Week 50: Back to the zoo!

This week the word in town was that Maruyama Zoo has a baby polar bear!! The weather was great so we hurried across town to say hello.

He spent the entire time using his mother as a pillow.

There were huge crowds waiting to see the baby, but he really was not up to much. He was pretty cute though! Eventually we tore ourselves away and visited the other animals.

This non-baby polar bear was standing around roaring at everyone :/

Toucan!

Coati!

A puppy!

This lazy deer was shedding like nobody's business!

We spent a lot of time watching the chimpanzees. They were mostly hanging around grooming each other, but two of them were using sticks to fish some honey or something out of a log! There was also a baby who was putting on a pretty good show of swinging around like a maniac and annoying the adults. Also, a grown man was annoying one of the chimpanzees by pounding on a window and making faces at him; the chimpanzee then responded by throwing a clump of dirt at him, kick-flipping off of the window, then running across the enclosure and very obviously and intentionally mooning a different group of people. 

 The lemurs and the smaller monkeys got a snack while we were watching. The lemurs were very stereotypical: they ate all the bananas before they touched any of the other food. Then they ate the grapes, and then the apples. The fish were not a prime choice apparently (I saw the baboon take a bite of one by accident, but he threw it away).

Chewbacca

The big cats were all acting like house cats. The tiger flopped down and started stretching and clawing a log, and the snow leopard was rubbing his face all over everything.

A fluffy kitty!!

I even got to see a dancing crane (who was too lazy to dance for us). My friends went to see them in the wild when they visited in February! I'm jealous. 

It's really spring here. Actually, today it was so warm that it felt like summer!! The trees are beginning to bloom! 

Fiddleheads!!

Week 49: Cake!

Hm. I didn't do very much this week. On Friday we had a lab dinner to welcome a few new people who have joined the group over the past few weeks. We went out to a shabu shabu restaurant, where you cook meat and vegetables in a pot of broth at your table. The pots each had a division down the middle, like this one:

Missing from this picture: a vegetarian side

That means that at my table, one side could be used just for vegetables, and people could cook meat on the other side, which was really thoughtful! And luckily there were only three other people at my table, so most people didn't need to be TOO meat-deprived. 

I spent most of the weekend in the lab or running errands. I made an interesting new friend at the store. I also just noticed that my friend's bike is in this picture; we were at the store at the same time, but I didn't know because she recently got a new bike and I never recognize it (but she later told me that she parked beside me on purpose) :p

On Sunday I helped my friend's kid to decorate a cake because she was having a party with her friends to celebrate her birthday, which was this past Monday. I think she has some serious cake decorating skillz!

Week 48: Easter 2: The Eastering

It's Easter again!! Orthodox Easter is a week after Catholic Easter, so this Sunday we had an Easter feast(er)!
 

My relationship with the Bulgarians of Sapporo continues!! I now know 5/6!! My friends' friend had tickets for a display of ikebana, which is the art of flower arrangement. I thought it sounded like a nice way to walk off our Easter feast, so we headed downtown to check it out!

Next, we went to a park to sit outside and drink a coffee. I made a new friend!

 

Finally, my friend sent me some pictures from last weekend! He got pictures of the tanuki!!

He also got a picture of a fox being chased by crows :p

Also, a guy in the lab lent me an AMAZING book about weapons (and ninjas!).

And most importantly, the Sens clinched a playoff spot!! I'm pretty sure I'm the biggest Sens fan in Sapporo but I am trying to drum up support among the lab. So far the uptake is slow, but I'm confident that I can pester everyone into feigning interest.