Japan reboot - food photos mostly

I recently had the very awesome opportunity to visit Sapporo, Japan for a work trip. It was a really great trip (no earthquakes!), with great people, and a very interesting meeting. The only downside was the incredibly, unusually hot weather in Sapporo, which made sitting in a meeting room wearing a business suit rather uncomfortable (I'm been generous - it was miserable in the hot meeting room).  But, I did take a few pictures of some of the fun foods I tried and some of the city sights. 

The food in Japan, particularly the seafood, if really incredible. I love seafood, and I was pretty much willing to try everything at least once.  These are my phone pictures, I'll try to upload some of my good camera pictures next.

Our meeting was in Shin-Sapporo, which means 'new Sapporo' - think suburb. It was ok. But we did take the train to Sapporo quite a lot and this is outside the main train station in Sapporo. For the record, I liked Tokyo better than Sapporo. 

Sapporo is known for ramen. This is one of the ramen dishes I tried during my stay. It was quite good, but rather rich. I didn't really know what I was ordering (not unusual...) and it turned out that this was 'butter corn ramen' or something like that. Yes, that's what's left of a pretty big pat of butter sitting on top of the corn...

This squid was alive a few moments before this picture was taken. No, you don't eat the eyes. It was fantastic though...you dip the strips into soy sauce mixes with some of the grated ginger and wasabi that you see on the plate. YUM! I would eat this again.

An assortment of sushi...tuna, crab, uni (sea urchin roe).  I'm not really a fan of the sea urchin roe...the flavor was good, but the texture was hard to get past. It's...soft, or mushy, or creamy, maybe...but not my favorite.

This is Yuki and Peter. I met Yuki on the airplane coming to Sapporo and she was wonderfully helpful and fun. She and Peter split their time between the US and Japan. They were kind enough to give me a ride to my hotel the first night, then we met up for dinner later in the week. Yuki is from Sapporo, and I let her lead on ordering food for the night, which is how I ended up trying so many new and interesting things.

Beer with frozen beer foam on top. It had the texture of slightly ice-crysally soft serve ice cream, but tasted just like beer foam (so, not really GOOD, just sort of beerish). A novelty, for sure.

Mongolian barbeque...with lamb and veggies and lots of deliciousness.