We started our journey to Sapporo from Shin Hakodate, where we caught the JR Hokuto train to Sapporo. We got on a non-reserve car (a weird lady tried to push past us to get on the train.. She had a concealed dog and behaved really oddly the whole way to Sapporo) where we easily found seats near the front of the train. The train ride took 213 minutes, pretty long for a fast train in Japan, as it was a local train that stopped quite a bit.

I watched the beautiful snowy scenery out the window and spotted 3 blue herons, 1 white crane, 3 swans and at least 30 deer (a few horned stags and a fawn). The scenery was stunning, but the ride was so long. We arrived in Sapporo at 5:30pm and hopped on the metro to our place, only two stops away.

The metro was crazy, like Tokyo at rush hour, complete with car stuffers (people who push you on to the train to maximum capacity). I stood between rail cars as there was no space to stand, especially with our backpacks. We walked to our hotel a few minutes away from the station. We checked into the hotel and dropped our bags in the room (the room was ok). We then set out on an adventure to find food, as we hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

We wandered around, finding an ice sculpture competition near our hotel. We finally found a place we wanted to eat at, a sort of traditional salaryman izakaya (Japanese pub) situation. We sat down at our own curtained table and the man explained that we use a touch screen tablet to order food and drinks. I was able to find beer with my limited Japanese language ability (大 vs 中 for beer size) and we ordered by matching kanji on a menu to the screen.

We somehow successfully ordered an amazing dinner. We got salted cucumbers with spicy mustard and cabbage with sesame oil (like we had in Osaka) , both of which are traditional drinking foods in Japan. We also ordered okinomiyaki (Japanese pizza), tuna sushi, mixed sushi, tempura…was that it? Anyway, we were stuffed! We paid 4000 Yen for so much food and drink, and headed back out into the cold. It was snowing hard now, but big flakey flakes!

We walked around the ice sculpture festival and took a ton of photos, the sculptures were super impressive. The winning sculpture was a huge dragon made completely of ice! We then walked back to our hotel, stopping at Lawsons to grab a Sapporo beer to enjoy in our room.