Sapporo Dome

Wow, time sure does fly when you are having fun. How did it get to be Sunday so soon! I mark this up to be one of my best travel experiences yet – what a wonderful culture Japan has. I am counting down the days until my next visit. It is not as intimidating as I imagined living here, and look forward to a month of adventure with Anthony in September/October.

Today we had to taxi it to the field earlier than I would've liked due to a 2pm game start. And unfortunately I had to kill a few hours in the dome before making the trip to the airport.  Anthony’s translator – Ippei – once again went above and beyond this trip and lined up a tour of the 41,000 fixed seat Dome for me. My tour guides were a part of the front office and initially gave me the impression they didn't know any English. They apologized about their lack of English while I apologize for my lack of Japanese – I always feel guilty when the Japanese apologize like this. Shouldn't I be the one that is sorry since I am in their country? I’m determined to learn a few more phrases before my next visit so I don’t feel quite so conceited.

Despite my tour guides impressions of their pour English, Atsushi Yogi and Keiji Kikuchi were able to communicate a lot to me. We even discovered they had traveled to Charlotte in the past to watch the NASCAR All-Star Race. Ha who knew that was a destination for the Japanese. As I always say after my travels – it really is a small world.

Here are a few photos from my tour –

My favorite stop was this Observatory deck. The deck – built at the top of the dome – is Japan’s only observatory and sits at 53m above ground level (remind me to get better at my metric conversions).

I would not volunteer for this job!

As all other large arenas, the dome plays hosts to other events such as concerts, auto shows and soccer. The Sapporo Dome seems to be most well-known for the world’s first ‘hovering soccer stage. This stage is a gigantic natural turf field that resides just outside the dome but can be rolled and rotated in through a 10 hour process. These easy (ha!) 5 steps are outlined below:

The remaining pictures highlight some of the bigger acts that have performed at the stadium (Bon Jovi, Billy Joel and The Rolling Stones) and other large events they have played host to (All-Star Games, World Soccer, and of course Yu Darvish)

Yu Darvish - 2009