I don't know if you can tell from this picture taken with my cellphone but Hokkaido is having a regular blizzard at the moment! Hopefully my plane will be able to fly tomorrow...
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A perfect countermeasure for the winter-cold of Hokkaido is "ashi-yu", hot springs for your legs, found in this case inside a train-station for people waiting for the rather infrequently departing trains of Abashiri.
According to my guidebook, the number one thing to see in Hokkaido is "Lake Mashu on a clear day". Certainly the huge water-filled volcanic crater was impressive, but equally notable were the freezing cold winds that threatened to tear my ears off!
Another first: Playing a Japanese bamboo flute called "shakuhachi". Although I have heard and sampled the characteristic sound of this flute many times, this was the first time I actually had a chance to play the real thing. Unfortunately doing so proved much more difficult than expected and even producing a single tone took quite an effort.
Yep, Hokkaido IS pretty far up north and one of things to do when you're here is to go on a boat trip and look at "drift ice". Most of the ice had apparently gone to Russia, but we still managed to get an impressive view of some of the remaining flakes.
Today I had my first experience with a snowboard. Although my skills were limited to going really fast and falling over, I had great fun and the views of the Sea of Okhotsk and surrounding mountainside were spectacular.
Well, I arrived in Abashiri, Hokkaido yesterday and it's quite a different scenery up here. Everything is covered in snow and the temperature is well below zero!
While my webpage has happily been updating itself as if everything were fine, I have actually been having the worst week due to a mysterious cold that slowly crept in on me Monday last week and rapidly got worse. Now I have had plenty of colds during my time in Japan but this was actually the first time for me to be really sick with a fever and also provided me with my first visit to a Japanese hospital where they stuck a 20 cm stick up my nose (lovely) and gave me a bunch of mysterious looking drugs. Anyway, I'm starting to feel better now and am planning a trip to Hokkaido next week. I hope I'll be back up to strength by then.
5 points to whoever can guess where this picture is taken.
The "Antquarium". A plastic box filled with a strange blue gel that serves as the ants' food as well as their home. Ew. Supposedly you have to catch the ants yourself or you can buy them in small containers, although most of the ants on sale at Tokyu Hands seemed to be...erm...sleeping...while upside down.
A present from one of my students who went on a trip to China. His arm actually moves back and forth! :P
Apparently this infrared camera was set up to illustrate some point about parts of your body cooling down if you don't have the right...desk lamp or something. To be honest I'm not sure, but in any case it was entertaining watching people pass by while pretending to be The Predator.
Well, not that it's big news to anyone that you can actually buy rye-bread in Japan if you look around a bit, but still it was a nice surprise when my friend brought me a big loaf from the Kinokuniya shop in nearby Sagami-ono the other day.
Here's an interesting twist on the typical "UFO catcher"-game that usually gives you the chance to waste large amounts of money on trying to grab some fluffy animal that's too heavy for the grappling arm in the first place. This thing works on the same principle except for the fact that you're not trying to catch Snoopy or the Nova Bunny, but real, live goldfish.
Man. This thing arrived at the research-lab at Tokai the other day, and I had a bit of time to play around with it. This would be so cool to have for live-performances and composing music on the train. The Vaio U is basically a Windows PC crammed into a small hand-held device about half the size of a video-tape. It works like any other PC running XP with a touch-screen and you can connect external devices to it using USB. Too bad I had to return it to Tokai the following day...
Whoa. I've been way too busy lately with reports, tests, work and so on but spring vacation starts next week and I finally have some time to update. However, it wouldn't be fun posting all the updates at once so I've scheduled the posts so the site will update itself automatically the next couple of days. Meanwhile, check out some of the new pictures I've been taking. Next: Replying to all those e-mails I've been ignoring... >_<
This is so cool, WHEN can we get it!?
So I'm teaching these two high-school kids in Odawara as I do every Friday and am helping the students work out an assignment on the topic of giving directions ("excuse me, could you tell me..."), when suddenly I hear someone knocking on the door. Now, Ms. Nagashima, the old lady who runs the school usually returns before the end of the class in order to pick up the kids and drive them home, so I figured it'd be her and thus didn't pay much attention as I called out "come in!". However, as I look up from the student's workbook I'm surprised to find a woman in an electric wheelchair looking back at me from across the table. "Do you speak Japanese?" she asks, and continues to talk (in a random mix of English and Japanese) about how she wants to learn English and is looking for foreigners to communicate with. She is quite articulate and there isn't as such anything unusual about her (except for the fact that she suddenly barged in without explanation). However, her presence makes it a little bit hard to continue the lesson and since I am unfamiliar with the procedures on how to make people in wheelchairs leave (maybe I should have just pushed the reverse button on her controlpanel) I try to be as polite as I can and answer her questions. Eventually, though, I go back to teaching the students, figuring she'll probably leave if I make it obvious that we are actually trying to have a lesson, but she doesn't seem to mind and actually moves closer, picks up a workbook and continues to follow the lesson while muttering to herself. After a while Nagashima arrives and gives me a perplexed look, but the only reply I can come up with is a shrug as the lesson comes to an end. As we start cleaning up the wheelchair-lady excuses herself and heads for the elevator. "Who was that?" Nagashima asks. "Erm..." I reply.
Whereas people in Denmark spend the days following New Year's eve recovering from hangovers and cleaning up detonated fireworks, people in Japan make good use of their precious few days of vacation preparing and eating special New Year's food and, perhaps more importantly, going to "Hatsumode".
Hatsumode is another one of those Japanese words that requires a full sentence when translated into English, and means something like "first temple visit of the New Year". Since my friend from Hong Kong was visiting Japan and I for once didn't have to work, taking part in this seemed like a good way to spend a Sunday evening. During hatsumode, Japanese crowd together at the many temples scattered across Japan to pray for good luck and draw "o-mikuji", which is sort of like a lottery that tells you what kind of fortune the new year will bring you. This is hugely popular and people were forming long lines to get a premature glimpse of the coming 12 months. However, having your future decided by picking a random piece of paper from a big box reminded me too much of the Danish army's draft, so I decided not to participate. I guess I will find out how everything turns out in due time anyway.
The temple we went to is located in the part of Tokyo called Asakusa and is one of the bigger and more famous temples in Japan. Since we arrived a bit late and it was already the 2nd day of the New Year it was not as crowded as we had feared, and we had no trouble reaching the main building. Once we got there we realized that none of us could really remember what we had to do, but eventually resorted to just copying whatever "the natives" were doing (bowing, clapping etc).
I may be a little late with my New Year's greeting, but anyway I hope there's an o-mikuji with good fortune for 2005 written upon it waiting for you all, Happy New Year!