August 2007

Bulgarian hypothesis cooking (20070801)

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My Bulgarian colleague who timed things nice enough so as to have his birthday and his one month going back to Bulgaria trip almost at the same time cooked and handed out this. It is cheese and egg and something. He sent an e-mail dictated by his Japanese girlfriend, so it should be OK. My guess the kanji for "katei" was supposed to be "home made" rather than "hypothesis" though. But I am not a native speaker, so who knows.

Coffee jelly (20070801)

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I went to play badminton, but no one was there to play with me, so I wandered upstairs and found someone offering me coffee jelly instead. Surprisingly good, considering it is mainly coffee (which is disgusting).

Badminton (20070801)

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I finally found some people to play badminton with. I managed to break a racket after 2 minutes (though this was expected, since it cost 100 yen for a set of two...). I also managed to injure my shoulder, so all in all it was a good day.

Laundry (20070802)

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Either I have new neighbors, a neighbor has his girlfriend/wife visiting or one of my neighbors has started cross dressing. I thought there were only men living here, but someone has hung panties and bras out to dry sight outside my window (why there though?). Which was perhaps not a great idea, since today saw the heaviest rain so far of my time in Sapporo.

Food (20070802)

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Japanese food.

Confused as usual (20070803)

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Today I was supposed to meet someone who has no cell phone, which is always exciting. If you do not find each other, how do you get in touch? I was supposed to wait under the "big clock in the middle of the station". Evidently, this was not it. 20 minutes later (and 5 minutes before our train left) I finally found her.

Temple (20070803)

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A temple with almost Swedish feelings. Probably because of the pine trees.

What Japanese people do (20070803)

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When going on a bus through an area famous for the patch work fields and the flower fields there, what do you do. Sleep...

Puns (20070803)

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Spider and cloud is the same word (when speaking) in Japanese, so when people ask what this is, you can make a pun.

Flowers (20070803)

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Furano, not that far away from Sapporo, is famous for its Lavender fields. There are also lots of other flowers to see. And Lavender flavored ice cream and caramels. And the usual "toilets with no door".

Tours (20070803)

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It is nice to see the organized Asian tourists. Follow the flag, we are aiming for the station next!

High (20070804)

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Today people were climbing ladders held up by their friends, in the rain. When near the top, they did acrobatic things. Seemed dangerous. Some religious or cultural thing, it seems.

American dog (20070805)

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This is called an American dog. It has almost no taste. But it is quite sweet. Cheap, but not really something I recommend.

Worthy inheritor (20070805)

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I have given my cute pink shirt away. It suits her better than me, I guess. It was painfully tight on me.

My friend (20070805)

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I have a friend called Westin.

Skills (20070805)

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I managed to fold a scare crow from the plastic wrapping for my napkin today. I was aiming for a kimono clad dancer, though.

Yakuza? (20070805)

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My friends told me this must certainly be a yakuza (mafia) car. It is illegal to have toned windows in Japan (or so I hear, at least) so only the yakuza do.

Sushi (20070808)

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I went for "kaiten sushi" today. Going with Japanese people tends to mean lots of weird and or disgusting food being ordered. Are we for instance sure that the squids are even dead yet? I also like the fact that someone is preparing food with a blow torch.

Praying (20070808)

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Now you can put up requests to the gods in the middle of the shopping centre again. I put up this note.

Key chain (20070808)

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Why not have a stylish tempura fried shrimp for your key chain?

Translations (20070809)

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The Japanese "konsento" means electric socket. It is considered an English word by Japanese people, and it comes from "concentric plug" I hear. This is not what Japanese people believe though, they believe the English word is actually "concent".

Cut (20070810)

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This is me with long hair. Long no longer.

Deep English (20070810)

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This cake is interesting. Though not interesting enough to buy perhaps. "I have always sweet cheese cakes. ...unnecessary of the boyfriend... because cakes make me happy!" This would be funny even written in correct English, and with "unnecessary of the boyfriend" it was perhaps the photographical high point of this week.

Street culture (20070811)

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There was drumming and dancing in front of the old governor's manor or whatever this tourist attraction might be.

Shopping (20070811)

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Today was super hot, and since the Japanese class I usually kill time in on Saturdays had a summer vacation today, I had nothing to do. A friend from Sapporo has claimed that girls in Sapporo are much better dressed than girls in Nagoya, which I expressed doubts about. According to what I hear, Saturday near either the station or the southern shopping districts is where the best dressed girls flock. To see if I could verify this story, I went there. But it was too hot to be outside for long, so I fled into stores with AC. So today ended up as a huge shopping spree, with two new pairs of pants and an expensive t-shirt... Following my recent tradition of taking a photo of anyone selling me expensive stuff, this is the cute sales girl who managed to sell me a pair of weird pants. Sadly, I was too tired (or sun struck) to remember to take a photo of the girl in the t-shirt store, who was perhaps even cuter...

I am surely not the strangest (20070811)

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The person next to the pole wears a mini-skirt, stockings, high heels, a hand bag, tight no sleeve shirt and a girlish bandanna. He is also a man. I hereby vote for removing myself from the position of worst dressed male in Sapporo.

Street music (20070811)

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There was a live performance outside the station today. Nice music.

Huge amounts of food (20070811)

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We went to an "all you can eat and drink, from a huge variety of choices" place today. After two hours (then the shop closed, if we had arrived earlier, we would likely have exploded) of eating Chinese, sushi, Japanese, pizza, pasta, salads, European food, cakes, ice cream, bread, fruits etc. we rolled out the door and overloaded the elevator.

Pizza with potatoes (20070811)

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In Japan, potatoes is a normal thing to put on pizza... not so much in Sweden.

Salad? (20070811)

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In the "Salad bar" part of the restaurant they had a bowl of fried chicken. Possibly you could also find trace amounts of onion. Does this really qualify as salad?

Colorful (20070811)

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Shredded ice with colorful synthetic taste additives is a popular summer dessert in Japan. Your tongue turns blue too, as my young company noticed. She also noticed that one of the people at the next table was eating the same thing. So we convinced her that taking a picture of the neighbors tongue would be good. Being an extremely stubborn kid, she managed to get a picture after a few minutes of nagging, despite loud cries of protest (as it would be embarrassing). We were quite happy with the result.

Clothes (20070813)

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In Japan people wear shirts and lots of other clothes when swimming. Main idea: no suntan.

Me (20070813)

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Me looking stylish at the beach. Especially the hat is very manly (though not actually mine).

Dogs (20070813)

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In Japan, you take your dogs for a spin in the rubber boat.

Camera (20070813)

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I too want a camera for under water use!

View (20070813)

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Yoichi is nice to look at.

Making friends (20070813)

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It seems it is easy to make new friends in Japan. As far as I can tell, this is what you do: You walk up to them, look super cute and start laughing. Then you say "I know how to speak Japanese" and start ordering them around to do things for you. There must be some important detail I am missing though, because it never works for me when I try this method...

Tattoo (20070813)

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How cool is it too have a gun jammed into you underwear tattooed on you stomach? Very!

Otaru sights (20070813)

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We stopped by Otaru to get something to eat. For some reason, everyone must take a picture of the canal. Astute readers may remember a picture from this exact spot in wintertime, taken by me a year and a half before.

Swedish chopsticks from Japan! (20070813)

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I got presents from IKEA in Tokyo.

Three threes (20070814)

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It is too hot here. 33.3 degrees Celsius (any respectable person of course uses Celsius, since Celsius himself was a Swede).

O-Bon (20070814)

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There is a holiday here now, called o-Bon. You can dance around the scene in the park if you like. I have tried this before, twice. Both times in Chiba. I have tried Bon-dancing in Sapporo too, but in the winter for some reason.

Getting around (20070815)

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Some people have fancier ways of getting around inside the very wide university grounds than others.

Birds (20070815)

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Someone is herding a bird down the street. Why was unclear.

Waffles (20070815)

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I met up with my former Swedish-Japanese language exchange friends form last time in Sapporo. I tried fruit waffles, but I must say Swedish waffles are much different from and much better than Japanese ones.

Room mates (20070816)

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Someone keeps leaving the door to the building open, and below my door to the hallway there is a huge gap, so currently I have many other creatures sharing my room with me. I try to herd spiders into my room to eat the other insects, but there is very little progress so far.

Distraction (20070816)

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We were doing a group trip in a tiny car today, and I had to distract the most impatient person from screaming at the driver. So she painted my fingers orange and pink.

Japanese translations (20070816)

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Having managed to pick the only day with bad weather to go swimming, we went to some adventure pool thing. They had signs in many languages, though not always very clear. Taking pictures of all the cute people in bikini was not allowed, so this sign is about as exciting as it gets. I also noticed that Japanese people cannot stand heat very well either. That they cannot stand cold was clear since before, but today I spent some time in a sauna, where some poor fully dressed guy was waving a towel at you (to pull down hot air from above and pour it over you). Japanese people seemed to have no tolerance for the mild warmth of this sauna.

Indian gnomes? (20070816)

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What kind of establishment keeps German garden gnomes and similar things in their garden in Japan? Indian restaurants it turns out...

More translations (20070817)

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I was waiting to meet a friend who was back in Sapporo for the first time in years. While this sign is not very exciting, I was bored because of all of the other people showing up late.

Failed practice (20070817)

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While once again being made to wait, this time for people going to the bathroom, I tried practicing a new card trick. It did not work that well, and I ended up losing one of my cards into the well protected flower arrangement...

New strategy (20070817)

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We managed to meet up with a friend who is very pregnant too, and her husband. Everyone else wanted to have coffee, which I don't like. I decided to go with my new strategy: when no particular option is evident, pick the most expensive thing on the menu. It was called "Berry-Berry-parfait" and was quite delicious. I got yelled at for eating it myself, before other people had time to react and eat most of it for themselves.

Micro (20070817)

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I had a severe head ache (ever since being to the sea, so probably I filled some part of my head with dirty sea water or something) and decided to "cook" today instead of going out. Japanese micro-wave pizza really put the word micro in the name...

More festivities (20070819)

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With most of the headache gone, I went out to help pick out readable books in English. I also saw kids doing karate/dancing to music. Followed by construction workers and other people dancing Bon-dances.

Japanese curry (20070820)

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Japanese curry is not like other curry. For instance, they sometimes spell it calyi. And it is "spice" rather than spicy.

Stanp cards (20070820)

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I headed over for some Chinese food instead of calyi, but I do not have a stanp card.

Cultural exchange (20070824)

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I was asked by a friend to show up for some kind of international culture exchange thing. It turned out to be some sort of "gender studies" society meeting... But it was quite fun in the end. We foreigners got a bunch of cards saying "parents are poor", "religious family" and such things. Then we had to decide if this made life easier or harder for a kid growing up under such conditions (actually stated as "imagine you have just given birth to a baby", which was hard for me to imagine). Some people went to great lengths when forced to explain their choices (which you had to do in Japanese), while I normally made short explanations that seemed to be to the point so there were no annoying clarifications necessary. Like: "a family with very weak religious beliefs" making life easy, by way of reasoning: "that is the case for most people in Sweden, and most seem to lead easy lives". After the whole thing we had to introduce ourselves too. A guy from India stood up and stated that his goal was to go back to India and work hard for all the poor people and to make an India equal for everyone, so everyone can lead a good life. Evidently, stating naive and unrealistic intentions is a way to impress young Japanese women, it turned out. There also turned out to be a Chinese woman soon moving to Sweden there, who wanted to ask me questions.

Pigeons (20070824)

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Perhaps to give me more practice at doing good things for unrealistic purposes, I was then taken to a "trade fair" restaurant (?). Evidently the words come from English, but it was unclear if Japanese "trade fair" should be the English "fair trade" (most likely) or not. They seemed to be sort of hippie influenced "we do not like capitalism" related, at least. Very nice people, though when we got there they had eaten all the food in the restaurant, so they could not even make new food for us... There was a special event going on. Some guy from Australia (or some other English speaking country, he presented himself as "Earth-person", which again impressed people as being profound) who had taken a bicycle ride around the whole of Japan was giving a speech. He went around the whole country doing origami (paper folding) pigeons, that can flap their wings, "for peace". Since my name means dove, I should probably learn how to do this. It was almost over when we got there, but he said some more profound things, like "self defence force and army, that is like stool and chair, only two words for the same thing". He seemed very nice. There was also a funny chef from Nepal there. He was reportedly a famous musician in Nepal, but after singing protest songs critical of the government he was either deported or at least his music was outlawed, so now he is in Japan. Working as a chef to get enough money to put out a record. The final interesting thing is that I ran into a Japanese girl who claimed to have met me before. As in 18 months before, at 2 in the morning in an Irish bar. She had bookmarked my home page too. Strange that she remembered me.

Food and drink (20070824)

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Having missed the food at the previous place, we went on to another restaurant were everything is 315 yen (about 3 dollars). For instance one hour of free drinks, including 50 types of alcoholic drinks... Also including a huge plate of fried chicken. Too much for four people.

Looking hot (20070825)

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Below the Sapporo TV tower there is some poor guy dressed as the TV tower. Must be painful in this 30 degree heat that never ends.

Text on shirts (20070826)

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People complain if I wear a shirt saying "Doctor Pigeon", because it makes no sense. Evidently, "Lovesick the sweet high and mighty secret my love enticeement 1982" is OK though.

Stylish (20070826)

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I too want a snake skin pattern shirt and pants with embroidery. Actually, I already have such pants, though with cooler embroidery, but it is too hot to wear them now.

Weird food (20070826)

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Chicken fried with corn flakes? Surprisingly pleasant. Pizza like things with teriyaki sauce and mayo? Also quite good.

Not again... (20070827)

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My bicycle handle has once again decided to fail me, and will likely soon fall apart...

Business cards! (20070829)

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I have now printed my first ever business cards. The paper looks much prettier in real life. It glimmers and is perhaps some traditional rice paper.

Badminton (20070829)

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I once again played badminton. This time, two girls also showed up to play. And gave me (and only me) home made cake, for some reason. A pro from China also showed up, so winning was not on the table today.

Only in Japan? (20070831)

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This is the unattended "lost and found" box placed in the highly trafficked northern student restaurants/shops building. I can hardly see other countries doing things like "well, someone seems to have dropped some cash/keys/whatever, let's just put them here"... especially with the cash.

This is how you do it (20070831)

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I have sometimes wondered how people can give other people a lift with them standing up. This seems to help.

More festivals (20070831)

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Today there was some kind of street event again. The bars (of various shadiness) have these events almost all the time, it seems. There was live music (very good quality, especially considering they were all employees of some bar or restaurant), traditional drumming (super advanced) and a karaoke tournament. An old pachinko (gambling) owner won, since he was really good. He was also recruiting young women, he said...

Food (20070831)

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Squids chopped up into smaller pieces. Served in some weird orange sauce. Raw. Perhaps not the high point of Japanese cuisine. The deep fried vegetables, shrimps and fish are good though.