Sapporo - Continued

I'm going to squeeze the rest of our Sapporo trip into one post because I'm anxious to move on and blog about our following trip to Mt Fuji...

So, on day two we slept in and then made our way to the Sapporo Brewery. We spent most of the day there because there was so much to do...

Sapporo Brewery

First we went to the beer museum.

Museums can be challenging, since we can't read anything, but Chris was kind enough to be my tour guide:)

Our favorite part was the little displays about how beer was made. They looked like a children's cartoon!

It's a beautiful brewery. This is the tasting room.

Afterwards we went to one of the restaurants there at the brewery for the Ghengis Khan... Lamb and vegetable barbecue. It was delicious.

Outside the brewery there was a festival going on. There were drummers...

and dancers...

and lots of beer... We stayed for quite a while watching the various performances and eating some of the best soft serve ice cream ever.

Afterwards, we caught a bus back to town, spent some time in the Sapporo Factory (it's just a neat mall with a ton of cool shops, including a bunch of outdoor gear stores) and grabbed dinner.

We also found this great little observatory that was in the building next to our hotel.

They had a coffee shop/bar at the top and lots of comfy seats to sit and watch the sunset.

I had Chris take this picture (obviously).

The third day we were in Sapporo we got an all day bus/subway pass and really traveled all over.

First we went to the Olympic Jump Stadium from the 1972 Winter Olympics. The bus dropped us off in the middle of nowhere and we had about a 10 minute walk to the stadium. There was this map near the bus stop... it would have been nice to have been able to read it!

In spite of the map, we didn't have any trouble finding the stadium.

We took a chair lift to the top.

There's a whole host of reasons why I'm not an olympic ski jumper, but I think this downhill view has to be pretty high on the list.

I'll have to stick to the ski jumping games that they had in the museum! I'm a pretty good virtual athlete!

They had a ton of olympic games to play - hockey, bobsledding, ice skating, speed skating, cross country skiing... we had quite a bit of fun.

Our next stop was the Historic Village of Hokkaido. They took a bunch of historic buildings from all over the island and placed them together in this historic town.

We just walked all over and toured the different buildings...

At the fishing village we got to try the traditional backpacks that they used to carry the fish. They were about as uncomfortable as you could get. I think I'll stick with my own backpack...

This photographer's studio was pretty cool. The second story room had tons of light from the glass roof, and there were black and white curtains that could be arranged to give just the right lighting for the portraits.

This is the martial arts gymnasium in one of the old schools.

Next, we went to the sake museum. It was pretty small and I only took the one picture inside, but we were able to taste a few different types of sake. I didn't think I liked sake, but after tasting a few from here I'm reevaluating that... they had some pretty good ones.

Sapporo's clock tower. Apparently, based on the announcements in the bus when we drove by, this is Sapporo's most famous site. The clock was made in Boston.

Ramen ally, downtown in the entertainment district. There are about 6 ramen restaurants crammed in this tiny ally. We chose one at random.

I love Japanese ramen. It's especially good in the wintertime. It's okay in the summer too, but it got pretty hot in this tiny restaurant with a hot bowl of ramen and no A/C.

The next day we got up early and caught the train back home. I love Sapporo. I can't wait to go back.

We didn't have any lunch packed up for the return trip home, so we had to buy a lunch from the food cart on the train. The beef lunch sounded better than the other lunches with candied herring, but it was still a little hard to handle, especially that long thing in the middle that looked like a tail... Lesson learned. Next time we'll pack sandwiches.

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.

We're Home!!

All our household goods arrived in Japan only a couple days after I went back to the States, so Chris was stuck at home with the movers to get it all unloaded and put away. He did most of the work, and I organized a little and rearranged when I got home to finish it off. Here are a few before and after pictures...

This is the foyer of our building... I didn't take an "after" picture, but it's cleared out now:).

This is our indoor storage closet... we would be lost without it! I spent a solid day putting shelves together and organizing this mess.

Messy, cluttered living room...

Nice, clean living room...

Oh, the kitchen... what a nightmare.

The kitchen was the first room I tackled.

The office/guest room had become a dumping ground...

Now we actually use the office!

Our only bathroom (I'm still getting used to only one bathroom).

And, finally, the bedroom.

My new favorite room of the house... It makes me want to take a nap just looking at it;).