Day 1 and 2, Amsterdam to Sapporo

On our way to Schiphol airport we got stuck in some morning rush hour traffic jams, but since we had already expected this we still arrived well in time for check-in. Schiphol is KLM’s home ground, so with only a few available desks for Lufthansa (that often offers the cheapest flight to Japan), check-in took a while. Also, they suddenly decided to put me on an earlier flight, giving me more transfer time in Frankfurt. So even though we had arrived 2 hours before the flight, I now had less than half an hour to boarding. Schiphol is a huge airport, and merely walking to your gate can easily take 20 minutes. In the end, I was allowed to cut the line at the security check, and I still made the flight to Frankfurt. There I now had 1.5 hours to transfer, though, so all the rushing in Amsterdam had been pretty pointless.

During the flight to Osaka I was sitting next to two Japanese-language students, who both went to Japan for a year. Igor from Serbia had already been in Japan before. He had gotten his degree and now went to do research. Being Serbian, he of course was a football-fan, so it was easy to find a conversation topic. He also taught me a little bit of Japanese: “Eigo ga dekimas ka?” Do you speak English? For Jana from Germany it was her first time in Japan. She had actually never traveled outside Europe and was very nervous. We tried to comfort her a bit, and on arrival, we walked her to the arrival hall where her contact was waiting, so I’m sure that everything went fine in the end. I can’t imagine what could go wrong anyway, as she already spoke the language.

I again had to transfer, this time to a domestic flight to Sapporo with ANA. I was the only foreigner on the plane, but thanks to all the English loanwords in the Japanese language, ‘juice’ is always a safe option if you want to drink something. I half slept during this flight, but still enjoyed the nice views of the Japanese west coast. On schedule, we landed in Sapporo. That is, New Chitose Airport, located about 40 km south of Sapporo. So I first had to take the train. Fortunately, from my last visit to Japan, I still knew how the ticket system worked. I can imagine it would be quite difficult to figure it all out for the first time with a totally jetlagged head.

In Sapporo, it was pleasantly sunny weather, and finding my ryokan was easy. It was quite a luxurious place (I had gotten a large discount through some travel website), with pretty rooms and a nice atmosphere. A kimonoed maid came to serve tea when I arrived, which was great because I had quite a jetlag.

As I write this (well, I wrote the English translation after I got back), I had dinner served in my room, and afterwards had my bed spread out. I also tried a bit of conversation, just for fun (really). I wanted to explain that I had been awake for about 30 hours now. It only took about 15 minutes to express this single sentence. But in the end I succeeded, and even learned a few new words, thanks to my Lonely Planet phrasebook (which, quite surprisingly, really works).