Week 3: Tanuki Koji

This week I got to play with my Arabidopsis!! My seedlings are so cute! Using Arabidopsis makes me finally feel like a real scientist. 

I also heard a lot of cuckoos (the common cuckoo is the official bird of Sapporo!) and helicopers (which makes me feel like I'm living in Night Vale). On Wednesday we went for a lab lunch at a vegan restaurant! It was really delicious, and I think most people from the lab were pleasantly surprised. It was relatively close to where I live (maybe a 20-30 minute bike ride) so I will definitely be back. 

Today I went on an adventure to find Tanuki Koji, an open-air shopping arcade. I had heard that they had some souvenir-y type things in addition to some "normal" stores, so I was curious to check it out. When I went to leave the research facility where I live, I forgot the key code for the gate, so I had to scramble up a hill like a mountain goat to get to the other side (the passcode is a permutation of some of the numbers on a sign that can only be seen from the other side). So that was dignified. Then I had to open the gate for my bike. When I got downtown, unsurprisingly, I got kind of lost trying to find the place I was looking for and I wandered in circles for a while before I found my way in (which of course turned out to be right beside the place where I started from). I managed to find an open-air fish market in the process, but I decided not to buy anything for the cats because I didn't think my parents would appreciate receiving a probably-spoiled package of crab in the mail. . 

When I eventually found Tanuki Koji, most of the stores were still closed (at 10:30 am on a Saturday?) so I got the chance to wander around and see what kind of stores there were before I actually did any shopping. Two things they had in spades were crane game parlours and casinos?? Like, several slot machine casinos, sometimes right across from each other. I had no luck on the crane games; I used to feel like I was pretty decent at them (I won the first few times I played the last time I was in Japan!) but this time I got NOTHING! Tragic.

The empty shopping arcade. It turns out that things open at 11 am, and not 10 am which would be a sane time to open on a weekend.

These are tanuki and they are HILARIOUS.

One of many slot machine casinos. I didn't go in so I don't know what other games they had. 

PenPen!!!!! This is one of them fancy crane games. I didn't play it because I figured the odds of winning were too low (and then I wasted like $10 on keychain machines soooo...)

After the shopping street, I went back to Daiso for some more basic baking and organizational type things, and this time I managed to take pictures! Unfortunately, they all suck :S So here are some socks I saw instead! I have already received complements on my socks from people in my lab. My Pac-Man socks were a hit!

Looking at this picture, I actually wish I would have bought some / all of these.

I did a quick grocery shop when I got back to my subway station. I finally got baking powder and baking soda and vanilla so I can do some baking!!! When I was ready to head home, I discovered that a) my bike basket is a little smaller than I thought it was and it can really only fit one bag of junk, and b) I had my second bike parking ticket! I guess they're more of a warning than a real ticket, but apparently they give them to everyone all the time for parking bikes in front of the subway station. Everyone told me that nobody cares and they only rarely confiscate your bike, so MEH. It looks like I was pretty lucky though, because all the bikes about two away from mine had been removed so that someone could set up a stand, so I think I might have to try to find a better place to park my bike. It would be a little embarrassing to have to ask someone from the lab to help me call the city or whoever to figure out what happened to my bike.

Photographic evidence that I am a delinquent.

 Anyway, because I had a basket full of HEAVY groceries and a second bag of groceries hanging from my handlebars AND a heavy backpack AND I was wearing a skirt AND the streets were crowded because it looked like there was a signing at the Ham-Fighters swag store (which is in between the subway station and my place), I had a pretty interesting bike ride home between trying not to flash anyone and also trying not to fall off my bike. I don't have any shorts and it is about 30C today, so I didn't want to wear pants, and I figured that schoolgirls ride their bikes in skirts and seem to maintain their dignity, so it seemed like a good idea at the time. This is an artist's rendering of me riding my bike home:

Subtract the cigarette and add a bunch of groceries and a bike parking ticket.

During the course of the day I saw some HILARIOUS signs and t-shirts. These are for you, bro.

"Snobbish Babies." This one was a pet stuff store and there was a chihuahua inside barking at me. 

"Zero Planning," an unfortunately-named travel agency of some sort.

S'up bra?

Why was the zombie skating over the other zombie / vampire? I think he really does care.

Maruyama Zoo!

Whoa! Fixed the internet thanks to some trans-oceanic tech support from my brother. I'll update the previous post with a few pictures, but I thought the zoo deserved a post of its own.

So. The Maruyama Zoo. The setting is beautiful; the zoo itself is nestled among a bunch of smallish mountains, near the edge of the city, in a park. There's a baseball stadium in the park and I could hear a game for most of the time we were at the zoo :) It was a nice, clear day, but it was also pretty darn chilly in the shade. I was wearing a coat and a sweater and I was cold most of the time. 

Some parts of the zoo were really great. There was a joey in with the kangaroos and he was drinking milk from his mother (though sadly I think he was too big to get in her pouch). The giraffes were cute and they kept making hilarious faces as they ate. The red pandas were ridiculously adorable!

He never did eat that strawberry..

Some of the animals were being pretty lazy, probably because it was around lunchtime and some of them had clearly just eaten

A tiger with a small child for reference. 

The Japanese macaques were having a great time eating bugs out of each other's fur and occasionally screaming. 

Canada was pretty well-represented. There were polar bears and wolves and prairie dogs and a mystery beaver who had an enclosure but who was not home while I was there.

There was a mynah bird who refused to speak for some reason, despite hoards of children (and adults) screaming "O-HAY-OOO! KON-NI-CHI-WAAAA!!!" every few seconds :p

One bird was in jail but the other was free in the tropical bird zone.

There were also some FLUORESCENT flamingoes! Maybe I've just never seen flamingoes before (likely) but these guys were seriously bright.

Based on some propaganda at my friend's daughter's school, we had been led to believe that there would be some sort of an exhibit about the tapirs, but we didn't see anything special (though it's very likely that we just were unable to read the programs and figure out if / when there was some sort of a demonstration).

He sure was a tapir!

The chimpanzees really stole the show. There were several young chimps who were riding around on their mothers' backs, and some wise old men-chimps who were staring at everyone (which was sort of disturbing).

Because it was Japan, there were also some intentionally and unintentionally hilarious signs.

I'm not sure if "buzzard" is really an ornithological term...

Ok this one was clearly on purpose but we really enjoyed it (and also when we looked up there really was a monkey sitting on some mesh RIGHT above us...)

I also learned about a hornet that I saw outside of my window the morning I went to the zoo! They kill 30-40 people a year in Japan and can cause random people to go into anaphylactic shock. I'm pretty sure this is the type of hornet that stung a friend of mine once O__O Also I am never going outside again. 

They were no joke 3-4 cm long ;__; 

Sadly, as I mentioned in my previous post, some of the animals were in some pretty pathetically-awful cages. Considering that most of the zoo was pretty good, these were truly shocking to me. I'm really hoping that the situation for these guys is on the list of planned improvements for the zoo expansion that was under construction.

A mangy-lookin' raccoon with a rat tail, who was pacing back and forth frantically.

This is the snow leopard who was in leopard jail, while his buddy had a huge and more appropriate enclosure right beside him. I assume that these guys take turns being on alternate sides, but this was really not great. He was also pacing angrily and people kept knocking on his glass. He made a motion like he wanted to eat a little girl at one point.

I'm not sure if cement floors are a lion's natural habitat.

In the end, as a noted hippie, I wasn't blown away by the conditions of the animals in this zoo but I was mostly not completely disgusted, either. I don't have any grand plans to go back while I'm in Sapporo but I don't feel gross for giving these folks 600¥. 

Week 2

I feel like I'm settling in to Sapporo pretty well. One minor / major hiccup is that this weekend my computer decided that it hates the Internet. My tablet can connect, but not the computer. That kinda stinks for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I can't post many pictures!  Also, please forgive any weirdo spelling / grammatical / autocorrect issues.

Oh well. Just in general, I expect that this blog is going to be pretty quiet during the week. I usually just go to work and then come home, although I did have an adventure on Friday finding a 7-11 close to me (which required a hybrid of Google maps and 7-11's Japanese website). I needed 7-11 because they have 24-hour bank machines, and my bank (and its ATM???) are only open until like 5pm. Anyway, that turned out to be exciting because Google maps is in Japanese in Japan. I suppose that makes sense.

On Saturday I went shopping with my prof and his family. I had met them previously, because they came to stay with my current prof when he was a visiting scientist in my former lab. His wife is super sweet and very helpful, and his kids are adorable and very well-behaved. 

First we went to Costco, which had a TON of imported Western stuff! Near the entrance there was a woman demonstrating a Keurig, which must be new in Japan because people were flipping out over it. When the lady saw me she kept telling my prof that Keurigs are really popular in the US and telling him to ask me for confirmation :p

I didn't buy a ton of stuff, because of course the sizes were ENORMOUS, but I did get my hands on some peanut butter!!!!!!!!!

Next we went to a regular grocery store.  My prof's wife got rally excited about teaching me to make miso soup, so she helped me find all of the (fish-flake-free!) ingredients.  She was amazingly thourough and patient. It was really great to have some help knowing which brands of stuff I can actually buy! She also helped me find yeast and flour (so I can make bread!!!) and my prof "suggested" that I should buy a bag of rice of a cultivar that was developed at our research station :) (I acquiesced).

Finally, and most importantly,  we went to a second-hand shop and I got a totally sweet ride! I got to test it out right away by biking home since it didn't fit in the car. 

Mine is the blue one in the centre. It has a bell!!! And a headlight!! And a seat that's low enough for me!!

On Sunday I went to the zoo with my labmate and her family. My friend's daughter had been getting the hard sell at school all week about a special tapir exhibit, so we went to Maruyama Zoo (which, unsurprisingly,  is in Maruyama Park, where we went last weekend). Despite the fact that the tapir exhibit appeared to just be, y'know, the fact that the zoo has tapirs, the zoo was pretty fun. Most of the animals' enclosures were ok - I had read online that a lot of them were pretty bad but there were only a few that were unacceptable to me (most notably a very mangy-looking raccoon who was pacing frantically). These was also a very upset snow leopard with the same problem, which was confusing because right beside him was another snow leopard withal perfectly fine cage?? It was like he was in leopard jail. Also the polar bear did not seem impressed. However, the zoo was clearly working on a huge new area for some of the bigger animals like the giraffes, so hopefully the raccoon and the others might be able to take over the old space. Anyway, I would rate it as non-horrifying but mildly upsetting. 

When we were done at the zoo I went grocery shopping with my friend and her family. Apparently I cannot stop grocery shopping.  However, I guess as a person who always cooks every meal and is used to having a cupboard full of dried beans and other stocks, going from that to literally nothing (no spices?!) was a bit of a shock, so I feel like I'm always scrounging. My labmate's husband made the pot that maybe it's a good idea to check where the veggies were grown, because maybe it's better not to buy stuff from Fukushima just yet. Maybe a good point. 

Anyway, I made a huge curry with my vegetables and I finally have a cupboard full of dried things (like adzuki beans and mushrooms and seaweed) so maybe I can stop grocery shopping every second day or so :)

Odori park and Maruyama park

Sunday was another exciting day in Sapporo!

First, I managed to do laundry. Laundry isn't nearly so annoying when the machine is a) right across the hall from your front door, and b) free! I definitely pressed some wrong buttons because when I heard the machine beeping that it was finished, it turned out that I had soaked my clothes instead of actually washing them (i.e. they were in several feet of skunky water when I went to get them). I pressed a different series of buttons and eventually ended up with clean-smelling clothes, so something went right. 

After that I went for an adventure with my labmate and her family. The first thing I did was fall into a ditch. Luckily, things got better after that. The weather was also much nicer than yesterday; it was warmer and it only rained at the very beginning and end of the day. My friend and her family showed me the alternate road out of the forest (I was waaay off, as it turns out), and they also pointed out that the closest subway station has not only a big department store, which I knew about, but also a big 100 yen store AND a big grocery store!! Way to go Linda on noticing things.

The first place we went was the former Hokkaido government office. It was really beautiful, with tulips and lilacs and lots of huge trees! There were also ducks and pigeons and ENORMOUS carp. 

Also, ravens in Japan are huge. HUGE! Apparently they are also not afraid of people, because my labmate told me stories about seeing them stealing hot dogs from children and such. One almost flew off with my friend's daughter at one point.

Next, we walked through Odori park. Likely because the weather was better, today there was music and food stalls and tons of people. I never made it to the tulip festival but I think this was the next best thing.

After that, we took the subway and headed to Maruyama Park, a huge, beautiful park that houses a zoo, a mountain, and the biggest shrine in Hokkaido! We walked around the park for a little while, then made it up to the shrine. There was a wedding going on inside but I didn't really take photos (I'm not THAT much of a creepy weirdo).

By then it was getting late and it had started to rain, so we headed back. Along the way, two Mormon missionaries on bicycles came to a screeching halt when they saw us (because we are white) and started witnessing to us and handing us flyers. I had heard that there were a fair number of missionaries hanging around to prey on foreigners but I was pretty impressed to run into some on my first weekend! My labmate's husband was much nicer to them than I would have been. 

We made it home in the middle of a crazy rainstorm. I thought my labmate's daughter was going to fall asleep in the middle of the street, but we all made it home in one piece.