Week 64: Hokkaido adventure

Happy August! This is the beginning of my last month in Japan!!

This week we had an adventure! My friend's husband teaches guitar to a Japanese guy, and he offered to take us on a trip around Hokkaido! I had fun drawing with my friend's kid in the car. At her request, I drew a chihuahua. Then a mouse riding the chihuahua. Then my cat. And then she added a kabutomushi. And then some cowboy hats. 

In response to the M on my cat's forehead (for mackerel tabby / Mighty Cat / Mario), she drew some additional cats: first an L cat (for Luigi) and then a W cat (for Wario). Wario cat has a big butt. 

She also updated her portrait of me. I think this is a much more accurate representation than the one she drew last year! I'm looking good these days even though my skin fell off.

Anyhow, our first stop was the Asahiyama Zoo, which is the most northern zoo in Japan. In the winter, the penguins go on parade around the city! But in the summer, the winter animals were mostly just hot. It was a pretty nice zoo!

Even though it was too hot for a penguin parade, we still enjoyed the penguins. There was a 360 glass underwater tunnel so that you can watch the penguins swim all around you! There was also a seal tunnel (but they were harder to get a good picture of). 

In addition to the penguins, the zoo had some cool birds!

The red panda was putting on a show to look cute. 

As always, the chimpanzees were really fun to watch. There was a mother with a really young baby! 

After she got tired of holding it, she put it on her head and it rode around backwards on her head for a little while. 

The lemurs had a baby too!

In the Hokkaido animals section I was FINALLY able to take a good picture of some awake tanuki!

There was also a GIANT hare!

 I was really happy because this zoo had some capybaras! Capybaras are the best because they are just giant guinea pigs.

The goats were having a great time!

Some of the "fierce" animals were trying harder than others to actually look fierce. Most of the cats were just sleeping.

The giraffe was eating out of people's hands!

The hippo was getting stung by a sparrow bee but he didn't seem to notice. 

When we left the zoo, we headed to Biei, where there was a really beautiful blue lake!

There was also an active volcano!

Next we went to Furano, which is known for it flower fields!

Lavender season had just ended, but you could still buy lavender ice cream (which everyone did)...

As well as lavender lemonade (which I did)! It was really good!

Our last stop was a series of cabins in the woods. It reminded me of Endor! The little cabins were actually shops selling expensive handmade toys and bits of art, but they were fun to poke around in. 

On the way home, my friend's daughter and I took turns drawing animals in the dark with our eyes closed. I think the drawings turned out well, though they started to get abstract near the end when the theme changed from "zoo animals" to "monster fruits / vegetables."

An emu

A tiger!

Flamingo

Tanuki. This one is my favourite. He's so fat!

"Ringo-san" (Mr. Apple)

A French-Canadian pineapple

A sweet potato kid

It was a great trip!! I'm really happy that I had a chance to see a few places outside of Sapporo. 

In the interest of "taking pictures of things that I enjoy before I leave," here are some more subway pictures. I finally got a picture of the scary living rice leaf man! In this ad series, it always says "rice is..." and then there's a picture of something (like a little kid and his dad and it says "rice is... family." This one says "rice is natural." I'm not sure if this picture really gets that across...

This is a poster for a horse racing track. They have a bunch of posters with this theme of people doing things while oblivious to a horse standing beside them. This one has a mother with a crying baby, and the mother is saying something like "Shhh... there's no horse." I think it's mean to lie to babies. Also, at least to me, the translation of the racetrack is "Sapporo Horse Friends." I like it!

Finally, here is Tanuki Koji, all dolled-up for summer!

Week 63: Summer party!

Holy cow it has been a hot week. It rained cats and dogs almost every day, but somehow that didn't do much to bring down the humidity, which was in the 90% ballpark most of the time... even in the lab! What a week!

Monday was a holiday, so I went with my friends and their Bulgarian pal to another ikebana (flower arrangement) exhibition. I found out that my friends' friend actually used to do some ikebana, which explains why she's so into it and why she always has tickets to these things :p 

On Saturday I was hanging around Sapporo station mooching wifi when I saw an interesting fellow.

The most popular comic and show in Japan right now is probably Attack on Titan, and there's a live action movie coming out later this summer (I think??). Apparently there's a travelling exhibit of some of the props from the movie and stuff, which is what's going on here. The comic is about a world where people are constantly attacked by naked / skinless giants. It's.... interesting.

 Here's another interesting fellow from the train station. "Don't hurl your belongings at others."

On Sunday I went back to my old stomping ground at the International Hall, where I met yet another interesting fellow:

A cicada!

We had a lunch party with the Chinese grad student and his wife, who also works in our lab. We played some indoor frisbee and sock hockey and sticky-ball darts. It was a great party!

Week 62: It's time to appreciate the ocean again!!

Happy Marine Day!! This is my last long weekend in Japan! :o My time here is really coming down to the wire. I bought my ticket home today; I only have about six weeks left in Japan!

To celebrate, once again I did pretty much nothing ;) On Saturday I biked to the lab, but I had to abandon my bicycle there because there was a torrential downpour. I've really ridden my bike into the ground. It's second hand, and it was already pretty old when I got it, but on Saturday I had to take off the chain cover, which was so mangled that it either caught my foot or else scraped on the chain. The gears are stuck and now only one of them works (luckily a pretty normal middle gear that works well enough for everything). But despite its problems, my bike survived a ride home on Sunday, and I think it will last me until I leave. 

On Sunday I wandered around downtown (looking in vain for a Starbucks that I have been to several times, but which seems to have vanished off the face of the earth..), and I took a few pictures of things that I'm going to miss seeing. One thing is the giant Santa inexplicably on a building in the nightlife district.

The other is this sign on the subway doors. I think this is an ad campaign encouraging people to eat local Hokkaido food, but this one is one of my favourites (I need to get a picture of the one with a terrifying sentient rice plant).

Week 61: IT'S HOT

A poem by Peter West 
its hot in the city 

White light glares on car rails, cobbles, 
Swirling dust and scraps of paper 
Stirred by baked enamel autos. 
Shirt-sleeved drivers, forearms upright 
Sickly-sweet, warm, wafted smells—from 
Joe’s Place and the Lucky Garden— 
Mingling, bring no invitation 

Lolling dogs droop in dead doorways. 
Children seek the soiled and struggling 
Patch of earthy grass between the 
Bus stop and the supermarket; 
Lining up to bow and gasp in 
Turn at the delicious shock of 
Water gushing from the fountain. 

Damp, red men and moist, pale women 
Feel the grilling sidewalks reach up, 
Suck vitality through shoe soles 
Down toward the earth’s hot center. 
Old folk, wise, released from tension, 
Rock, or fan themselves on porches. 

But 
Nobody hurries. 

Friday: and man flies, gasping 
From what he has made 
Out, off and away 
To the cool wood, 
The sweet turf 
Or the limpid lake— 
To breathe. . . 

It’s HOT in the city. 

--

When I was in high school, I took an English writing course, and that poem was the subject of a hilariously bad reading by myself and several other members of the class.Our interpretation involved all of the group members but one droning out one line, followed by a single person reading the next line and yelling out random words, e.g. "It's hot in THE city!!". The poem immediately became an inside joke among the people in my grade, none of whom read this blog. Hmm.

I posted this poem not because I am in a particularly poetic mood, but because it is HOT, and I always think of this poem when it's hot. Both yesterday and today were well above 30C and humid. Summer is here! People are out in force with umbrellas for the sun, and lots of people are out and about in yukata (summer kimonos) because there are festivals all over the place! 

Once again I had a pretty boring week, with the exception of nearly having a meltdown on Friday night because I JUST WANTED TO GO HOME and the streets were absolutely clogged with Ham fans. Don't get me wrong: I love a baseball team named after a pork processing company as much as the next person, but those were the worst crowds I have ever been stuck in in my entire life. Plus there was a group of drunk, rowdy foreigners a short distance behind me in the traffic jam, and I didn't want to be associated with them :p Actually, now that it's summer (and also now that I live downtown instead of in the middle of nowhere) I have noticed a TON of foreign tourists! I keep waiting for one of them to ask me for directions, but alas. Only old Japanese women ask me for directions.

The other thing that happened this week was a huge lab cleanup! We moved to a new lab several months ago, but we had to leave a ton of equipment and chemicals in our old lab just up the street due to storage limitations. Well, this week we finally went back for a massive cleanup. We unearthed a few treasures in the process. One grad student found a statue of Asuka from Evangelon, which was clearly won from one of the most difficult kinds of crane games!! Now she lives on his desk (which is beside mine).

I found a cd for the band Mr.Children, who are playing a concert at the Sapporo Dome in a few weeks! I haven't listened to it yet because I keep forgetting it in the lab.

Next weekend is a long weekend.... the last long weekend that I'm going to have in Japan!! There is a big fireworks display that I might try to check out, and I supposed I'd better start trying to knock things off of my "things to do before I leave Japan" list. For starters, I should probably make a list of things that I want to do before I leave Japan...

Week 60: My pot went to pot

What happens when you have noodles stuck to the bottom of your pot, so you add cold water to make sure that it doesn't turn into superglue?

RIP Fancy IH pot with a ceramic lining! I guess the pot was too hot when I added the cold water?? At first I thought that I had burned a bit of seaweed to the bottom of the pot, and there was some minor gunk on the bottom of the pot anyway, so I gave it a scrub with some baking powder. It was only after I had scrubbed for like 10 minutes that I realized that that black spot is a shallow but HUGE gouge out of the pot's ceramic lining!! So since I wasn't interested in trying to figure out which metals were likely to leech into everything I was going to cook from now on, I had to run to the store to buy a new pot. 

Luckily for me, there was a mysterious mega-sale and I was able to get a nice pot for less than 50% of the original price!

I christened it with some miso soup!

In other shopping news, I had the adventure of buying deodorant in Japan. If you google "deodorant in Japan" you will find that most westerners feel that Japanese deodorant...... is super terrible. And judging from some of the odours that I have experienced here, I think that assessment is probably right. I brought a crapload of deodorant to Japan with me, but the gravy train has run dry, so I have been forced to venture into a drugstore in Japan for the first time. 

Part of the problem with the deodorant scene is just limited selection. I saw three choices: spray-on deodorant (two brands); "deodorant wipes" (which I think are more to wipe off your sweat after you have begun to reek, rather than something that you use when you get dressed); and one brand of normalish, roll-on deodorant that comes in a tiny egg thingie and costs like 700¥. I went with the egg. But maybe I should just give up on deodorant and let my natural scent run wild and free!! At least I'll get lots of space to myself on the subway ;)