Week 11: Rain and pie

Yay! It was a short week thanks to Marine Day! The big news of the week: there was a bird party on the lawn outside my window!

I also found the graveyard of dead bugs left by one of the giant spiders who lives in the front entrance. Yes, there are several. I think they have eggsacs ;_____; If I was braver / taller I would get rid of them, but alas!

The spider is that silvery thing up there. Blargh!

My only adventure during the week was to pay a bill at the bank. I think I did a much better job this time; the first time I tried to pay a bill, I pretty much just handed the bank teller my bank card and the bill and looked sad until she helped me. I was surprised when she withdrew the exact amount from my account in paper (and coin) money and used that to pay the bill?? I had expected the actual transfer to happen electronically, I guess. I never pay bills at the bank in Canada, so maybe this is normal, but it seemed weird to me.This time I cut out the middle man and just handed the teller the exact change and the bill. This worked much better!

I didn't go back to Japanese lessons this week. Terrible! I have no good excuse, other than that it was raining really hard. But I think I need to go back, because this week, on THREE separate occasions, when people asked me if I had something (e.g. a store loyalty card, a phone number at the bank, etc), I said "no, I have it," instead of "no, I don't have it," which obviously caused some confusion LOL. I have no idea why I have started doing this. Maybe I put my brain on upside down. 

Because it was so rainy, other than a little shopping, I stayed in for a good chunk of time this weekend. When I did go out, I found some amazing sights.

There was a big line if you wanted your picture with these sheep mascots.

I also found an amazing store that sells all kinds of pop culture stuff. I should subtitle this post: "things I should have bought."

I just realized that that shirt says "I learned everything I know on the streets." Dang. I should have bought that shirt!

The Sailor Moon section was playing the Sailor Moon theme song on loop!

Finally, because I was staying in, I decided to do some baking. Here is a helpful tutorial!

How to make a pie in Sapporo!

1. Realize that you have a bunch of (expensive / soon-to-expire) fruit in your fridge.

   

   Cherries and haskap and apples, oh my!

2. Decide to make a pie.
3. Realize that you don't own a pie pan.
4. Improvise a pie pan from a cake pan and some rice to bring the height up to reasonable pie height.
5. Remember that you don't own a rolling pin and improvise with a bottle of apple cider vinegar.
6. Finally get your pie in the oven.
7. Burn pie because burner in your tiny oven is like 10 cm from the top of your super-tall pie.
8. When pie is finished, break pie into pieces trying to save it from its ricey prison. 
9. Decide pie is unsuitable for human consumption ;__; So much for bringing a delicious pie to school!
10. Freeze pie.
11. Eat slices of frozen, hideous, but surprisingly delicious pie in shame. 

It used to have a lattice top, until the top exploded.

Happy baking!

Week 10: Long weekend!

Happy Marine Day (海の日)!! It's the first long weekend since I arrived in Sapporo :)

Saturday was nothing special. I went to the used sports equipment store to see if I could find some hockey sticks for the purpose of teaching my friend's daughter to play some street hockey. Sadly, there was ONE hockey stick in the entire store, and it was jammed in an umbrella stand behind the store's front door, so I'm not even sure that it was for sale :p

On Sunday I went to Moerenuma Park with my labmate and her family. Moerenuma park was designed by a sculptor, Isamu Noguchi, who had the vision of making a park that was designed like a sculpture. I think he succeeded, because I've never seen a park anything like this!

The park was really beautiful. I can't say much to do it justice; there's a giant glass pyramid with an art gallery inside (including some exhibits for the Sapporo International Art Festival!)...

... a mountain...

...  a tiny beach....

... a tetrahedron (?)...

... a crazy fountain...

... a water play area...

... and a huge hill that is designed to look like an Aztec temple!

There were also beautiful views of the city...

... and hawks...

... and fungus...

... and also a million helicopters and jets???? There is an airfield nearby, and I assume that this must be the source of the helicopters that I see on a day-to-day basis. But I think there must have been an airshow or something because there were seriously tons of jets zipping around in formation.

Unfortunately, because it was such a beautiful day, we all got a bit too much sun and we ended up with some red noses by the end of the day.

On Monday we went on an adventure with a bunch of people from the lab! First we went to a little farm in Eniwa (about 30 minutes away) to pick some haskap berries! 

Haskap berries are sour and taste a little like raspberries. They were really good!!

We ate lunch as a picnic in a park nearby.

Next, we played some golf! It was sort of a cross between real golf and mini golf, because the course was MUCH bigger than a normal mini golf course, and there were no amusing obstacles like windmills. The balls were also much bigger (about the size of a squash ball), and they were heavier than a normal golf ball, so it definitely took a bit of getting used to, but it was really fun!

Finally, we stopped for some ice cream at a little dairy.

You could buy some timothy hay for 100 ¥ to feed the cows at the dairy. The cows were pretty stoked about this. One of them tried to eat my friend's daughter. 

It was an excellent long weekend!!

Week 9: Fireworks!

This week was hectic! Mostly I just worked a lot.

The big news this week was the typhoons and flooding near Okinawa and a minor earthquake near Fukushima. I am very far away from either location, but we did have a very small earthquake here on Wednesday (small enough that some of my labmates didn't notice it).

The other news was that my labmate's daughter got two beetles, named Brumby and Brumbelina. On an unrelated note, the Bulgarian word for beetle is brŭmbar ;) . Sadly, Brumbelina is no longer with us due to an unfortunate watermelon-eating incident (apparently too much watermelon is toxic to beetles because of the high water content??), but Brumby is still kickin'.

I was surprised when I heard that the beetles came from a store called Homac, which is located beside the grocery store that I usually go to. I had seen the store but I thought that it was basically like Home Depot. I went there on Saturday and it turned out to be a cross between a Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and PetSmart! They had a big garden section, lots of fabric and yarn, tons of fitness equipment, home stuff, shoes, clothes.. and a really big pet section! I can't lie.. I was kind of tempted to get a pet fish. It might be nice to have a pet, but I don't really have the space for a proper setup, and of course I would need to find him a new home when I leave Japan. But I might change my mind...  Or maybe I should just get a plant :p

On Saturday evening there were some mysterious fireworks at the Sapporo Dome!! I just checked and I guess it was just part of a promotion with the baseball game that was being held that day, like some sort of a fan appreciation thing, which explained why I saw so many Ham Fighters jerseys around earlier in the day. Even the cashier at the grocery store was wearing one! I didn't know about the fireworks in advance, but I heard them from my window. I ran into my neighbours in the hallway and we dashed up the street to watch them. We had a great view from the lab!! The fireworks display was great. The only downside was that I was EATEN ALIVE by mosquitoes. I have seen a lot of mosquitoes around, but I guess they were lulling me into a false sense of security because they never bit me before Saturday, when they descended en masse and devoured the exposed skin on the tops of my feet and also my eyebrows, so now I have a nicely swollen eyebrow and I look like a caveman. My friend commented that normally mosquitoes love her, but they went after me instead, so I still have my crown as the favourite snack food of mosquitoes everywhere.

My pictures don't do it justice. It really was a great show!

I saw my friend the fox several times on Saturday. He was really close to me - probably only five or six metres away - and he was a bit scared of my squeaky bike brakes, but otherwise he was pretty bold. He hung out and stared at me for a little while before he resumed frolicking in the grass. Sadly I only had my phone so I couldn't get a good picture.

On Sunday I ran some errands. I really needed some new jeans because I had some near-disaster wardrobe malfunctions this week. I saw some great shirts while I was shopping.

Because it's the summer and it's festival season, Tanuki Koji was all decked out with banners and flags!

All my thinking about Animal Crossing made me really want to play Animal Crossing again. After some consideration, I finally caved, and I got this puppy (used) on Sunday! My excuse is that it might help me with my Japanese (if I can make it past the setup..).

It's an Animal Crossing 3DS! It was a sign from the Nintendo gods.

I have played about 30 minutes so far and it is remarkably like my real life in Japan: I arrived and everyone spoke to me in complicated Japanese and I didn't understand anything and immediately got lost, and there are weird bugs and animals everywhere. If only my real life were as easy to figure out as the game is..

I also caved and got a cute lunch box. I'm only human!! I used the flimsy excuse that it is annoying only having two tupperware containers (since I like to cook on the weekend rather than every single day) so it made sense to get another container. You can only be in Japan for two months before you are legally obligated to buy adorable things.

Week 8: Japanese lessons and Otaru!

I had a week full of critters!

First, I saw a marten dash across the street in front of me on the way to school! Then two days later, I saw two weasels chasing a mouse!

On Saturday I braved Japanese lessons with my friend and her daughter! The lesson was........... ok. Honestly, I found it really hard!! The teacher zoomed through a bunch of new vocabulary then immediately started quizzing me on it, and she seemed really frustrated when I kept mixing things up. The school is closed next week, so that gives me two weeks to study before I go back. I think I have a really weird mishmash of knowledge that made it hard for the teacher to figure out what to do with me. I understood and could answer all of her very basic questions (can you introduce yourself? What country are you from? What is your job?) but then almost nothing else (e.g. I can READ the days of the week but I don't have them memorized to say out loud). I suppose I shouldn't be too disappointed that I wasn't very good at something that I haven't put any work into, but I feel like I have a lot of studying to do before it would be worthwhile to go back!

On Sunday we went to Otaru, a city by the sea! The city is known for its canal (and, on a related note, they have a mild obsession with Venice), music boxes, and glasswork. It took about 30 or 40 minutes to get there by train from Sapporo station. The city itself was walkable and pretty touristy; there were tons of little knicknack stores selling glass objects. 

The canal was nice, but short. It's no Rideau canal :p But there were lots of nice arts and crafts being sold along the sides, and we saw some diving birds swimming and eating fish!

This guy landed about 2 feet away from me and strutted around until he realized that nobody was going to feed him.

We wanted to see glassmaking in progress, which we assumed would be possible at one of the many places labelled as a glass factory, but maybe we weren't looking in the right place because none of the places we saw had an active glass workshop. We quickly checked out the Otaru Orgel (music box) Museum (well, mainly its music box emporium on the first floor), but it was jammed full of people and way too........... sparkly for me. I guess I can only look at so many golden carousels and golden jewelery cases embedded with fake diamonds. Also, it felt like a disaster waiting to happen since most of the stuff was delicate and expensive.

The Otaru Orgel Museum

We spent the afternoon at the Otaru Aquarium, which was located on a cape that jutted out into the sea. 

The aquarium was pretty ok. Like a lot of zoos, the enclosures for some of the animals were awful, but many were pretty ok, and there were some pretty cool critters! They had some arowana and some other fish that I only knew about because of Animal Crossing. Actually, I think about Animal Crossing a lot in Japan. I would say that it is an extremely good estimation of what life in Japan is like.

Anyway, here are some critters!

Some weirdo hideous fish. Google tells me that these are Bering Wolffish.

An octopus in a box??? Maybe he was a Houdini octopus.

An octopus in a petting zoo! I have never seen such a thing. 

He was really writhing around a lot.

The petting zoo also had sea stars and sea urchins and crabs.

An enormous salamander.

An eel, just like in the Little Mermaid!

Condescending pelicans

Dolphins!

This seal was just showing off.

Penguins!!

On the way back, we accidentally discovered an imported food store in Sapporo Station!!! I was extremely excited to see dried chickpeas and lentils and a wide variety of maple syrup.