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I'm in Sapporo
I have sniffed some unsecured wireless by Sumikawa station here in Sapporo so I am updating quickly by pasting what I wrote on the train today:
---
My train has AC power after all, so I am typing this entry despite that I have no clue if/when it will ever get uploaded.
Thursday/Friday
I woke up at 6am on Thursday (well, I woke up at 2am and made myself sleep until 6am). I had a few things to accomplish for the day -- get my train tickets to Hokkaido, get lunch, get a new memory card for my camera, go to the Fighters game at the Tokyo Dome, and a few shopping things to do for the house (toilet paper and shampoo).
Of course, I spent a while researching trains and then was ready to leave around 11am... at which point I realized that Koshien was on BS2 for an hour (BS1 and BS2 are the only stations I get clearly on satellite, my terrestrial reception is terrible and I don't have cable. Given that I don't really watch TV this suits me most of the time, BS1 shows pro baseball every night but I can't choose what team is all), so I sat and watched that, Tokaidai Sagami vs. Kyushu Gakuin. Tokaidai has a well-known young sidearm pitcher named Shinta Hifumi (noted because his last name is spelled 1-2-3 in kanji) who could probably go pro next year if he wanted. So I watched him, and then at noon I went out, expecting it to be about an hour to get lunch and train tickets and a few other things, maybe an hour and a half.
Lunch was first at Heiroku. I ate 7 plates of stuff, the sushi guy was a new face, but that is typical at Heiroku really. The only steady face the entire 3 years I've been going there has been Fukumoto, one of the women who works there at weekday lunchtimes and mostly does the register (she was there). I kind of miss how it was back in my GEOS days when they had these young funny guys behind the counter rather than this new wave of older serious dudes who don't talk much at all.
Then Daiso, just to get some plastic bags in preparation for a rough spell of games in Akita and Morioka, assuming they don't rain out. You'd be surprised how many uses there are for garbage bags here. These are going to be for putting my bags in to keep them dry, maybe for sitting on, etc, we'll see.
A stop in at the Dan bookstore yielded the Koshien magazine for this year, so now I have all the rosters at the drop of a hat... now that I'm also not sitting around watching the tourney anymore.
And then the train tickets.
I expected it to take all of 5 minutes -- I'd go in like "I wanna go to Hokkaido, I looked up time tables and these are the trains I want to take" and the clerk would go "okay" and make me tickets and that'd be that.
Of course, the clerk was trying to figure out all kinds of creative things I could do so that my trip would be cheaper, like the various Hokkaido/Aomori "free ticket" things and whatnot. But I was like "Dude, I'm going to Sapporo, and then after that I am going to Akita, and after that Morioka, and I might work trips into Yamagata and Aomori along the way..." at which point I think her head exploded. She looked valiantly through all of her books for something that would help this poor gaijin save a few bucks, told me about how if I didn't mind taking some other trains instead of the shinkansen to Hachinohe, etc, there were many cheap options I could do...
Eventually I just said "Look, it's okay, I would rather have the freedom to go around all over, can we just make a one-way trip for tomorrow and I'll figure out the rest later?"
My original trip had me on a shinkansen from Omiya to Hachinohe at like 9:22am->12:03pm, a tokkyu from Hachinohe to Hakodate from 12:16->15:12, then a tokkyu from Hakodate to Sapporo from 15:23->18:59, putting most of my trip in the daylight hours and getting to Sapporo at dinner time (or halfway through game time) but also requiring me to get up and be at Akabane station at like 8:45am.
Well, that ALSO wouldn't work because the two morning shinkansen that would get me to Hachinohe in time were almost full (one was full, one had a handful of middle seats left). AND there were no reserved seats open on the Hachinohe-Hakodate arm.
So I said screw it and let's move to the later one I'd looked at, because the most important part to me is Hachinohe-Hakodate -- that is where we take the train between Honshu and Hokkaido! Which I personally think is the most exciting thing, though maybe in person it will be not all that exciting at all, who knows.
So here is the itinerary I got. By the time I upload this, in theory I will already be in Sapporo, but who knows:
Akabane->Omiya 10:54->11:09 (local train)
Omiya->Hachinohe 11:22->14:03 (shinkansen, reserved aisle seat)
Hachinohe->Hakodate 14:14->17:33 (tokkyu, reserved window seat)
Hakodate->Sapporo 17:55->21:31 (tokkyu... NO reserved seats open)
Sundown these days is about 6pm.
Now, the train that runs between Hakodate and Sapporo is a 5-car train and 3 cars are reserved and 2 are unreserved. I was like "So I could end up standing for 3 hours?" and she's like "That is a possibility... I recommend you run to the train and line up as quickly as possible."
Sigh.
So we'll see. I'm still apprehensive about that but also hopeful, like that maybe the reason there are no open seats is because there are no open seats the WHOLE WAY between the two cities but maybe there are going to be dead portions where nobody is riding and that I can grab someone's seat when they get off, or something.
Still, going through all that took upwards of at least half an hour, maybe 45 minutes, so by the time I got through Yokado with my shampoo and toilet paper and headed home it was already past 2pm. Fighters game at 6pm, I thought doors were at 4pm, so I ended up leaving home around 3:30 to go down there, I got there at 4:10 and naturally the place was PACKED with people lining up, it turns out that for some stupid reason they were having Fighters AND Marines fans all go in through gate 25 for outfield unreserved seats, rather than Fighters at gate 25 and Marines at gate 11. I still don't know what was up with that, but it meant a RIDICULOUS line at gate 25.
I had thought of going to Akihabara on the way to the stadium to get my memory card but then thought I'd be late. When I saw the lines I briefly pondered it again but figured "I'll go buy my ticket and come back..." but there were STILL lines. Went to Yamashita bookstore, and all in all I didn't go into the stadium until like 4:40 or so; I could have easily done a detour to get a memory card, sigh. I came in and found a seat with Team 52, though I did go up to say hi to Ojisan. He was like "OMG you're here! I figured since you didn't show up in Chiba or the first two games here and you hadn't contacted me, you just up and moved back to the US to get married or whatever! WTF!" See, I had emailed Hiromi while in the US but she lives in Fukuoka this year now so apparently she didn't tell anyone else I was in the US. Whoops. I don't have Ojisan's PC email, just cellphone, so. I told him how I saw Sweeney and he thought it was really cool.
Did pinbadges and wandered around for a while before the game, got KFC for dinner because I actually like it in Japan. I saw Hichori's mom in the concourse and she said hi to me -- I was even wearing my Hichori shirt so maybe that's why she noticed me first :)
Apparently Wednesday was International Day again and there were lots of white people doing YMCA on the field again and they had an English announcer for the game and stuff on the boards in English... and my friends were like "Why were you not here yesterday to translate for us OMG!" and I'm like "...I guess I could have rushed here from the airport but..."
So yeah, there was a game. The Marines won 7-0. Masaru Nakamura started for us -- he's 18 years old, he'll be 19 in December, he was in high school last year. Yuki Karakawa started for the Marines, he just turned 21 in July. How nuts is THAT? Nakamura had a rough inning culminating in a grand slam by Saburo and things just kind of went downhill from there.
The Fighters got so few people on base that we couldn't do our special Tokyo Dome chance theme so we just did it for the entire 9th inning. I'm sure Shaggy was happy because he didn't have to call anything. (Shaggy being my nickname for one of the ouendan guys.) But BB the mascot came down in the 8th inning and even was in our row cheering with us! He took Junko's Kensuke Tanaka towel and was holding it. I'll post pictures of that to Marinerds when I can.
After the game I caught up with a few more people in the stands and talked to some who are going to the Akita and Morioka games so maybe I will see them in the outfield there too, that'd be nice.
The game ended around 9pm so I even got to Yodobashi Camera at 9:30 and got an SD card! It's so easy in Japan. I go up like "I have this camera, which cards can I use?" and they get out a paper and just say "Anything on this rack. The ones on sale are at the bottom if you're looking for something cheaper", we talked a bit about the read speed and all, and I get a 16GB card for 6500 yen.
I came home but ended up zonking out instead of packing. Whoops.
Which was the problem when I woke up at 7:30am and still needed to pack and get my act together to get out of the house by like 10:30. I have no idea how those 3 hours went by so fast but I had no time to write an update or do my blog or much of anything in that time, it was pretty weird.
But I'm on the train, which is what counts.
More later, I think.
----
Quickly to add to this, since there was no power on the trains from Hachinohe on upwards: taking the tunnel to Hokkaido was NOT exciting as hoped. But there was some beautiful scenery along the way, as well as some boring scenery as well. Shrug.
Getting a seat on that third train was no problem after all -- I don't think I ever saw anyone have to stand, the worst I saw was couples split up between a few rows, things like that. But with 20 minutes to spare I just threw my bags down on a seat, then wandered off to the bathroom. I already got my tickets back and I have reserved seats from here to Aomori. What I do after Aomori, I haven't decided yet (may go to Hirosaki, may not. I need the prefecture either way.)
I am going to go find my way to Eesha's place in a few -- and I may not really update this all weekend. What will probably happen is that I will type entries on my laptop and then will just upload them all when I get to the hotel in Akita on Monday night. Unless I do something silly like this some other time :)
I can read email on my phone -- gmail too -- and will probably be READING LJ but I will not be typing much into it, most likely.
---
My train has AC power after all, so I am typing this entry despite that I have no clue if/when it will ever get uploaded.
Thursday/Friday
I woke up at 6am on Thursday (well, I woke up at 2am and made myself sleep until 6am). I had a few things to accomplish for the day -- get my train tickets to Hokkaido, get lunch, get a new memory card for my camera, go to the Fighters game at the Tokyo Dome, and a few shopping things to do for the house (toilet paper and shampoo).
Of course, I spent a while researching trains and then was ready to leave around 11am... at which point I realized that Koshien was on BS2 for an hour (BS1 and BS2 are the only stations I get clearly on satellite, my terrestrial reception is terrible and I don't have cable. Given that I don't really watch TV this suits me most of the time, BS1 shows pro baseball every night but I can't choose what team is all), so I sat and watched that, Tokaidai Sagami vs. Kyushu Gakuin. Tokaidai has a well-known young sidearm pitcher named Shinta Hifumi (noted because his last name is spelled 1-2-3 in kanji) who could probably go pro next year if he wanted. So I watched him, and then at noon I went out, expecting it to be about an hour to get lunch and train tickets and a few other things, maybe an hour and a half.
Lunch was first at Heiroku. I ate 7 plates of stuff, the sushi guy was a new face, but that is typical at Heiroku really. The only steady face the entire 3 years I've been going there has been Fukumoto, one of the women who works there at weekday lunchtimes and mostly does the register (she was there). I kind of miss how it was back in my GEOS days when they had these young funny guys behind the counter rather than this new wave of older serious dudes who don't talk much at all.
Then Daiso, just to get some plastic bags in preparation for a rough spell of games in Akita and Morioka, assuming they don't rain out. You'd be surprised how many uses there are for garbage bags here. These are going to be for putting my bags in to keep them dry, maybe for sitting on, etc, we'll see.
A stop in at the Dan bookstore yielded the Koshien magazine for this year, so now I have all the rosters at the drop of a hat... now that I'm also not sitting around watching the tourney anymore.
And then the train tickets.
I expected it to take all of 5 minutes -- I'd go in like "I wanna go to Hokkaido, I looked up time tables and these are the trains I want to take" and the clerk would go "okay" and make me tickets and that'd be that.
Of course, the clerk was trying to figure out all kinds of creative things I could do so that my trip would be cheaper, like the various Hokkaido/Aomori "free ticket" things and whatnot. But I was like "Dude, I'm going to Sapporo, and then after that I am going to Akita, and after that Morioka, and I might work trips into Yamagata and Aomori along the way..." at which point I think her head exploded. She looked valiantly through all of her books for something that would help this poor gaijin save a few bucks, told me about how if I didn't mind taking some other trains instead of the shinkansen to Hachinohe, etc, there were many cheap options I could do...
Eventually I just said "Look, it's okay, I would rather have the freedom to go around all over, can we just make a one-way trip for tomorrow and I'll figure out the rest later?"
My original trip had me on a shinkansen from Omiya to Hachinohe at like 9:22am->12:03pm, a tokkyu from Hachinohe to Hakodate from 12:16->15:12, then a tokkyu from Hakodate to Sapporo from 15:23->18:59, putting most of my trip in the daylight hours and getting to Sapporo at dinner time (or halfway through game time) but also requiring me to get up and be at Akabane station at like 8:45am.
Well, that ALSO wouldn't work because the two morning shinkansen that would get me to Hachinohe in time were almost full (one was full, one had a handful of middle seats left). AND there were no reserved seats open on the Hachinohe-Hakodate arm.
So I said screw it and let's move to the later one I'd looked at, because the most important part to me is Hachinohe-Hakodate -- that is where we take the train between Honshu and Hokkaido! Which I personally think is the most exciting thing, though maybe in person it will be not all that exciting at all, who knows.
So here is the itinerary I got. By the time I upload this, in theory I will already be in Sapporo, but who knows:
Akabane->Omiya 10:54->11:09 (local train)
Omiya->Hachinohe 11:22->14:03 (shinkansen, reserved aisle seat)
Hachinohe->Hakodate 14:14->17:33 (tokkyu, reserved window seat)
Hakodate->Sapporo 17:55->21:31 (tokkyu... NO reserved seats open)
Sundown these days is about 6pm.
Now, the train that runs between Hakodate and Sapporo is a 5-car train and 3 cars are reserved and 2 are unreserved. I was like "So I could end up standing for 3 hours?" and she's like "That is a possibility... I recommend you run to the train and line up as quickly as possible."
Sigh.
So we'll see. I'm still apprehensive about that but also hopeful, like that maybe the reason there are no open seats is because there are no open seats the WHOLE WAY between the two cities but maybe there are going to be dead portions where nobody is riding and that I can grab someone's seat when they get off, or something.
Still, going through all that took upwards of at least half an hour, maybe 45 minutes, so by the time I got through Yokado with my shampoo and toilet paper and headed home it was already past 2pm. Fighters game at 6pm, I thought doors were at 4pm, so I ended up leaving home around 3:30 to go down there, I got there at 4:10 and naturally the place was PACKED with people lining up, it turns out that for some stupid reason they were having Fighters AND Marines fans all go in through gate 25 for outfield unreserved seats, rather than Fighters at gate 25 and Marines at gate 11. I still don't know what was up with that, but it meant a RIDICULOUS line at gate 25.
I had thought of going to Akihabara on the way to the stadium to get my memory card but then thought I'd be late. When I saw the lines I briefly pondered it again but figured "I'll go buy my ticket and come back..." but there were STILL lines. Went to Yamashita bookstore, and all in all I didn't go into the stadium until like 4:40 or so; I could have easily done a detour to get a memory card, sigh. I came in and found a seat with Team 52, though I did go up to say hi to Ojisan. He was like "OMG you're here! I figured since you didn't show up in Chiba or the first two games here and you hadn't contacted me, you just up and moved back to the US to get married or whatever! WTF!" See, I had emailed Hiromi while in the US but she lives in Fukuoka this year now so apparently she didn't tell anyone else I was in the US. Whoops. I don't have Ojisan's PC email, just cellphone, so. I told him how I saw Sweeney and he thought it was really cool.
Did pinbadges and wandered around for a while before the game, got KFC for dinner because I actually like it in Japan. I saw Hichori's mom in the concourse and she said hi to me -- I was even wearing my Hichori shirt so maybe that's why she noticed me first :)
Apparently Wednesday was International Day again and there were lots of white people doing YMCA on the field again and they had an English announcer for the game and stuff on the boards in English... and my friends were like "Why were you not here yesterday to translate for us OMG!" and I'm like "...I guess I could have rushed here from the airport but..."
So yeah, there was a game. The Marines won 7-0. Masaru Nakamura started for us -- he's 18 years old, he'll be 19 in December, he was in high school last year. Yuki Karakawa started for the Marines, he just turned 21 in July. How nuts is THAT? Nakamura had a rough inning culminating in a grand slam by Saburo and things just kind of went downhill from there.
The Fighters got so few people on base that we couldn't do our special Tokyo Dome chance theme so we just did it for the entire 9th inning. I'm sure Shaggy was happy because he didn't have to call anything. (Shaggy being my nickname for one of the ouendan guys.) But BB the mascot came down in the 8th inning and even was in our row cheering with us! He took Junko's Kensuke Tanaka towel and was holding it. I'll post pictures of that to Marinerds when I can.
After the game I caught up with a few more people in the stands and talked to some who are going to the Akita and Morioka games so maybe I will see them in the outfield there too, that'd be nice.
The game ended around 9pm so I even got to Yodobashi Camera at 9:30 and got an SD card! It's so easy in Japan. I go up like "I have this camera, which cards can I use?" and they get out a paper and just say "Anything on this rack. The ones on sale are at the bottom if you're looking for something cheaper", we talked a bit about the read speed and all, and I get a 16GB card for 6500 yen.
I came home but ended up zonking out instead of packing. Whoops.
Which was the problem when I woke up at 7:30am and still needed to pack and get my act together to get out of the house by like 10:30. I have no idea how those 3 hours went by so fast but I had no time to write an update or do my blog or much of anything in that time, it was pretty weird.
But I'm on the train, which is what counts.
More later, I think.
----
Quickly to add to this, since there was no power on the trains from Hachinohe on upwards: taking the tunnel to Hokkaido was NOT exciting as hoped. But there was some beautiful scenery along the way, as well as some boring scenery as well. Shrug.
Getting a seat on that third train was no problem after all -- I don't think I ever saw anyone have to stand, the worst I saw was couples split up between a few rows, things like that. But with 20 minutes to spare I just threw my bags down on a seat, then wandered off to the bathroom. I already got my tickets back and I have reserved seats from here to Aomori. What I do after Aomori, I haven't decided yet (may go to Hirosaki, may not. I need the prefecture either way.)
I am going to go find my way to Eesha's place in a few -- and I may not really update this all weekend. What will probably happen is that I will type entries on my laptop and then will just upload them all when I get to the hotel in Akita on Monday night. Unless I do something silly like this some other time :)
I can read email on my phone -- gmail too -- and will probably be READING LJ but I will not be typing much into it, most likely.