. When I opened the door I almost shut it again quickly and ran away. It looked like it was a hostess bar after all ... but the bartender was male so maybe it wasn’t ...

The bartender must’ve smiled signaling that it was safe to enter because we ended up going inside and sitting at the bar.
I ended up really liking this place. It turns out it is a regular bar – just with very odd decorations. It looks like a love hotel but it’s so bizarre that I liked it. And I really liked the bartender – he was so friendly. He said the name of the bar was from a character in Final Fantasy number 3 I think he said it was... I can’t quite remember.

Next we went into Be.
This bar had the smallest and wonkiest pool table I’ve ever seen, a dart board, a screen playing a movie.
There were some other customers there too – but they weren’t very friendly and neither was the bartender.

And then by the time we got to the final bar I’d had too many drinks to remember to take any photos. But anyway, I’ll definitely go back there. The bartender was really nice and friendly ... she even gave me a birthday present. I was pretty happy about that.
I think the bar was called Eddy which she said means something about rafting.

And today I did some more cleaning. Some people on YouTube asked what cleaner I was using. First we bought this cleaner. It’s called “Magic Clean”. That quickly ran out and we bought this one called “abura yogore senzai”. It’s cheaper than “Magic Clean” but seems to work just as well. I didn’t actually look closely at the cleaner before I saw those comments on YouTube. My boyfriend just said “this is the strongest one” and put it in the basket. It turns out it’s oven cleaner.
As for being all natural ... definitely not. I think if I used these cleaners with the windows closed I would be dead by now.
Ideally the people living here before would’ve cleaned regularly and it wouldn’t need these strong chemicals. I think they might’ve been smokers and that stuff oozing off the walls is tar from tobacco. Mmm lovely.