Sapporo - Day 1

Chris got Monday and Tuesday off this year for the fourth of July. We decided on Friday morning that we couldn't let our four day weekend go to waste so we located some maps and information about Sapporo and planned a last minute trip there for the weekend.

Sapporo is on the northernmost island of Japan - Hokkaido. You can get there either by train (they have tunneled under the ocean) or ferry. We've heard that taking the ferry is nice because if you get a group of people together you can split the cost of shipping a car over there. We decided that it would be faster, easier and cheaper (since it was just us two) to take the train.

These were our train tickets. Sometimes you get lucky and the man at the ticket counter will print your tickets in English... We weren't that lucky. But if you study them enough you can pretty much figure out what's going on... We have three tickets - One ticket says we're going all the way from Misawa to Sapporo, and then we have one ticket for each leg of the trip (Misawa to Hakodate and Hakodate to Sapporo). This top ticket is for the train from Hakodate to Sapporo. It states that we are leaving July 3 (7-3) at 13:29 (arriving at 16:56) on train 11. We are in car 2, row 3, seat C and it's a non-smoking train. I'm pretty clueless about the rest of the ticket, but that stuff doesn't matter.

The trains are really comfortable and surprisingly roomy, if you get a seat. On the first leg of the trip from Misawa to Hakodate the train was standing room only, and we spent about three hours in between cars, where the bathroom and trashcans are. There was a whole bunch of people crammed in there with us. We just laid our suitcase down and used it as a bench. It was okay... we survived. But it was so nice to have an actual seat for the rest of the way.

It was kind of a long train ride - it takes about 7 hours to get from Misawa to Sapporo because there is no bullet train up there yet.

This was our hotel, Hotel Gracery. It was nice and had a great location. It connected directly to the train station and there was a subway station on the same block. It made it really easy to get around the downtown area.

The rooms were SO small. They seemed much bigger in the pictures...

It was supposed to thunderstorm all weekend, but we didn't get a drop of rain on us. The first night we were in town we walked to the TV tower in Odori park so we could get a view of the city.

It was beautiful. This is looking down at Odori park. Someday we'll be back to hike in those mountains...

Because it was so nice outside, there were beer gardens all over the city. This one was at the base of the TV tower. We took one look at this and realized we didn't need to go any farther to find dinner...
For 3,500 yen/person we got all the meat and vegetables we could grill as well as unlimited beer. The weather was perfect, the food and beer were delicious, there was Beatles music playing overhead (seems to be the music of choice for Japan) and we spent the rest of the evening hanging out here.
I think it would have been so much easier to grill using some tongs and a spatula, but the chopsticks worked okay.

Odori park... We walked in the park for a while, then called it a night.