June 2007

Signs (20070601)

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Hair messangers indeed.

Walking the dog (20070603)

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I guess the dog gets some exercise in the form of balance training at least.

Tea ceremony (20070604)

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I was given a free ticket for a tea ceremony with a famous tea making master. It was all very fancy (they also sold you tea cups for 30,000,000 yen a piece, so somewhat more high class than I was used to) and I was the only foreigner there, except my Taiwanese friend who is in tea ceremony training. I sat in the back, so as not to make a scene when I made all the (likely to occur) mistakes. Then of course, everyone else also sat in the back, so the sensei comes out and says move to the front, everyone. So I did. No one else did though... Then the very old sensei described what was going on, and one other very prestigious sensei did the actual work of preparing tea. They would prepare 2 cups, the rest of the people there would receive cups made behind the scenes, probably by less fancy people. The first cup will go to who? Everyone pointed to the front right, i.e. me... I gestured wildly at people next to me who in turn suggested the kimono-clad guest sensei. I got perhaps the third cup, and had no idea of the procedure. For instance, when given your little cake, you were supposed to hand in your ticket, but since no one told me and I was first to be served, that did not happen, so they had to come back and take my ticket later when the guest sensei noted that I seemed lost with my ticket. Of course, they could have just asked me for my ticket, but being polite they just went on to the next person. Japan is often like this, nice, but confusing.

Swedish (20070605)

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Today I verbally assaulted this poor girl when I was looking for dressing for my salad and she was trying to leave the cafeteria. She has a shirt with "The Scandinavian peninsula. The Kingdom of Sweden" written in Swedish, so I asked if I could take a picture. She said that I would have to tell her what it says first (I guess she does not want to be photographed wearing something obscene), so I did. It is still unclear to me why she had such a shirt, I think maybe she never answered that question. It could also be my lack of understanding of Japanese showing up again.

Business cards (20070605)

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I have been thinking of getting business cards for awhile, since everyone expects you to have some (and I know a few tricks using them that I, in my nerdy ways, think are cool). I have never gotten around to it, but my colleague did. He had earlier asked the printers for the same design as our professor (handing over that card) but changing the details. Then he ended up with a card stating his name and our professors mail address, which was fun for some of us. Now he did the whole thing from scratch, using a web interface. Which failed. So he has very cool cards, just stating his name and mail address instead of all the normal information. There was a discussion over lunch whether this made his cards look like someone from the mafia or prostitution. He will try a third time.

Swedish sweets (20070606)

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Strangely enough, the Royce chocolate company have now introduced a line of Swedish things, such as vodka-filled chocolate (which I have never seen in Sweden, but sure sounds like a Swedish ting). They also have Swedish names on all the boxes. They are also in general not spelled correctly, which is kind of funny. They contain mistakes very typical of restaurants and the like in Sweden, though, so possibly it is on purpose?

Hokudai festival (20070607~10)

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The school festival of Hokudai (my university) occurred, and mainly consisted of students selling strange food in weird clothes.

Cars (20070607)

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Since the main festival area was the main street, where many cars pass, there were often people waving sticks around and shouting "car passing, get off the street". Why they closed down all exits to the campus except the one in the middle of the festival area (so all cars had to pass through the throng) instead of closing the main street remains a mystery.

NsDonalds (20070608)

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The funniest name was Nurse-Donalds, where nurses (in training) sold cakes and drinks. Drinks like "cute young boy lover" and "sex machine".

Tired (20070608)

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This boy was tired and dragged around on top of his fathers bag.

Exercise (20070608)

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These guys were watching some exercise video (evidently something called "Billy's boot camp" is famous here) and doing the exercises in the middle of the street.

Close (20070608)

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I wanted to enter the magic cafe, but it was "close".

Guns (20070608)

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In Japan, people build guns out of chop sticks and rubber bands. But you were only allowed to shoot at target papers on the black board, so we did not bother to enter.

Most unexpected stall (20070608)

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While most people sold food, one stall sold refrigerators! OK, give me two, because it is so convenient to lug them around here.

Rice burger (20070609)

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The rice burger, one of the best choices.

Coolest of the festival? (20070609)

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My fellow lab mates. Coolest people around, at least according to themselves.

Zoo (20070609)

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There was even a small zoo for the festival, including a beaver that tried to escape by several clever maneuvers.

Blue grass(20070609)

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On the absurd side, there was a three day continues bluegrass concert with only Japanese bands. They were good, except maybe for the pronunciation of the English lyrics.

Magic (20070609)

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The magic cafe, best show of the festival. Stage magic and table magic, with over ten different performers.

Signs (20070609)

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Do not step me!

Deep fried ice cream (20070610)

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Ice cream, normally served cold, and deep frying, normally very hot, is an unexpectedly nice combination.

Manly clothing (20070610)

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Everyone thought I was insane (even more than usual) when I dressed up like that, and here are many other men doing the same thing and no one thinks it is strange. Life is unfair.

Yosakoi festival (20070606~10)

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At the same time as the Hokudai festival, there was the Sapporo yosakoi festival. Yosakoi looks like a mix of the back ground dancers of pop stars and old fashioned cultural line-dancing. People wear strange clothes and dance in groups of 20 - 200 persons. As I had it explained to me, it is based on some traditional dance related to pulling fish out of the sea. The dancing is accompanied by a mix of trance techno, Japanese folk music and people screaming. Many groups have live bands performing the music.

Peeping Tom? (20070607)

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This guy was waiting for some special photo opportunity for a long time.

Participation (20070608)

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You can also join in and dance around with the people from the top teams, which seemed very popular.

Free ice cream (20070610)

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They also hand out free stuff, like ice cream.

Free ticket (20070610)

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For the semi-finals, the dancing was not on the stage, but in the streets around the big park. There were huge seats erected especially for this, and you had to pay to get in. I received a ticket from a woman leaving early, who explained to me with very clear and absurdly slow Japanese that she was indeed giving me the ticket (who knows how stupid these foreigners are anyway, right?).

German lessons (20070610)

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When watching the finals, from the not exactly top spot, some very old Japanese man practiced German with me. I do not speak German and explained to him several times that I may be blond but am not actually from Germany. It was quite fun anyway, and I sometimes managed to guess what the German he was using meant. He gave up after about 15 minutes though.

Birthday party pizza (20070608)

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This thing looked like stick, tasted like a stick and was hard like a stick. It was "pizza" according to the Japanese though.

Clubs (20070608)

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Following the crazy friends of my crazy friend, we ended up in a club that charged huge amounts of money for entrance, but was very much like all the cheap places inside, except with fewer toilets. I got to practice some Japanese on some drunk Japaneses so it was quite a lot of fun.

More Swedes (20070609)

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At the Hokudai festival, someone started shouting my name (in Japanese, but still). It was one of my old volunteer teachers. They had found another Swedish guy, so I spoke to him for awhile. He had heard rumours about some crazy Swede from the teachers...

Weird guy with camera (20070609)

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While waiting for a friend, who never showed, I spotted this guy who walked in and photographed the room from different angles. Who ever walks around with a camera and takes strange pictures all the time? Weirdo.

Even more Swedes! (20070609)

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While waiting, I met three Swedes (from a group of nine, soon to be extended by four more) by chance. While talking to these to find out who they were, four more Swedes (from a group of 14) showed up! I knew none of them, and they did not know each other. Also, another 74 are coming for a special celebration, I have been told...

Bad translation (20070614)

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This may be the worst choice of translation for the word "方" (here, a polite word for "person", translated as "direction" which it can also mean) I have seen in a while. "Please offer the direction of use hope to 1F management office"...

New stuff (20070614)

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Someone I know bought a new car, and a new apartment. Why there are winter tires lying in the kitchen was never answered. I was asked to help with installing the Internet, but since the fonts for Japanese were non-existent, this proved hard. There was also hardware failure, so I did not manage to help out. I also did not manage to plug in the TV. So all in all, I did not help at all.

More festivals (20070616)

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More festivals. Parading around gods downtown, and squeezing huge amounts of people in between shops selling food and junk. And one Swedish flag.

"Swedish" midsummer (20070617)

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Today saw the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the sister city agreement between Toubetsu (near Sapporo) and Leksand (Sweden). It was also a midsummer festival, which just as normal in this slightly backwards country, occurred on the wrong day (Swedes celebrate Friday next week). It started out pretty bad with my designated car and driver never showing up (climbing some mountain and sleeping under a table or whatever) and then the city personnel stealing all the bikes parked near the train station (which they do from time to time, since it is for some reason (most likely lobbying from the taxi companies) forbidden to ride the bicycle to take the train...). It meant lots of walking for me in the scorching sun. I did manage to find the Sweden Hills place out in the bush (one hour by train), finally. I don't think I have ever seen so many people wearing Swedish traditional clothing, and here most of them there were Japanese. There were also about 75 people from Leksand there for the celebration, and about 25 Swedish students from Sapporo. And about a billion Japanese visitors. You could watch folk dancing and the very very slow raising of the May pole (but I was told by a Leksander that it is because it is such a tall pole that it takes so much more time than in Stockholm, which may well be true), listen to folk music and boring speeches, participate in mass dancing or read signs with miss-spelled Swedish. There was also Swedish handicraft on sale for prices even Swedes would find steep, and a 500 kg Dala-horse. There were plenty of people who wanted to take pictures of all kinds of things. I aimed for the Swedish ambassador and people doing strange things in traditional clothing. It was pretty fun, and I came home with a severe sunburn and one more digital camera than I had when I left home. I mean, how hard can it be to find a Swedish man in Japan, right? Still the owner of the camera managed to disappear... Probably the funniest thing I saw was when a Swedish acquaintance asked her friend's Japanese daughter "how old do you think I am?". She is 35 but the answer was "well, my mother is 49 so, maybe the same?". She went and hid under a tree when told the true answer.

Mystery (20070619)

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Someone has stolen the seat of my back up bicycle. A seat which looks very much like the one I am missing is now sitting on a mountain bike placed in the bicycle shed for people living in my house... It seems to be welded there or something, though, because I (known for my great physical strength, of course) cannot make it budge.

Thai food (20070619)

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I found (or actually, was shown) a new Thai restaurant today. Incredibly cheap.

More "English" (20070621-22)

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Why are so many registers "close" in Japan? And what does "yes is love" mean?

Nice pick nick (20070622)

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This is probably not the most scenic place I have seen people use for barbecue...

Fellow Viking (20070622)

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I ran into the same Swedish guy I keep running into all the time again. This is his Norwegian friend, who in true "I come from one of the lands of the vikings"-style, drinks himself unsteady every day and has lots of hair.

Flowers (20070623)

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There is now one more festival in Sapporo, but it is a flower festival, so there is no reason for me to waste my valuable time this weekend.

Jazz festival (20070623)

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There seemed to be a jazz festival too. The singer sang in a very impressive English. Probably better than mine, which is rare here.

Shark fin soup (20070623)

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It had been decided that today I and a friend would go to a high class restaurant. It required reservations 2 weeks beforehand, though, and we only called a few days before. We tried two other fancy restaurants, but they were also fully booked. We ended up with one more friend in an expensive and thus probably high class Chinese restaurant. I had shark fin soup for the first time in my life. Not particularly exciting food though. The rest of the seven course lunch was very nice, though somewhat lacking in quantity. There was a sad lack of rich women looking to marry and spend their money on Swedes though.

It finally catches up with you (20070623)

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Whenever I go along with someone shopping for food, they ask "do you like this" and similar things. I usually answer "well, yes, but here in Japan it is not as good as when I used to make it myself back in Sweden". This grates many nerves, and is usually followed by "but why the *#! don't you make some here then!". I normally claim "because I am quite happy with the restaurant food here, which while not as good as my own cooking does not require me to do dishes or go shopping for ingredients". Today this way of teasing people backfired and I ended up having to cook. With a very very limited supply of ingredients available, it was somewhat tough. It was also made worse by things like "-Please add this too. -No, there is no place in this dish for zucchini. -I don't care, you just have to add it anyway. -Who is making the food here? -Shut up and add the zucchini.". The result was a huge success, so now people might start to take me seriously when I talk about my cooking skills.

Endless dancing (20070624)

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I dragged another Swedish guy along to some international dance festival thing today. Free lunch included, I was told. Ends at one, I was also told. More correctly described as "10 minute break at one, ends at three thirty", but did indeed include a free lunch box with sushi (vegetarian) and green tea. Of course, the other guy tells me he cannot eat this type of sushi nor drink this kind of tea. He also almost fell asleep and was in pain from sitting in a too small space for 5 hours. We got to see 60 year old Japanese women dance Hawaiian hula dances about 12 times, though (different groups every time), and kimono clad old women pose with fans with something akin to music in the background (the kimonos and make-ups were great!). There were also many entertaining acts of other types. One was five exotic foreigners coming on stage and saying "in my country we speak Spanish; in Spanish the word for hello is ola". Most popular was the ballet performed by kids in the ages 3 to 6 or so. Very high cuteness factor.

McDonalds (20070624)

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What is a "shrimp-filet-o"? Since I had an offer to buy one with 100 yen off, I decided to find out. It is (unsurprisingly) a burger with shrimps instead of meat. Why it is named shrimp-filet-o remains a mystery. I have never seen one offered in Sweden, so maybe McDonalds is not the same all over the world. Also, I have never seen wasabi sauce offered at McDonalds in Sweden.

Cheater, an Anagram of Teacher (20070629)

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Today saw the Keiteki Student Dorm Undoukai (roughly: exercise meet). The Information Science department (which I belong to) traditionally finishes last in most things, especially the overall results. This year one of the teachers from our department was organizing one of the events. This event consists of people running 30m and picking up an envelope. Inside is a note saying something like "grab someone who has a student ID card with 4 as the last digit", and when you have such a person you both run to the finish line. So people from our department showed up with sports clothes and nothing else except the teacher special library card, or a big box of tissue with the logo of the Sapporo baseball team. What a coincidence that these things happened to be needed... Despite cheating outrageously, it seems we finished as 11 of 13. Improvement, but not much. I was mainly there to take a picture of my colleague running the relay. I was Shang-Haied into throwing gravel filled bags into a basket held up high too, since there was no limit to the number of participants allowed. Another foreigner had to masquerade as Mr. Ishikawa (or some other Japanese sounding name). Since he is twice as long as all the other Japanese people, has completely different hair and skin color and came running in office shoes and jeans, it caused much amusement. We all got to wear the official Information Science pink ribbons too!

Monty Python! (20070629)

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I found a restaurant named after perhaps the best comedians ever to have existed! The joy was somewhat dampened when they took one look at my cat shirt (picture above) and said that they had no table for me. They at least let me see the menu to check out the pricing and what was available. It is a French/Italian (so why Monty Python?) restaurant, with fairly expensive prices. They told me that they had some kind of cheap special on Tuesdays, so evidently I don't look as rich as I am.

Toilets below standard (20070629)

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Japan is heaven when it comes to toilets. I have never been to any other country where there are nice clean toilets available for free everywhere. There are some that are below standards though.

Sweden! (20070629)

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Sometimes you see Swedish flags. This guy has probably escaped from the Potato Circus. (Which is a restaurant where the waiters have flags from strange countries).

Signs (20070629)

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"I love W.C." And I have my bottle of booze with me when I go!

The word no one knows (20070629)

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I have asked around to see what "fractals" could be called in Japanese. No one seems to know. Here is a program that draws fractals that I wrote a long time ago. I have made prettier ones, but this one was still on line. Anyway, it seems fractal is mainly called by the Japanese pronunciation of the English word (furakutaaru), but no one would understand you if you mentioned it. There is a long technical Japanese word that people only mention very quickly when they have access to some huge lexicon. No one would understand that either, I am told. We studied fractals in math class in high school and at the university. One of the prettier applications of simple math.

Japanese people sometimes act strangely (20070629)

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I met this pair tonight. She had lived three years in America and thus spoke English fairly fluently. So she translated everything any other Japanese said, even if I could follow along (and indicated so by making fairly relevant answers) in their Japanese. Someone also bought me a drink today, but it sadly was a guy.

Maiko-look alikes and hotel rooms (20070630)

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When I was in Kyoto I would have liked to see a geisha or maiko. I did not spot any though. This is what the clothes and make up of a maiko looks like. Inside is however not a Japanese maiko but one of my Chinese friends. Quite hard to recognize though. It turns out you can have this done to you and get a photo album for not very much money. I should have done so, but I was told that generally men only get a man style kimono and no make up for photos... Sounds boringly normal. I wonder if it is possible to do the girl clothes instead? Seems so much cooler. Anyway, my friend lives in what used to be a hotel. Not only are the rooms super tiny (Japanese hotel rooms often are), there are also over four different land lords that have rooms in the house. And it is not organized in any sane manner, such as one floor each, but seems to be pretty random with many different land lords on the same floor.