sempre pizza, our guilty ashikawan pleasure

once again we’ve fallen behind in our posting schedule.  for me this tends to happen once i start a stretch of back to back riding days which seems to render me completely useless past dinner (or breakfast since it’s technically my first meal of the day).  after a stretch of 7 days on the mountain out of the past 9 days and 5 of those being decent powder days in a row, i’ve decided to forgo yet another 10+cm day at kiroro in lieu of a slower paced day to relax and catch up on my posts.  and then the inadvertent post-breakfast dessert happened.  after a delicious yakisoba & okonomiyaki meal, we wandered past a mochi shop and asked for two skewers for an afternoon snack while we work on our blog back at the hotel.  we were told to wait on the red velvet bench as she picks our sticks out from the display cabinet.  five minutes later, she comes out with a tray of green tea and our mochi sticks.  my god.  i’m not hungry.  but i eat it anyways.  and it’s good

now i’m sitting in our lobby, since wifi sucks on the guestroom levels, and i’m dozing off in front of my laptop as three chinese girls are sitting across from me, silently eating their ice cream cones (it’s -4 and snowing outside) while each of them are on their phones.  thank you social media.

so anyways, onto sempre pizza, another one of our guilty pleasures from the aeon mall in asahikawa.  this feels very much like our breakup tub of ice cream (no, i’ve never done that before.  i just know lots of emotional men) as we were wasting away in the snow/rain.  plus, we’ve missed our vancouver pizza joints that we’ve gotten used to frequenting.

it was next door to the mos burger which we’ve been diligently holding off from eating.  with pizzas ranging from 400 to 900 yen each, that’s pretty awesome value.  in comparison, a donburi at any of the stalls in this mall will start in the 700 yen range.  so our valentine’s day meal picks were the potato (ham, potato, cream sauce, mozzarella) and japonaize (gouda, corn, bacon, seaweed, spicy mayo).  both very different from each other and dericious, as the japanese would say.

this instantly became our fallback meal once the storms kicked in and we didn’t want to walk 15 minutes to an eatery that either didn’t exist or didn’t have a 4 hour wait (yes, an izakaya turned us away at 7pm on a monday and told us to come back at 11pm).

it’s pretty hard to have a bad meal in japan.  though we kind of bastardized our diet by excluding the local fare, it was definitely satisfying to mix it up.  and for a cheap fast food option, this was great.  i can’t recall if a $7 thin crust pizza exists back home.  with all that said, can someone reading this please indulge in a bufala/via tevere pie for us and please include gratuitous crust shots.