Week 65: It's my birthday!

Happy birthday me!! Saturday was my birthday, and boy howdy I had an interesting day!

During the week I got some good news about some job prospects... and then on Saturday morning I got even more good news!! It feels really good to have things kind of settled, considering that I'll be back in Canada in less than a month!

My birthday was great. First, I woke up to my good job news. Then I had a great chat with my brother, followed by a second great chat with the friends that came to visit me in Sapporo. Then I went to the lab for a little while, and then I met up with my friends for some birthday shenanigans! I got a great gift (a watermelon!!) and they cooked me a really good lunch! Then we picked up their kid from playgroup at school and we took a bike ride out to a little farm that's in the neighbourhood of the research center. By the way, did I mention yet that my friend's 10-year-old kid is now a few centimetres taller than me?

The farm is only open for a few hours every week, but they have a little market with fruits and veggies and their biggest attraction is fresh milk and ice cream! The weird thing to me is that there is only one flavour of ice cream: milk. Not vanilla. Just milk. But people go bananas for it, so I guess it must be pretty good? After the ice cream we continued our bike ride and visited some sunflower fields. I don't know what kind of sunflowers they were but they were pretty puny!

On my way home I found a 1 yuan coin. I had a lucky birthday!

On Sunday I lazed around and did some shopping, and I took a trip out to the Hokkaido Shrine and bought a fortune. I got a lucky one!! I'll take that as a good omen for my job news. 

I also took a good hike through the Tanuki Koji shopping district. While I was there I bought a treat: a red bean popsicle! The ingredients are just red beans, cornstarch, sugar, and water. I really liked it!! I just found out that these exist so now I'm going to have to do my best to cram as many in my mouth as possible before I leave. 

Things are getting a little weird at the travelling roadshow for that giant movie...

Note guy in inflatable skinless giant costume

And there was an exhibit of space stuff at Sapporo Station! A Japanese guy is currently the commander of the ISS, which I think is the reason for the delay. I want to try space curry!