Kevin in Sapporo

I will be spending this weekend in Sapporo, located on the northern island of Hokaido.  This is evidently Japan's 5th largest city, and you know?  It feels fifth largest city-ish to me.

This weekend will also be exciting as I'm staying in a capsule hotel.  Yup, it looks pretty much like in the pics on that page.  This will be...  interesting.  It's actually pretty cool.  Clean, relatively quiet and well-located.  Will go into detail later!

So, Sapporo.  I only got in around 2pm, but I think I'm going to like this city.  It's still quite large, but it's WAY more organized than Tokyo (or most other cities for that matter).  It was laid out in the late 1800's, with the help of American city planners (USA!  USA!  USA!), and is organized on a grid.  Just line up the letters with the numbers and you know where you are!  Or where you want to go!  It actually has kind of a Denver feel to me, which may say more about me misremembering Denver than it does about the state of the city here.  But whatever.  It seems like a very comfortable, welcoming city.

After taking the commuter rail from the airport (about 35 minutes), I found my hotel and went out to find lunch.  I found a really cute little shop where I got a rice bowl with pork and pickled radish.  Simple, cheap (like 350YEN) and TASTY!  Very happy with that little meal.  The proprietor was very nice, and seemed a little impressed with my Japanese!  It turns out that pork is BUTA.  I, uh, accidentally put a P at the beginning there.  TOTALLY different word.  My bad!  Lesson learned, though.  I also practiced "oishiideshita", which I think means tasted good.  I think.  It's hopefully close enough.  I guess I could have said "kore wa oishiidesu", but I wanted to say it after the fact.

I do have more pictures, but since my stuff is in the locker downstairs (this capsule hotel has a locker room in B1 (basement), capsules on F1 - F6, and Japanese showers on F7 (yup, this is about what it looks like)) I can't post them now.  Hopefully later.

Tonight I'll probably head down to Sapporo Station, which is kind of the center of town.  The weather is amazing here.  Nice and cool (though a bit breezy), with a few inches of snow on the ground!