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.