January 2008

New Years breakfast (20080101)

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Breakfast on the 1st of January is more pun based dishes, Japanese sake, smashed rice cakes in soup (very very chewy/gooey, which has some elders die every year from choking, I am told), and the rather surprising tiramisu (non-traditional, I think).

Asahikawa (20080101)

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Asahikawa is Hokkaido's second biggest city, after Sapporo. Feels a lot like a small town, though. But it has about the same number of inhabitants as Stockholm, the largest city in Sweden.

Dogs (20080101)

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The family had a dog, that really really wanted to go along when everyone was going shopping for cameras and other electronics (there is a sale on everything after New Years). He had been eating something bad the day before though, and kept throwing up the whole day, so he was not allowed to come. He was first into the car anyway, but had to be lifted out.

Japanese pizza (20080101)

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After coming back to Sapporo, I had pizza for dinner. A very nice pizza, but removing the boiled egg would most likely improve it further.

Sumo style food (20080102)

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There was a 60 year old Swiss guy in town who knew no Japanese at all. Since I know English, I was called in to party with him and some other people. Of course, he is a native French speaker who then knows German and Italian too, so I was not that much help. But he did speak some English, more than my French, so I guess I did some good. We had "chanko nabe", which is what sumo wrestlers eat to gain that slim physique of theirs. We ordered food for four, but were actually six, but still got more food than we needed.

Manly food (20080102)

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After the chanko, people wanted to eat cake. When asked what kind of cake I was going to order, I said I don't like Japanese cakes (true, since they taste only of whipped cream and sponges that are mainly air). Everyone evidently though "Oh, very macho male, doesn't like sweets" and nearly fell off their chairs in shock when I ordered this thing instead.

Strange food (20080103)

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As thanks for having food cooked for me many times, I was trying to treat a Japanese friend to dinner. After having let slip that she had a 9 days winter vacation, there was no longer any way for her to dodge this, and we ended up eating weird food. The main dish was "motsu", which is some form of guts from some unspecified animal. Perhaps not knowing more details is good. There was also blue cheese covered in red miso, raw cow tongue, pig something with bones and cartilage that you were expected to eat, and a perfectly normal salad. Most exciting was the horse sashimi (raw horse meat; photo taken with flash). It came in two types, "meat" (the red parts) and "mane" (the white parts). The "mane" was evidently the same in Japanese, and native speakers too would expect to get a mouthful of fur when hearing this. But it turned out to be fat or sinew from right below the mane, I guess.

More home cooking (20080105)

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More people cooking for me. Which is nice, but I had to ride a bicycle with a carton with a cake in it over to this place, which is difficult on ice covered roads. And your fingers get cold from having to grip the cake box and try to keep it from hitting random pedestrians or aggressively close taxis.

Gyoza (20080106)

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Today I bought a vacuum cleaner, and on my way home got invited to a Taiwanese gyoza (dumplings) making party. I also helped a Taiwanese friend carry an oven to the post office, to send the oven to her parents. In the end, my Taiwanese friends did not go (they went shopping for clothes instead) but a Japanese friend went along and ate too much gyoza. They had managed to buy all the gyoza ingredients from the whole super market nearby. Apart from the actual gyoza, there was also a lemon (squashing 8 lemons) based sauce, a soup whose most important ingredient was "love", and fruits.

Desserts (20080106)

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The Japanese friend from the gyoza party had actually agreed to go for a "who can really eat 10 pancakes in one go" challenge today, but had eaten so much gyoza that she could hardly move. A Taiwanese friend back from shopping wanted to go and eat pancakes anyway, but we decided to postpone the 10 pancake challenge. We only had 5 pancakes each, which is still rather impressive considering the gyoza. Normal dosage is 2 to 3 pancakes, I have been told. That Japanese girl still thinks she will have no problem with 10 pancakes though, which is strange since that would most likely double her body weight.

Kids (20080107)

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I spent the afternoon playing games with kids. They had a "start the new year" party, and since most of these kids have never spoken to a foreigner before, I was asked to show up and show them that foreigners are not that strange. "Friends" of mine questioned my suitability if this was the actual purpose, but at least the kids had a lot of fun (as did I). I did get very dirty on the way there and back though. I had to ride my bicycle on the main thoroughfare of Sapporo for about half an hour either way, and the weather was just warm enough for it to be covered in easily "flying to pants" dirt.

Convenient (20080108)

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Today I tried out my new vacuum cleaner. Conveniently enough, it also fits in my refrigerator! Which saves space.

Stylish (20080109)

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My new gloves. Go well with my sheets too. No use at all against the cold though.

Aesthetically pleasing food (20080110)

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Apparently, you are not actually supposed to eat the flowers at the Thai restaurant.

Aesthetically less pleasing food (20080112)

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While the goal of eating "sparrow on a stick" to find out what that is about (do you eat the beak? can you leave the head uneaten or is that rude? etc.) remained unfulfilled, other strange things were eaten. Here frog and raw chicken. Frog does indeed taste a lot like chicken. As does the raw chicken.

Aesthetically ambitious drinks (20080112)

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Cappuccino with different designs available.

Snowy preparations (20080113)

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The Japanese army does the most ambitious sculptures for the Sapporo snow festival and have already started piling up snow. Many many meters high.

Doll festival (20080113)

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Soon it is time for the Japanese doll festival holiday (hina matsuri). So most stores now sell dolls that all look more or less the same and cost a fortune.

Swedish stuff (20080113)

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There are not that many Swedish things on sale in Japan, but this store sold Swedish vacuum cleaners (and no other brands in that area).

Winter view (20080114)

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The view from my apartment.

Educational (20080114)

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There was some sort of demonstration of electricity today (today was a holiday). In this picture, static electricity is used to keep balloons in the air without touching them.

Free food (20080115)

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Today I got a free left over "lunch box". Japanese lunches contain a huge number of different things (all in fairly small amounts though).

What is a rapper? (20080115)

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Today I bought myself a rapper and checked what it is. It is something that vaguely resembles bread wrapped around something that resembles cheese and a not very exciting sausage.

More free food (20080117)

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Having given lots of feedback and corrections of the written English in a few research papers of a colleague, she made good on her promise to buy me food if the papers where accepted. First a steak that you fry yourself that kind of splatters all your clothing with oil, and then lots of cakes. It was hard to move after eating all that.

Winter is here (20080117)

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The winter seems to have finally come to Sapporo.

First fall (20080117)

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On my way home I fell with my bicycle. First fall this year (traditionally I fall five times per winter). I was going pretty fast and suddenly some car is driving on the sidewalk (where I was too). So I had to swerve to avoid the car and ended up on the road covered in very bumpy feet thick ice. Turning quickly on ice is tricky at best, so down I went. My knee decided to protect the soft and durable parts of the body by taking the hit itself. That hurt.

Not a fry-pan (20080118)

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A friend asked if I wanted to go along to a cheap shopping mall today. Since I in normal fashion had absolutely nothing to do, I did. She ended up trying on pretty much every model of boot in the shoe store (over 20 models available) and uttering many disparaging comments regarding my taste in what is a nice boot. I looked around for a fry-pan so I could make Swedish pancakes but since I do not know what size my IH range actually is, and since it is lowered down into the desk it sits in, I did not buy one. Buying one that is too big to use would be sad. Instead we bought some weird Belgian ice cream with apricot jam inside.

Not allowed (20080119)

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As sometimes happens, today there was a huge gathering of people sitting outside a tiny radio station. Probably some famous Japanese something were being interviewed. I took a picture but was captured by guards telling me to erase that picture. Evidently, taking pictures in a public place is forbidden if from this place you can see the back of the head of someone famous. And why famous people do not want to be photographed while working also seems strange, but I erased my picture.

German(ish) food, and a disaster (20080119)

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This item was billed as "super popular" and "German style cutlet". Pretty good. When leaving lunch and going home, my bicycle broke! No bicycle means my life will be sadly lacking in convenience. And physical exercise.

Early (20080120)

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Today I planned to get up at 5.45 A.M. to go snowboarding with two friends. That would most likely be perfect timing for catching the train at 7.03 (obviously, the person making this schedule was not me). At 5.25 I got an e-mail to my phone saying: "Oh, by the way, we are also planning on going to a hot spring. Make preparations for that. You can borrow towels on site." Since a hot spring means taking off your clothes and sitting naked in hot water, all you actually need is a towel. So people wake me up at this ungodly hour to say "no additional preparations necessary at all"... And then they themselves almost missed the train (just made it by running the few hundred meters from the subway to the train), so I had to buy them breakfast... I on the other hand reached the station at 6.30, since someone woke me up twenty minutes earlier than planned.

Not packed with people (20080120)

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One of the benefits of going basically in the middle of the night is that most normal people are still sleeping, so there is plenty of space in the bus!

Norway, almost Sweden (20080120)

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I spotted a Japanese guy in a jacket saying Norway in Norwegian. So I asked if I could take a picture, which was OK.

The ski slope (20080120)


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The ski slope was very nice, and the weather was great. A little cold when the strong winds made the lifts swing like a roller coaster, but other than that, fine.

Lunch (20080120)

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Lunch was included, and was OK. After lunch a snow storm arrived, so I got a bad frostbite on my ears. Almost gone four days later, though.

Why snowboarding in jeans is not that great (20080120)

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When skiing, jeans is perfectly fine, since if you don't fall you don't get snow on you. When snowboarding, you spend a lot of time sitting down, even if you are actually good at snowboarding. So your jeans will be caked in ice, like mine.

Instead of hot springs (20080120)

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Since everyone I knew was female, and the hot spring place like most such places having separate areas for men and women, the hot spring thing was rather boring. The choice was between sitting naked in hot water alone or sitting clothed in the hot lobby alone. Or possibly, standing in on site bought swimwear and watching kids play in the pool, alone. I opted for the lobby, where at least I could e-mail and surf the Internet with my phone. The others were finished surprisingly fast, we left after only slightly more than an hour and a half.

Tomamu, not big (20080120)

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Tomamu (the place we went) is such a small place that they don't even have the automatic ticket checking machines, they just have a box with a sign saying "throw your ticket in here".

Asian socializing (20080120)

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When going back to Sapporo everyone except me promptly fell asleep and spent the whole 90 minutes asleep. No one else wanted to speak to me either, so I continued to spend my time on the Internet with my cell phone. The trip out was much more enjoyable, since my friends managed to stay awake and converse with me. But evidently, in Japan you are more or less supposed to sleep on the train. Not sleeping is considered slightly weird, I am told.

Weather (20080121)

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Winter is here, so now it keeps snowing all the time.

I am back presents (20080121)

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I got licorice and a keyboard with Swedish letters on it as a "I am back" present today. I am not sure why I would want one more keyboard (I have many already), but at least it was very surprising.

Italian food (20080121)

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I finally managed to corner a friend on a day when she had no plausible excuses not to have dinner (first time in six months), so we had some very nice "Italian" food.

Japanese food = disgusting stuff (20080122)

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One of the ski people had bought a ticket for Asahikawa but not managed to use it in the three months it was valid, so she sold it to me cheaply. Today was the last day it was valid, so I took off right after work, had dinner, and just managed to catch the last train back. I am now classified as insane for going to Asahikawa just to eat (takes about 90 minutes by train), but in Sweden there is a saying roughly like "90 minutes away for coffee is still close", so I have been reassured by Swedish friends that the weird ones are the Japanese. I met up with two of the three that guided me around in Asahikawa the first time I was there, and we set off for a restaurant a colleague of mine had recommended. They had a menu full of grotesqueries. Highlights include: insects of various types, sparrows (including beaks and all), fish sperm, frogs, raw liver, raw chicken, and green smashed up crabs. But there were good food too. More details below. Anything not described below is either normal (like grilled liver on a stick), tasty (like the ramen salad), or both.

Fish sperm (20080122)

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We did not order this (I,and everyone else too, have eaten this before; it is quite common), but they tried to give us some anyway (they went to the wrong table). It is "very creamy" and just melts in your mouth (very disgusting), looks like a raw brain (also disgusting) but is actually some sperm related part of a fish (also rather disgusting, perhaps). Comes raw or grilled, usually raw. Can be white (the best color), green, or black. Evidently, winter is the season when fish sperm is the most delicious, or so I am told. This is expensive food. Recommendation: try once just to see what it is, then avoid.

Crab paste (20080122)

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This green thing is some kind of crab thing. Most likely a crab mashed up to be a cream paste. But why is it green? Tastes like crab and is not very disgusting at all, except possibly the color. Recommended if you like crab.

Insects, grasshoppers (20080122)

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Grasshoppers are surprisingly OK. Tasted about the same as raisins, but were very much crunchier. Not exactly good, but not bad. Recommendation: try once at least, best insect so far. We finished all of them.

Insects, wasp based (20080122)

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In Japanese: "Wasp children". The black ones look pretty much like fully grown wasps, and the orange brown things are something like eggs, I guess. Black ones are more disgusting than the others. Taste is fairly OK, but the feeling of them popping and gushing out intestines and juice all over the insides of your mouth is not very pleasant. I ate about twenty of these and then we left the rest. Recommendation: try once, not that bad. Came as a set with the grasshoppers, so you might as well eat both.

Sparrows (20080122)

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Sparrows. Very disgusting. Looks disgusting, and tastes surprisingly disgusting too. Most of the parts are just bones (legs, wings) with no meat, but even the meat tastes bad (the little of it that you find on the chest and back). Most disgusting is the head, you are supposed to eat all of it, eyes, brain, skull, beak... everything. The beak is better than imagined, but not good. Best part is probably the legs, which is like chewing on a twig (both taste and texture), though you have to be careful when eating the claws. Recommended: no, not really. Looks grotesque, which is funny. I managed to finish a whole one (not that that is very much food), but the other two managed to eat only one leg and the beak of the other sparrow. Good thing I talked them out of ordering two plates of this so that "everyone could have at least one bird each"...

Frog (20080122)

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I have had frog before, though this one was prepared in a different way. Frog is not actually bad, though it is not really great either. Tastes like chicken, though with a weaker flavor. The best part about the frog was that after having all the other really disgusting stuff, everyone was kind of calming down at the table thinking "I, finally over". And then the waiter shows up and shouts "And here are the frogs!" which caused a very funny reaction in my company. Recommendation: you might as well try it so you can say you have eaten frog, but chicken is still cheaper and better.

Liver sashimi (20080122)

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The worst food of the night was the liver sashimi (raw liver). This is not a very strange food in Japan, they have it in many many places. It is very disgusting though. I don't like liver even when cooked, and one thing that the raw liver has in its favor is that it does not taste very bad. It does not taste very much of anything at all, actually. The texture is very disgusting though. It is very soft and slimy, and just melt outs all over your mouth. And no matter how much you swallow, some still stays sloshing around inside your mouth for some reason. There is also a lot of blood seeping out of the stuff, which some people find disgusting. Recommendation: might as well avoid it.

Chicken with lots of wasabi (20080122)

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The green thing on top is wasabi, and it was strong enough to have my two Japanese companions waving their arms and looking funny after eating it. They thought it was hysterical when I tried it and tears poured out of my eyes, and of course took many pictures of that. Recommendation: if you want to have an intense pain in your nose, this one goes away relatively quickly so it may be a good way.

Chicken sashimi (20080122)

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Raw chicken. We did not order this, but it is not very special, except in the sense that generally if you eat raw chicken you will be sick. Hopefully, restaurants that serve raw chicken use especially non-dangerous chicken meat. I have had raw chicken before, and it tastes like normal chicken but is a little bit slimier. Not really recommended.

Rope pulling (20080123)

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There was some form of rope pulling contest at school this week. Traditionally, information science comes last. This year, we managed to win one match. Why Japanese people consider rope pulling to be a good thing to do when the ground is covered in very slippery ice remains unclear. It is also traditional to tie rope around your shoes, despite this being no help at all in not slipping. In Sweden, the computer science department had the color pink, and here in Japan, we still have pink as our official color. Some things never change.

Small pig (20080123)

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A "I have travelled and must thus give you gifts" present, called "small pig". Quite good.

Food on a stick (20080124)

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Having no one to dine with, I ended up in a bar where the bartender is very funny (he also has a father who is a magician, which leads to some interesting anecdotes). Today I ordered bacon wrapped in glue like rice paste and then deep fried, and other normal things. They also had deep fried bananas, which is rare but still good.

Snow (20080124)

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It has started snowing in Sapporo, so we got a few meters recently. Which made my black clothes turn white from a few minutes of walking home.

Strange sports (20080126)

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A friend of mine wanted to try out "luge". You lie on what looks like to huge ice skates strapped together with a face towel. The instruction was fairly short: "You lie on this part, make sure your head is hanging freely in the air and that your arse is also hanging in the air. If you let got with your hands, you will die, so don't do that. If you put no pressure at all on these things here with your legs, you will bounce into the walls and hurt yourself a lot. If you put a lot of pressure on these things with your legs, you will bounce into the walls and hurt yourself a lot. If you raise your head so you can see where you are going, you will bounce into the walls and hurt yourself a lot. There is no way to break, and steering is difficult. Good luck." Then we went into the ice canal and started bouncing against the walls, which hurt. The first try was only the final curve, so you were only going really fast (later we went really really fast). I hit the walls a lot and completely failed in any steering attempts. But I managed to hit the walls with my elbow pads, which did not hurt, so I figured "piece of cake, nothing here hurts". Second try was a little bit of speed gaining and then the last curve. This time I managed to steer well enough to not hit any walls, which also gave me confidence. The final two trips was a fairly curvy 250 meter stretch (the full course is about 1200 meters I think). First time down, I was fastest of all, but also managed to fly out of the tunnel and straight into a wall, hand first. So I got a big bump on my hand which I hoped would turn into an impressive bruise given time. Unfortunately, this was spotted by the nurse at hand, so she insisted on wrapping me up in some kind of coolant packs etc. No bruise for me... It was a lot of fun, hurt quite a bit, and was a rather strange new experience. My friend hurt herself a lot, and had chill packs on both her legs, and on her back. She also had a bruised arm. She later went to the hospital too, and had a hard time lying down, sitting up, walking, and standing, for a few days. Luckily, this was all her idea, otherwise I might have been killed by her afterwards.

Japanese food (20080126)

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My bruised and battered friend went off to meet some of her real friends instead, so it looked like a lonely night for me. I managed to get invited to have dinner at a rather fancy looking restaurant, which was good. Meeting up with these people turned out to be as difficult as usual in Japan, what is the problem with specifying one place (in an easy to understand way) and a time, and then just going there? Anyway, they ordered lots of food and when one person who has not met me for two years asked if I perhaps also wanted to order something, everyone else said that "No, he eats anything, so we never ask". I asked the waitress if they had any strange or weird food (my friends claimed this was a normal restaurant so they of course only had normal food). She suggested "apple filled with cheese and shrimps", which qualifies as weird in my book so I ordered that.

More snow (20080126)

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Since the snow has now started falling, there are walls of snow between the pedestrians and the cars that are taller than either. Which makes crossing the street more dangerous than in summer. It can also be hard to find your car if you go away for a day or two.

Home cooking (20080127)

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A friend had a party in his home, where everyone could eat home cooked Japanese food, play Wii (with the fitness controller), and watch the S&M Kitty cups.

Bicycle (20081030)

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I broke my bicycle a week or so ago, and tried using the subway instead. That is not a good option. Bicycles are so much faster and more convenient (and cheaper). Today I finally found a place that would actually sell me a cheap bicycle. It is not really high season for bicycles in Sapporo now.

More snow (20080131)

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Today, bicycle was perhaps suboptimal. It was hard enough to see anything while standing still, and when riding straight into the wind vision was pretty close to zero. And my eyes hurt.