back from Sapporo
so tired. must braindump this day, then tomorrow i should start catching up on all the online stuff I ignored the last 4 days.
So yeah, got up, ate breakfast and checked out of the hotel. Continued to insist on never saying a single word in English to any of the staff there despite that they insisted on trying to talk to me in English. Whatever.
For lack of anything better to do to waste an hour or so, I went to the Sapporo branch of Mint, which is a baseball card/etc store... I've been to every Kanto branch they have and also to a few in other cities like Fukuoka and Osaka, so now I can add Sapporo. The cool thing is that they had a bunch of binders of JUST Fighters cards, so I looked through those. I was very weak and got 8 more Yukio Tanaka cards to add to my collection, from various years and various printings. It'd be awesome if someday Yukio became a minor-league coach and I would stalk him and be like "hi, will you sign a card for me?" and show him that I have like his entire career :) okay, I couldn't really do that. But it's a funny thought.
(I've actually got a quest now to find some Shimazaki cards from when he was pitching for the Fighters in the 90's so I can bug him to sign one next time I see him.)
So, off to the Dome after that. I got there at 11:50am. Gates were at 12pm. But I had to wait in line for a looong time to actually get in... finally DID get in around 12:10pm. I wonder if it's because of this weekend being Inaba's Birthday Weekend... I said morning aisatsu to a few people I know, and then went to do pinbadges.
Thanks to today being "Special Pinbadge Day" -- some of the capsules had special tickets inside which would give prizes like, signed boards, or BB-mascot plushies, or various other things -- the line was CRAZY INSANE LONG to get them. It took 20 minutes to buy my capsule coins and another 35 minutes waiting in line for the actual capsule machines. Seriously, it was after 1pm by the time I got my pinbadges. Worse... I'd gotten Yoshikawa for just coming to the stadium, and the pins I got from the machine were another May badge, plus Naoto and Wing and Yoshikawa (sheesh, I have ALL of those) and then Yoh, the only one I didn't have.
BUT I remembered there was a trading area, so I went down there and spent like the next 20 minutes bartering my badges with people. Get this, those "boring I don't care" monthly badges are actually RARE, and I had three of them, so I managed to trade them for a TON of stuff. Went in with 12 pins and came out with 19! No joke! I don't remember the exact trades I got, but what I came out with was:
FC: Hichori, Yoshikawa
Tsuboi, Darvish, Sakakibara, Tadano, Tateyama, Yoh, Itoi, Ejiri, Yataro Sakamoto, Koyano, Yohei Kaneko, Ichikawa, Konta, Ohira, Watanabe, Tsuda...
...and Imanari 2007! Seriously, these two little boys had a bunch of old 2006-2008 badges and an Imanari one in their "pile of doubles we don't care about" so I traded something random for it. Holy crap!
Some jerk tried to trade me an Imanari pin for one of my rare monthly ones and got rightfully scolded by the lady I was trading with at the time, who was telling me that people usually trade 3 pins for a rare month pin like that. Another guy tried to do 1-for-1 with me for one of them and I was like "Haha, very funny -- that lady over there gave me 3-for-1. If you insist, how about I give you this one for Itoi and Koyano?" Considering they are both in the top 10 hitters in the PL, it's not THAT bad a trade for me. I forget what I traded for Darvish but it was something like, a rare month star badge for Darvish plus one other dude like maybe Sakakibara.
Anyway, I got back to my seat around 1:35pm after all of that.
Then it turned out that where I was sitting happened to be on the edge of a group called the Netsuenkai. And Mineji and Nori and a bunch of the Sapporo people I know are kind of with them as well. So I ended up talking to them for most of the game and they kept trying to make me eat spicy snacks. The Fighters were up 1-0 for most of the way and then freaking Tateyama came in to pitch the 8th and BOOM gave up a 2-run homer to Nobuhiko Matsunaka and that made it 2-1 and the Hawks won. GRR.
If you know who Matsunaka is (ie,![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
firearmofmutiny who I believe has a Matsunaka wristband), it might amuse you that he has hit 18 home runs this year, and 8 of them are against the Fighters. No more than 3 were against any other one team. Even better, I've been to 5 Fighters-Hawks games this year and I have seen Matsunaka hit 5 home runs in person. WTF WTF WTF.
After the game this one guy started telling me about their cheering group and gave me his card and was like "come back to Sapporo and just find us, we buy up a bunch of seats in this area so you can probably sit with us even if your ticket isn't for here." And while I was talking to him an older lady comes up like "hey, are you from Tokyo? And do you know Kamagaya Ojisan? I've seen your Ryota jersey before -- I think you know my daughter, she also likes Imanari..." and I'm like "WTF?" And it turns out it was Minako's mother! I haven't seen Minako much this year, but last year she always had these cool signs at games and such, and would say that her mom had made them, and also once or twice said "My mom is watching the game on TV up in Sapporo and said she saw me in the front row with Hiromi and some gaijin girl!" and so on.
So that was pretty crazy too. And Minako's mom basically asked me if I'd want to come chat for a bit, so we went to one of the cafes in the Sapporo Dome and she bought me an ice cream parfait, and she told me stories about Okinawa spring training and about various stuff in Sapporo, and asked me about Brian Sweeney and the other foreign players since Minako told her about how I always go talk to them. She's also a huge Trey Hillman fan, and actually watches Royals games on TV sometimes just to see him. Crazy. It's funny, she said how she always loves the foreign players but she can't speak a word of English so it's difficult to tell them that. But apparently during Spring Training some funny things happen like Hillman coming onto the tour bus with all the fans and telling them in Japanese that he appreciated them all being there.
Okay, so I made my way back to Sapporo station, with a brief stop at Marui Imai and the Fighters Square -- but the name-sticker machine was broken and that was my main reason for going there since I couldn't find one at the Dome. Oh well. Onwards to the station, and onwards to the airport, where all of the food places were closed by 8pm. Doh! So I got a jingisukan bento and ate that on the plane. It was interesting.
The plane also involved a whole bunch of flight attendants speaking to me in English despite that I never ever replied to them in English.
(I know I've been obnoxious about it this weekend but I mean, I need to speak Japanese as much as possible. I've been thinking a lot about the idea of immersion lately. I was so happy that none of the Fighters fans at the Dome tried to speak English to me at all today!)
Came home, got in a bit after midnight. I'm vaguely unpacked I suppose -- didn't bring THAT much with me and most of what I bought is omiyage anyway. I basically bought two t-shirts (the spirit of baseball one and the Kitakuma shirt) and a set of folders for myself, and that's it. I really don't like the godawful purple Hokkaido jersey this year, so.
YAWN.
I am seriously already trying to figure out when I can go back to Sapporo. I'm thinking of October 3-4. It'll be cheaper to go then because it won't be "escape the summer heat" time anymore. I loooooooooove Sapporo, I really do, but I really couldn't live there -- while it would support my Fighters habit quite nicely, it wouldn't support the REST of my baseball habit.
So yeah, got up, ate breakfast and checked out of the hotel. Continued to insist on never saying a single word in English to any of the staff there despite that they insisted on trying to talk to me in English. Whatever.
For lack of anything better to do to waste an hour or so, I went to the Sapporo branch of Mint, which is a baseball card/etc store... I've been to every Kanto branch they have and also to a few in other cities like Fukuoka and Osaka, so now I can add Sapporo. The cool thing is that they had a bunch of binders of JUST Fighters cards, so I looked through those. I was very weak and got 8 more Yukio Tanaka cards to add to my collection, from various years and various printings. It'd be awesome if someday Yukio became a minor-league coach and I would stalk him and be like "hi, will you sign a card for me?" and show him that I have like his entire career :) okay, I couldn't really do that. But it's a funny thought.
(I've actually got a quest now to find some Shimazaki cards from when he was pitching for the Fighters in the 90's so I can bug him to sign one next time I see him.)
So, off to the Dome after that. I got there at 11:50am. Gates were at 12pm. But I had to wait in line for a looong time to actually get in... finally DID get in around 12:10pm. I wonder if it's because of this weekend being Inaba's Birthday Weekend... I said morning aisatsu to a few people I know, and then went to do pinbadges.
Thanks to today being "Special Pinbadge Day" -- some of the capsules had special tickets inside which would give prizes like, signed boards, or BB-mascot plushies, or various other things -- the line was CRAZY INSANE LONG to get them. It took 20 minutes to buy my capsule coins and another 35 minutes waiting in line for the actual capsule machines. Seriously, it was after 1pm by the time I got my pinbadges. Worse... I'd gotten Yoshikawa for just coming to the stadium, and the pins I got from the machine were another May badge, plus Naoto and Wing and Yoshikawa (sheesh, I have ALL of those) and then Yoh, the only one I didn't have.
BUT I remembered there was a trading area, so I went down there and spent like the next 20 minutes bartering my badges with people. Get this, those "boring I don't care" monthly badges are actually RARE, and I had three of them, so I managed to trade them for a TON of stuff. Went in with 12 pins and came out with 19! No joke! I don't remember the exact trades I got, but what I came out with was:
FC: Hichori, Yoshikawa
Tsuboi, Darvish, Sakakibara, Tadano, Tateyama, Yoh, Itoi, Ejiri, Yataro Sakamoto, Koyano, Yohei Kaneko, Ichikawa, Konta, Ohira, Watanabe, Tsuda...
...and Imanari 2007! Seriously, these two little boys had a bunch of old 2006-2008 badges and an Imanari one in their "pile of doubles we don't care about" so I traded something random for it. Holy crap!
Some jerk tried to trade me an Imanari pin for one of my rare monthly ones and got rightfully scolded by the lady I was trading with at the time, who was telling me that people usually trade 3 pins for a rare month pin like that. Another guy tried to do 1-for-1 with me for one of them and I was like "Haha, very funny -- that lady over there gave me 3-for-1. If you insist, how about I give you this one for Itoi and Koyano?" Considering they are both in the top 10 hitters in the PL, it's not THAT bad a trade for me. I forget what I traded for Darvish but it was something like, a rare month star badge for Darvish plus one other dude like maybe Sakakibara.
Anyway, I got back to my seat around 1:35pm after all of that.
Then it turned out that where I was sitting happened to be on the edge of a group called the Netsuenkai. And Mineji and Nori and a bunch of the Sapporo people I know are kind of with them as well. So I ended up talking to them for most of the game and they kept trying to make me eat spicy snacks. The Fighters were up 1-0 for most of the way and then freaking Tateyama came in to pitch the 8th and BOOM gave up a 2-run homer to Nobuhiko Matsunaka and that made it 2-1 and the Hawks won. GRR.
If you know who Matsunaka is (ie,
firearmofmutiny who I believe has a Matsunaka wristband), it might amuse you that he has hit 18 home runs this year, and 8 of them are against the Fighters. No more than 3 were against any other one team. Even better, I've been to 5 Fighters-Hawks games this year and I have seen Matsunaka hit 5 home runs in person. WTF WTF WTF.After the game this one guy started telling me about their cheering group and gave me his card and was like "come back to Sapporo and just find us, we buy up a bunch of seats in this area so you can probably sit with us even if your ticket isn't for here." And while I was talking to him an older lady comes up like "hey, are you from Tokyo? And do you know Kamagaya Ojisan? I've seen your Ryota jersey before -- I think you know my daughter, she also likes Imanari..." and I'm like "WTF?" And it turns out it was Minako's mother! I haven't seen Minako much this year, but last year she always had these cool signs at games and such, and would say that her mom had made them, and also once or twice said "My mom is watching the game on TV up in Sapporo and said she saw me in the front row with Hiromi and some gaijin girl!" and so on.
So that was pretty crazy too. And Minako's mom basically asked me if I'd want to come chat for a bit, so we went to one of the cafes in the Sapporo Dome and she bought me an ice cream parfait, and she told me stories about Okinawa spring training and about various stuff in Sapporo, and asked me about Brian Sweeney and the other foreign players since Minako told her about how I always go talk to them. She's also a huge Trey Hillman fan, and actually watches Royals games on TV sometimes just to see him. Crazy. It's funny, she said how she always loves the foreign players but she can't speak a word of English so it's difficult to tell them that. But apparently during Spring Training some funny things happen like Hillman coming onto the tour bus with all the fans and telling them in Japanese that he appreciated them all being there.
Okay, so I made my way back to Sapporo station, with a brief stop at Marui Imai and the Fighters Square -- but the name-sticker machine was broken and that was my main reason for going there since I couldn't find one at the Dome. Oh well. Onwards to the station, and onwards to the airport, where all of the food places were closed by 8pm. Doh! So I got a jingisukan bento and ate that on the plane. It was interesting.
The plane also involved a whole bunch of flight attendants speaking to me in English despite that I never ever replied to them in English.
(I know I've been obnoxious about it this weekend but I mean, I need to speak Japanese as much as possible. I've been thinking a lot about the idea of immersion lately. I was so happy that none of the Fighters fans at the Dome tried to speak English to me at all today!)
Came home, got in a bit after midnight. I'm vaguely unpacked I suppose -- didn't bring THAT much with me and most of what I bought is omiyage anyway. I basically bought two t-shirts (the spirit of baseball one and the Kitakuma shirt) and a set of folders for myself, and that's it. I really don't like the godawful purple Hokkaido jersey this year, so.
YAWN.
I am seriously already trying to figure out when I can go back to Sapporo. I'm thinking of October 3-4. It'll be cheaper to go then because it won't be "escape the summer heat" time anymore. I loooooooooove Sapporo, I really do, but I really couldn't live there -- while it would support my Fighters habit quite nicely, it wouldn't support the REST of my baseball habit.