The Adventures of Linda: 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: