sapporo
took a 4 hour train ride to sapporo today. there are no bullet trains from hakodate to sapporo, so i took a regular train.
tra(i)nsit
this train had some truly beautiful views out the window.
i am actually kinda thankful for the long train ride here, because i couldn’t check into my airbnb in sapporo until 3:00 pm. if the train was faster, it would have just meant standing around at sapporo station with a giant suitcase and stuffed backpack.
the airbnb
i don’t think i’ve ever brought this up before, but finding your airbnb in japan can sometimes be a giant pain in the ass. airbnb hosts will often give you the “english” address, which solves this problem completely. but sometimes, they give you the japanese address, which would help if airbnb’s chat didn’t auto translate everything it reads as “non english”. and the auto translated version of the japanese address sucks. so it took some back and forth with the host to figure out exactly where to go. but it was fine, because i arrived in sapporo at 2:00, and had an hour to kill.
once i got to the airbnb though, wow. look at this view:
apologies for the vertical video. didn’t originally intend to post this on the website.
after i got up here and looked out at the balcony / surrounding buildings, i thought “surely this is like the tallest building in sapporo.”
it isn’t, but it is the 11th tallest building in sapporo. and i am nearly on the highest floor of the building.
the moment i saw this, i knew i had to go buy an nd filter for my camera. i can’t really explain what they are because being honest, i don’t really know how they work. but it lets you take long exposure photos in bright light. i guess my idiot explanation is that it "artifically darkens photos so you can take much longer exposures than you normally could”. its like sunglasses for my camera. i don’t have one, but seeing this video made the official side quest for tomorrow finding one.
the airbnb also comes with this cute little book and a pen, asking every guest to write something in it. there are several dozen entries over many years, and there are some pretty profane ones that i won’t be posting here. made me a little ashamed of my country seeing vile shit next to everyone else’s messages. i obviously don’t know if the messages in other languages are offensive, but it is easy to imagine that they aren’t, given the illustrations with some of them.
i don’t know what i am going to write in here yet.
after settling in and sending that video to a few friends, i sent a very fun and totally not contextually relevant message:
the earthquake
as you can see, i sent the message above at 3:07 pm jst. at 4:52 pm jst, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake hit the area off the coast of japan’s main island of honshu.
this was right next to aomori. if this had happened just a few days ago, when i was in aomori, i would absolutely have been evacuated during the tsunami evacuation stuff.
while the city i am in is not very close to where the quake happened, i am on the 33rd floor of a 34 story building. this earthquake scared the shit out of me. it wasn’t particularly strong, but i could feel the building wobbling for over 10 minutes after it happened. apparently this is how earthquake proofing works on large buildings, the wobbling is the way the building disperses the energy or something. it still does not feel cool to be this high up in the air and have it feel like i am on a boat. i find it very funny to be from california, the stereotypical “earthquake” part of the united states, and have these experiences in japan. this is my third time in japan, and there has been an earthquake all 3 times. i cant remember 3 earthquakes in the last decade in california.
in the process of writing about this, i’ve just learned that a pretty massive area around where this quake happened is now on “mega quake” alert until the 27th. apparently there is an increased risk of a massive earthquake hitting over the next week. so that’s fun.
photos from the balcony
i stayed in the airbnb for the rest of the day. i think this is the first actually comfortable bed i have had on this trip. i did get some cool balcony photos though.
i also got a neat time lapse video from up here. you can see the camera wobbling during the video. this is for 2 reasons. first, the tripod i have sucks. it was $40. a good tripod is like $300. but second, and much more impactful, is that it is crazy windy up here. which is super funny because you can see the trees in this video not moving. the surrounding buildings are blocking a lot of the wind down there, but not up here at all. i actually cropped the end off of this video, because the wind blew my fully unfolded tripod over. i thought i might have broken the camera. but it turned out fine. thank god.
squarespace compresses the hell out of the video and i hate that. maybe i will end up uploading them all to youtube at the end.
