Week 36: Mumpless in Sapporo

Hooray! I am almost certain that I didn't contract the mumps after all! At this point I'm sure I would be all mumpy if I was going to become mumpy at all.

This week was a whirlwind of winter adventures!

On Friday I went snowboarding for real!!! Well, mostly. I went to Ban.K ski park with four other people from the lab. One guy is really an expert, one is maybe intermediate, and the other two are a couple who have only been snowboarding once, so luckily I wasn't entirely on my own in terms of my skill level (and lack thereof).

When we arrived, I demonstrated my skill level by sliding directly into a mesh fence :p As a result, I was relegated to practice for most of the time, because that was fine with me. Even though the hill is considered pretty small, it really put Pakenham to shame, and I probably would have died if I had tried it at the beginning. But I learned a LOT, and now I think that I really am ready to try the big girl (aka super beginner) hill next time!

On Saturday there was another unforecasted blizzard! I didn't expect a random blizzard, so I had the bright idea to go to the store to get some towels and blankets and other bulky items because some of my friends are coming to visit in a few weeks. So I had a very fun walk home with an enormous bag in a huge blizzard. It was bad enough that one person got snowed in at school, and the lab door was stuck in an uncloseable position when I arrived on Sunday morning!

On Sunday we went skating again! My friends are really becoming experts. We have our timing down pat, too: they clean the ice every two hours, so we have worked it out that when we arrive the ice is pristine, and then we skate until they clean it again. 

Week 35: There is really a lot of snow

This week there was a crazy blizzard!! I thought that I knew blizzards, but boy, Hokkaido really puts Ottawa to shame. It blizzarded for about 8 hours straight, with much of that time being total whiteout conditions. I ran to another building to turn on a machine, and in the 2 minutes that I was indoors, my footprints in the snow were completely erased (which was a good thing, because they were embarassing... due to the whiteout, I wandered into a snowbank and almost fell over, so I'm sure that my path made it look like I was drunk). The snow was so heavy that three people slept in the lab overnight! We also got more snow on most of the days that followed; in this week alone we have easily gotten 50 cm, and maybe as much as a metre.

I made a comment to my friend a little while ago that our backyard would probably be a good place to really see how much snow had accumulated, because it's a pretty narrow strip of land between our long building and a strip of woods (and so the snow there can't get blown around too much). She sadi that that would be true if they didn't plow it. I thought she was joking, because why would they plow a backyard? But then they plowed the backyard. RIP snowman that my friend's kid built! So since the plow went by, there is a big buildup of snow outside my window (from the sides of the plow, as well as from the stuff that is always sliding off of the roof), so this isn't REALLY an accurate estimate, but in any case, this is what I saw when I looked out my window on Saturday morning.

And this is what happened when I stepped outside:

This is a VERY NORMAL amount of unforecasted overnight snow!

And this is what the sidewalk on the way to the grocery store looks like:

That's a pretty narrow alley! Later on there was no path at all.

Anyway, in other exciting news, I finally broke down and bought a new computer!! My laptop has been giving me grief of varying sorts pretty much since the day I bought it (I think it was a bit of a Boxing Day lemon). I have been hemming and hawing for a long time, and I nearly bought a new computer before I came to Japan, but today my computer did its effing annoying habit of forgetting that it has a network card, and that was really just the last straw for me.

Buying a computer without being able to communicate very well with the store person was, ironically, much an easier and less patronizing experience than buying a computer in Canada. I usually HATE buying things like that, because I hate the upsell that the salespeople are being forced to give you, and I hate the way that they talk down to you and try to make you consider dumb alternatives. So it was kind of nice for him to pretty much just take me at my word when I said that I knew what I wanted, and I was really lucky that allegedly I got the last one of the exact model that I had been thinking of all along!

It's so purple!

On Sunday I built some snow cats with my neighbours! I only managed to take a picture of the first one because I was frozen solid by the time we finished the second one. I'm sure they will only survive for a day or two before they are bulldozed, but it was fun to play in the snow!

Hm, my phone makes the snow look an awful lot more blue than it really is...

Week 34: Happy New Year!

Happy 2015!!

Considering that this week was a holiday week, I really didn't get up to very much exciting stuff. I got some work done in the lab. I slept in a bit, which was very nice. I read a book and played some video games. I did a bit of snowboarding when the weather was right, but most days were too warm and it was like trying to snowboard through wet oatmeal. 

Part of why the week was quiet is that my friend's kid has the mumps!! Apparently in Japan they don't vaccinate against the mumps at all. There was an outbreak in my friend's kid's class, and even though my friend's kid had been vaccinated, she still caught it. I visited her on the first day of her symptoms (when she had been diagnosed with an ear infection by a doctor who apparently can't recognize the symptoms of mumps...) so maybe I will get the mumps too! Also her parents have been living in close quarters with her (as our rooms are less than 5m x 5m) so they enjoyed a fun week of quarantine, too. That made for a quiet week! I barely saw another soul in the lab during the week, too, despite much rending of garments over our upcoming lab progress meeting and subsequent dramatics about staying in town for the holidays. I think it's good that people are taking time off - nobody should feel like they are being forced to work during a week off!! And I think we all need a break. I am glad that I worked at a pretty lazy pace to get through the things that I couldn't put off.

There is a last gap of holiday-ness in another week, because Monday the 12th is a day off. And now that people will be around again, a few folks in the lab have been talking about a ski / snowboard trip to the small hill here in the city, which will be a fun step up from my little hill!

There is quite a lot of snow on the ground. It's hard to get a good guess of how much has really accumulated, because there are big piles where it has fallen off roofs or been scraped up by plows, but I would conservatively estimate that a metre of snow has fallen, and is probably sitting at a depth of at least half a metre in most places (after squishing down due to melty temperatures). There is a shortcut across a field that I like to use, and if there aren't fresh footprints to step in I can easily go in up to my knee. The other day I made a fresh path through about a foot of new snow, and when I came back the next day I saw that the fox had used my path! I guess he was glad that he didn't need to forge a path in snow up to his chin. 

Week 33: T'was the week that contained Christmas....

And it was the longest week in the history of the world! Sapporo had a very white Christmas.

Last Friday I was chatting with my newest labmate, who seemed surprised that I had made some egg and dairy-free cookies for our lab holiday party. It turns out that her son is allergic to dairy and eggs, so I gave her the recipe I used (and promised her stacks more in the future). In return, she made me a dish of beans and pumpkin on Monday!! It was the winter solstice, and apparently if you eat red beans and pumpkin on the night of the winter solstice you will be healthy for the winter, so she brought me a treat to keep me healthy! I was really touched. It isn't often that someone brings me a vegetarian treat in Japan!! She is also an excellent Japanese teacher. I have learned a lot from chatting with her!!

Tuesday was a holiday because it was the Emporor's Birthday!! I celebrated by going to work!!! I also made three types of cake with my friend's daughter and watched Elf with her and ate popcorn :) 

Wednesday was Christmas Eve!! We had a party at the International Hall. We had vegan leek banitsa and Velingrad salad and sweet potatoes and vegnog (which has really grown on me for the past few years!) and the cakes that we made the day before. There was also a type of soda bread with a coin hidden inside, and whoever receives the piece with the coin will have a lucky year. That piece went to my friend's daughter!

I got the smile!

A festivus feast!

We also decided to open gifts because it would be cruel to make my neigbour's daughter wait until her mother was home on the 25th (as she knew that she had to stay late). 

Most of these were for some lucky kid

My friend's kid received a MAGIC SET!! So now she can be a magician!! She also got a 20-in-one game set from Santa Claus (who is Canadian, y'know) and a copy of The Little Prince in Japanese (because she has already read Anne of Green Gables). We played several rounds of Othello, which is one of my favourite games, and my friend's husband serenaded us on the guitar. Have I mentioned that he is a pro guitar player? Here is a YouTube video of my friend's husband playing Sapporo Christmas, a song he composed last year. 

For Christmas I received some CAT SOCKS, a cool Japanese comb, and a copy of his cd!

Christmas socks!!

On Friday I found out something that I wish I would have learned earlier: next week is a holiday??! Nobody bothered to tell me or my Bulgarian pal, so luckily we have lots of things in the works that can't be put off until later, and in any case there is a lab progress meeting the week after the holiday anyway... so I don't think we will be the only ones hanging around. But it might have been nice to know in advance :p

The weekend flew by, and I didn't have much time to do anything exciting. The snow was too wet again for effective snowboarding practice, but I made plans with a labmate to try going to a REAL hill in the new year. I am excited!!

Week 32: T'was the week before Christmas..

And all through the lab... People kept falling all over the place because outside is glare ice. The temperature has been hovering around 0C for several days now, so everything keeps melting and refreezing. But it's really beautiful!

On Thursday we had a lab holiday party!! The party was held at the International Hall, where I live. We mainly ate hot pot, so there was a big pot in the centre of each table, and inside we cooked tofu and mushrooms and lots of veggies (and, at other tables, meat). It was really good! There was also lots of sushi and oysters. My friend's husband and my prof serenaded us on the guitar and violin.

On Saturday I went snowboarding again, and my friend's daughter came to go skiing! We had fun, but the snow was really wet and very heavy, which even I know is not exactly optimal for skiing or snowboarding. In total we probably have about 40 cm of snow on the ground, but there are already some pretty impressive piles, especially under the overhang of the roof. All of the roofs are metal around here, so there is constantly snow sliding off of them. Some nights it sounds like a neverending avalanche as giant snow chunks keep rolling off of the roof. 

Avalanche remainders

On Sunday we went skating again!! We also had a bus adventure; it was really so icy that it wasn't possible to actually walk to the subway station, so instead we caught the bus that stops just outside the research station. 

I know I said before that when I went skating with a few people from my lab, they were the fastest skate-learners I had ever seen... but today my friend's husband tried skating for the first time, and he is officially the fastest learner ever! I was talking to him while he was doing some really awkward shuffly-walky thing that is common in new skaters, but all of a sudden his eyes lit up and he was like "I should move like a penguin!" And that was it! He just starting skating! 

I can't believe that this week is Christmas. It felt like it was a few weeks away for several weeks.... and now it's just a few days away! I'm really glad that the 23rd is a holiday (for the Emporor's birthday!) but Christmas itself isn't a holiday. I plan to spend the 23rd baking and cooking with my friend and her family, and we'll have a Christmas meal together on the 24th or 25th. I feel really lucky to have such nice friends to share Christmas with here. They have really taken me in as part of their family and I know I'd be feeling pretty lonely without them!

Week 31: It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

There's finally a decent amount of snow on the ground, the stores are jammed full of people, and there is Christmas music everywhere! And Christmas is coming up pretty soon... so maybe it's time to start thinking about Christmas!

On Friday evening I went on an adventure to try to get some replacement parts for the straps that broke on my snowboard. I spoke to a guy in the lab about where I could find them, and he pointed me toward a big sports store. I even checked their website in advance to make sure that they had what I needed, because the store is a good ~3 km walk, and I would be cutting it close to their closing time by the time I would be able to make it there, so I wanted to make sure that I didn't need to wander around too much.

So of course that means that they really DIDN'T sell the straps at all; they do repairs, but they were baffled when I asked if I could just by the straps themselves, and after a lot of hemming and hawing and phone calls and terrible Japanese (on my part) and ok English (on the part of the extremely patient guy in the store) I was able to convince them just to drop it. They tried to convince me to buy some new bindings (on sale for just $300!) but I wasn't so interested in dropping $300 on a $15 snowboard. On Saturday I went to the USED sports equipment store (which is beside the new sports store, but was closed by the time I could convince them to let me leave), and was able to get some used bindings for just $20. Crisis averted! On Sunday I gave my new bindings a test run and they are MUCH better than my old ones! They didn't even explode! I also had some company on my little hill, because a dad was teaching his son how to snowboard! It was also the kid's second day trying, but he put me to shame. 

The only other big news this week is that there was some sort of three-day concert (??) at the Sapporo Dome for Arashi, a boy band. Holy cow. I thought the streets were busy when there was a baseball game, but it was a total madhouse the ENTIRE WEEKEND for these guys. Plus, I literally saw ONE man heading for the dome; the other thousands of people were all women. It was bananas! I knew that idol groups were a big thing in Japan but I had no idea that there even WERE so many women in the entire city, and it was crazy to see them all converge at my end of the city! But from talking to people in the lab, it sounds as if the vast majority of women are genuinely into this band. It kind of reminded me of the Lego Movie.

One thing that goes along with concerts at the Sapporo Dome is seeing women lining the walls holding up signs (and often hiding their faces??). I am pretty sure that they are begging for someone to give / sell them tickets. It is seriously bizarre and the first time I saw it (for a SMAP concert a few months ago) it really weirded me out. I mean, to each his / her own; I'm not saying that I have great taste in music, but even as a teenager I was never into boy bands or sugary-sweet pop music, so I really have a hard time understanding how women my age or older can be so desperate to see a band like that. But who knows... maybe the next time I am in Ottawa someone will catch me standing around outside the Canadian Tire Centre holding up a sign and begging for hockey tickets :p

Week 30: A bunch of stuff!

This weekend was exciting!

On Saturday, I went to a museum with my friend and her family. My friend's husband is an amazing guitarist, and he has made some musician friends here in Sapporo. On Saturday, one of his friends was playing at the museum for a reading of a new children's book.

The book is about a little ghost, Maaru, who lives in Sapporo and has various Sapporo-themed adventures. In the most recent (?) book, he visits the Migishi Kotaro Museum of Art and the paintings come to life and he hangs out with them. At least that's what I think happens. There was a reading of that book, as well as a reading of another Maaru book, and the illustrator (who may or may not have also been the author??) was present to sign copies of her books! My friend's kid won a free copy of one book. I bought a copy of a book where Maaru goes to SPACE. I think I have a better chance of comprehending this book than Anne of Green Gables.

On Sunday I did more baking with my friend's kid. We also got about 10 cm of the powderiest snow I have EVER seen, so I figured that it was time to break in my snowboard!

I think this hill is perfect to learn on because it has a steep side as well as the (pictured) short and gentle slope.

Sick powder

I am proud so say that I managed to make it down the hill without falling a few times, and I didn't even break my wrist! I did, however, manage to absolutely destroy the bindings that hold the boots to the board, and I'll need to replace them before I can try again :S But considering that I got the boots and the board for about $30, I suppose I got what I paid for, and I had enough fun that I don't mind investing a little money into it so that I can continue horsing around and learning. It's also a good excuse to try switching around the orientation of the bindings, because I am pretty sure that my natural stance is opposite to the way that the bindings were attached :p

RIP foot holders