Japanese adventures - Part 1

Gosh, I don't even know where to begin. I've been decompressing from my trip to Japan for about two weeks now, and still haven't organized my thoughts enough to post a neat blog!

Oh well, I'll give it a go. I traveled to Hakodate, Japan, a "small" port town on the southernmost part of the Northern island - Hokkaido. By small, I mean 250,000 people. That's nothing compared to Astoria (pop. ~10,000)! To get to Hakodate, you can fly from Tokyo, take a train (and go thru the 53.9 km underwater Seikan Tunnel - world's longest submarine transport link), or take an overnight ferry. Given that I was traveling alone and had never been anywhere in Asia, I opted to fly to Hakodate after arriving in Tokyo (quickest, convenient). I figured I'd work out the rest of my plans once I got to Hakodate.

Did I mention I was going for a seabird conference? The 2009 Pacific Seabird Group Annual Meeting, to be exact. This was the first time they were holding it in Japan, and when I heard about the location I immediately knew I had to find a will and a way to get there. I saved up my Alaska Airlines frequent flyer miles, my money, and went for it.

Here are some pics from the arrival - although Japan is similar in latitude to Seattle, the northern island gets a lot of Siberian storms, and therefore tons of snow and veeery cold temps.



Sapporo train station (my plane was diverted from Hakodate to Sapporo due to heavy snow, so we had to take a train after all!)

The train timetable...go ahead...read it...

Those are actually the train tracks! The train arrived by we got delayed again due to a "snow bank blocking the tracks". The Japanese are actually pretty blunt with their translations (e.g. "Don't use cell phones on the bus, as they annoy your neighbor")

Snow storm in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan