Back at the lab with a cup of instant ramen I planned a trip in a couple of hours, just like that - opened skyscanner, saw some affordable plane tickets to Sapporo (110 euros for a roundtrip considering the usual Japanese prices for transportation was hard to believe), struggled a bit with finding cheap accommodation as next week turned out to be some huge Chinese/Korean/Taiwanese national holiday but finally managed to book three different places that I really liked, located quite far from each other though. That posed a problem of travelling around the island, but gladly I remembered someone from the dorm praising a very profitable unlimited 5-day Hokkaido bus pass for about 70 euros only so that solved every remaining doubt in a second. Even if it didn't and I had to hitch-hike, I was seriously ready to throw myself anywhere on earth with an average temperature lower than 30 degrees C with no further questions asked. It’s amazing how prolonged exposure to elevated humidity coupled with excessive heat can change people’s behaviour completely (or rather, strip away anyone’s remaining sanity).
In the morning on the first of August I packed three T-shirts, a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, a windbreaker, 3 pieces of underwear, 3 pairs of socks and one toothbrush into a hardly-4-kilo bag and dispatched to Narita airport for my full-9-day escape. The number of clothes I took with me is no joke - just try living in a meditative zombie-self-denial state for three weeks in Tokyo summer and you’ll feel like your survival wouldn’t really depend on any earthy belongings anymore. Physical objects lose meaning. And people wonder why Japanese are all about minimalism.