Ootsuchi Sweet Shop

The professor who was doing field work with us took his students and I on a outing while we were in Sanriku. He took us to a scenic lookout and showed us where all of the field sites were relative to one another. Above is a photo of one of the bays (Yamada Bay), the research site is on the right side of the mouth of this bay. There is a really cool Shinto shrine along the waterfront behind the research plots here. The floats that are in the bay are mostly oyster, kelp and some scallop culture bouys.

The next stop on our excursion was a sweet shop down some back alley in a small neighbouring town. It was a beautiful traditional spot that made traditional Japanese sweets and North American type treats as well (like cheese cake etc). Everything on offer was immaculately prepared and looked as if it was ready for a magazine shoot. We orderer our treats and sat in a beatifully crafted traditional style room and waited for service. Every detail in the room was intentional and perfect, from the minimal decor right down to the shadows cast by bamboo leaves outside the building on the rice paper covered window. The students seemed as impressed as me and took more photos than I did (that was nice because it made me feel like less of an outsider).

The food was perfectly prepared and more of a work of art than a snack. I had rice flour balls with three different dipping sauces, the dish is called omochi. The sauces (left to right in the photo) are sweet edamame sauce, walnut cream sauce (=tochi) and sesame paste (the black one, I liked this one best, called goma). All treats were served with a cup of matcha tea in beautiful hand crafted mugs. There was a cast iron pot of water over charcoal in the middle of the room so we were able to make more tea if we wanted. We all took turns making a second cup of matcha - here is a photo of the professor who took us on the trip making matcha. The students were impressed that I was able to froth up a pretty cup of matcha and again, they all seemed relatively in the dark about the how to make a cup properly but gave it a good try when it was their turn.

It was great to throw a touch of Japanese culture into this field trip and I can't wait to find a place like this in Sapporo that I can take Shawn to. It felt very relaxing to sit in such a peaceful and well planned space, even if it was just for tea and sweets.

Sanriku Field Work

The ferry ride to Honshu was an experience not to be missed while in Japan. The crossing is an 8 hour trip from eastern Hokkaido to northeastern Honshu. We boarded the ship at about 11:30 on Thursday night and arrived at 8:30 the next morning. The ship was smaller than the Spirit Class BC ferry and maybe about the size of the Queen class boats. It has 3 vehicle decks and a couple of passenger decks. The passenger decks have virtually no seats (I was told that you have to pay extra to sit in the few chairs that were available). Instead there are large carpeted areas where everyone sits on the floor and eventually streches out and sleeps (photo above, sorry about the poor quality, but I think it was weird enough taking a photo of people sleeping so I didn't improve on it). The only provision is a weird vinyl block pillow. It seemed like you could rent blankets if you needed to (although they kept it hot enough in there that I can't imagine why you would pay for a blanket).

The trip along the exposed Pacific coastline can apparently be pretty rough so I took a couple of gravol just in case and tried to settle in to sleep. The fact that they chain every vehicle to the deck of the ship demonstrates how rough of seas they expect to encounter. Here is a photo of a transport truck chained down to the deck. Despite my efforts at a drug induced slumber, I only slept sproradically throught the night. A man about 5 feet to my right was snoring like a chain saw - nevermind that he was also ripping off booming flatulence for most of the night. People's phones and alarms were ringing through the night too and that was a repeated source of sleep interruption. Needless to say, I was glad to arrive at our destination. We had a 4 hour car ride from the port to the marine station (this time a station associated with Tokyo University) so I made up some sleep while the students drove.

As an aside, I should note that Japanese people have an impressive abiltiy to sleep despite the conditions or location. I have now, on many occasions, seen people sleep through what I find difficult and uncomfortable to be awake through. Not only can they sleep anywhere and anytime (at their desk, on the subway, standing in line...), they also can somehow wake up at precisely the right moment (their stop on the train, the instant that it is their turn in line...). It is a desirable skill in a lot of ways I think. Anyway, back to Sanriku field work...

This station, called the International Coastal Marine Research Station, seems to be a much nicer lab facility and fits more closely with my expectation of a Japanese Marine Research Station. The dormitory is nicer than the previous one too, although the kitchen is still lacking and smelly to say the least. The first night of work started slowly for me with constant errors on my part. I took photos of one site with the camera settings wrong so had to delete and start over. Then took the photos over with the incorrect grid pattern (this field site uses a differnt grid than we did at the last two locations - thanks for the heads up on that one!) so had to delete another 40 photos and start again. Once I finally got rolling things went quickly. The weather on night one was very cold but at least it wasn't raining or blowing. I was bundled up in 4 layers of pants and 5 layers of shirts so only my hands were cold - credit to the hundreds of cold nights of outrigger practice for steeling me to dark and cold ocean work.

The weather has improved and last night's work was fast and productive. We will finish sampling tonight but our group will be unable to leave because we have to wait to have a piece of equipment delivered that was left behind. So we will be delayed by one day to download temperature data that we can only do with this specific piece of equipment - bummer. The real kick in the behind is that we will wait around for another day after that so that we can take another midnight ferry ride back (the students prefer the night ferry trip over the daytime one that would get us back 12 hours sooner - we voted and I was outnumbered 3-1).

On this trip we had a group from Chiba University (north of Tokyo) here helping with the work. They are from the lab there that is collaborating on this project. Many hands made light work and we were able to complete the work in half the time. The professor from that lab was here too and he speaks excellent English (did his PhD in the US) and is comfortable speaking. It was surprising to me how much of a difference that made to me. Not only could he accurately communicate to me what needed to be done and what time things were happening, he was also forthright in doing so. Wow! Who knew that it could be this easy! The students are great and I appreciate their efforts, but because they don't like to speak with me (they are nervous about it or plain tired of it - who can blame them) I am left to bumble around without the information I need to actually make effective use of my time. Only one more round of field work (we have to re-do the site where we had bad weather) and then I can work on my own again for a few months.

Here is a photo of the Marine Research Station and dorms (dorms are the white building on the furthest right). One of the research plots is located on the far right rocky bit of shore shown in the background of this photo. At this location we have 5 of the 150 plots involved in this project. There is a jetty (foreground of the photo) directly out from the station and at the end is a Shinto shrine on a tiny island. I walked out to the shrine and looked out over the bay that is full of shellfish (oysters, scallops and mussels) aquaculture . Here is a photo of the the shrine at the end of the jetty. I have seen many Shinto shrines here and most are on tiny little islands like this or other scenic coastal locations. It would be nice to come back and see them again in daylight.

Blizzard Move In

Shawn spent the day today moving us into our new flat. It is a nice place and we are both looking forward to living there. I am leaving in about 5 minutes for the ferry to Sanriku so this will be a short blog. I did want to share this photo of Shawn and our friend Paul's car. The car was a huge help in moving (for obvious reasons) but unfortunately wasn't big enough for the mattress. And to make matters more complicated, by the time he got to the mattress moving load, it was starting to snow pretty heavily again. So here is a picture of Shawn with the mattress on the car and the snow coming down.

The good thing was that the drive there blew most of the snow off of the mattress so it wasn't too wet when he moved it in. Shawn plans to spend the weekend setting up the house and getting all of the rest of the things that we will need while I am off battling the wind and the waves for another few field days.

Cockroach Carriers

Shawn has been in Japan now for 1 week and seems to be coping well with life here. On his first night in Sapporo we went out for YakiNiku (basically pieces of meat cooked over charcoal at your table). It was expensive compared to other places, but I love the idea of BBQ'ing piles of meat right at your table. Shawn liked it and it was a good intro to yummy Japanese food. Here is a photo - on the grill are some pieces of pork and cow tongue.

We got the keys to our new apartment today. A huge relief, given that Shawn and I have been tripping over one another (nevermind our luggage) in the teeny little place that we were in now. My host researcher is the guarantor on our contract, so he had to phone the landlady yesterday to arrange a time to meet. He has been exceedingly helpful with silly things like making phone calls for me because I can’t speak well enough to phone people. He made the call and set up the appointment, then came back over to tell me the details. He was nervous and weird when he came back over and told me that the landlady is very anxious about letting us move in. As a landlord myself, I told him that I understand. He continued and said that she is nervous that we will have cockroaches. I am of course thinking that this is one of those language barriers and I said that I would be very unhappy if this nice apartment that we are paying a lot of money for has cockroaches. He said no, that wasn’t what he meant, he really meant that the landlady is worried that us dirty foreigners will bring cockroaches into our building.

We had a laugh over it and I told him that he must think that this is all very funny. He knows fully well that Canada is too cold for cockroaches (as is Sapporo for that matter) but he said that he told her he would pass on the message to us regardless. So this was my first encounter with an outwardly racist Japanese person. Not to worry though, she didn’t spray us down with de-lousing chemicals when we met her. Quite the opposite, she was very nice and it may have helped that I made sure that I had a gift ready to give her as a token of our appreciation for her allowing us to pay her loads of money to rent her house.

Shawn got a chance to see the new place and he is as relieved as I am that we will soon live in a proper place with a reasonable sized bathroom. After seeing the place again, I am confident that the furniture that I have acquired won’t all fit into the space. No matter though, I have a feeling that I will be able to offload a few things if needed. Here are a couple of photos of the place.


The leaves and the snow have fallen here in Sapporo. Winter arrives abruptly and it seems that both happened within a few days of each other. The first snowfall came the first morning that Shawn was here in Sapporo and it has been pretty cold and snowing ever since. Interestingly this weather hasn’t prevented the young Japanese women from wearing stiletto heeled boots and mini-skirts and riding bikes around town. It was comical walking to language lessons this morning in my down jacket all bundled up and watching cyclists crashing on almost every corner. I do tip my hat to the women who can walk (pigeon-toed slightly) in those crazy boots over curling-rink slick ice with bare skin exposed while sending text messages on their phone. Now that is dedication to fashion!

I am off to do more field work this weekend. I will be going to an area of the northeastern coast of Honshu (the main island of Japan). We tried to get Shawn permission to come along, but unfortunately that won’t be possible. So he will spend the next week or so exploring Sapporo on his own while I take an overnight ferry to Sanriku for frigid night work. I won’t be in touch for the time that I am gone because I will leave my computer for Shawn to use. I will be back in touch soon with news of Sanirku and the “interesting” ferry ride that will get us there – I have a feeling that BCFerries will suddenly feel like a long lost friend in my mind.

Tokyo Rendezvous

Shawn arrived a couple of days ago and met me in Tokyo. We have had a couple of days of fun, interrupted only by my mandatory attendance at the meeting of the JSPS fellows. It was evident that JSPS really meant it when they said that attendance at all lectures and workshops was mandatory when the meeting chair knocked on my hotel room door on the second day of the meeting when she noticed that I wasn't on time for the first lecture of the morning. I was hoping that I would get away with attending the odd lecture here and there and skipping out to go for lunch with Shawn but it was not in the cards. Shawn was understanding and spent the time while I was in meetings to wander around the Imperial Palace (photo above).

While Shawn watched Sumo on TV, I was on an evening “study tour” to Tokyo tower. We were there at sunset so we got a nice chance to view the city at dusk. It seemed that the city goes on forever and with the smog, you can't see anything beyond. I have included a photo of the city at twilight from the observation deck of the tower, and the tower from below lit with the signature orange light. That night Shawn and I headed to a pub with some other researchers that I had met at the meeting. We were all from pretty different research fields so the conversation was light and mostly centred on the shenanigans of a British seismologist who has been enjoying the night life in Hiroshima.

The next day we smuggled Shawn onto the bus with us for the all day Tokyo tour. I had found a fellow who was not attending the bus tour and got his name tag from him for Shawn to wear. Shawn spent the day as Sam, a postdoc working on string theory at Tokyo University. If anyone I know is creative enough to BS his way through string theory, it's Shawn! On the tour, we went to an earthquake simulation centre, the Edo-Tokyo Museum, and ended off at the oldest Shinto shrine in Tokyo, Senso-ji temple. Here is a photo of the shrine.

The shrine and Buddhist temple were built in 680 A.D. and were beautiful. We were told that this place was unique because it is not very common to have a Buddhist temple and a Shinto shrine next to one another although many Japanese people practice both religions. As expected, it was bustling with tourists which was a bit weird for me to see because I haven't really seen many white people around in Sapporo. We learned how to properly pray at both the Shinto shrine and the Buddhist temple (they are slightly different because you have to clap at the Shinto shrine to get the attention of the Shinto gods, while the Buddah is always listening so you don't have to clap). Here is a photo of me cleansing my hands and mouth at the temple fountain. And here is another photo of Shawn using the sacred smoke, which is considered a gift from Buddah, to clean his body of ailments.


We strolled the tourist trap area and enjoyed a cup of hot sweet sake and some very average kaiten sushi. Here is a picture of us having sake at a street vendor. We had a great time and saw some of the fun sights of Tokyo.
I found Tokyo to be a very easy place to be for a non-native speaker. There seems to be many more foreigners here and more Japanese people who are willing to make efforts to help out and to speak with you. It will be nice to return and see some more of the interesting and historical places in Tokyo. We are in the airport now on our way back to Sapporo. I am looking forward to showing Shawn our apartment and the university. Tonight, we will go for yaki niku (BBQ meat) and sleep late tomorrow.

I have now included Shawn as an author on the blog, so look forward to updates from him from both of us from now on. He writes as Booken (=adventure) and I write as Canadian Onna (=woman).

Poseidon Weilds his Trident

We have been in a holding pattern in our little marine research station near Hakodate (actually about 1.5 hour drive from Hakodate in a small fishing community called Donan). It seems that Poseidon had different ideas about whether we should continue with sampling at this location. The wave swells and wind have been far to strong and are preventing us from working here. We waited patiently in the car on the side of the road the past two nights for the tide to drop far enough for us to work, but the nami (=waves) were too high. Looking out from the shore at the station today, it looks like we are in for bigger waves tonight and the ocean is brown with sand for about 200 meters offshore.
This photo shows the shore directly in front of the dorm while the waves were still about 1.5 m swells (we had 3 m last night and are in for 4 m tonight). One of the students has told me that tomorrow's forecast is for bigger waves still. It is likely that we will be forced to throw in the towel and not complete sampling within this tide window and so be forced to return here in December. Nothing like ice-covered slippery rocks to crawl over at midnight.

At least I brought a lot of reading to do while here so I have been able to keep busy. The sky and sea are grey and the wind is cold and I find myself missing a crackling fire and a comfy couch right now. The chairs in the cafeteria (that is the only place to sit) are terribly uncomfortable and there are no couches or beds. I braved the wind and rain today and went for a walk to clear my head. I spent yesterday morning on the phone (via internet) in the wet lab next to the dorms. The lab is pretty thick with salt, fish and formaldehyde smells so I need some fresh air. I had a nice chance to chat with friends and family and at least for the first part of the conversations, the students were still in bed so I had a small bit of privacy (a luxury of late).

I am in Donan with three other students this trip and we were all starting to get a touch of cabin fever. At least there is a TV in the cafeteria and one of the students talked me through watching my first sumo match. I have to say that it is one of the least attractive sports I have ever seen, and if there wouldn't have been someone watching with me and explaining what was going on, I would not have had any interest in continuing to watch. The student who I watched with was right into it and that helped me to find the stomach to continue watching.


Later, the same student patiently taught me to cook a Japanese staple – Okonomiyaki. Basically it is pancake batter with shredded cabbage and carrots mixed in. The pancake is topped with whatever you want (for us: more cabbage, bacon, shrimp and cheese), then fried and flipped. It is served smothered in mayo and a sweet BBQ sauce. It is a heart-stopper, but it is tasty (and contained no trace of eyeballs or other fish parts that were difficult to place). Here are a couple of pics of the students cooking Okonomiyaki. They got a kick out of making me make and flip one for them but I cheated and made it small and easy to handle.


We will head back tomorrow (Monday here) then I will have one day to get laundry washed and re-pack my bags for a short trip to Tokyo. I am going there for a meeting of the JSPS funded scholars from around Japan (JSPS is the agency who has provided my research funding for this work in Japan). I will get half a day of meeting time in before Shawn arrives to meet me there. Once he arrives, I don't think that I will have very much interest in listening to difficult english (most of the other foreign scholars are from Asia) and lectures on "how to interact with your Japanese host". I guess I'll see if I am “feeling very sick” and need to leave the meeting early *wink*.

Fish Head Soup

We have another set of workable tides and consequently are back in the field. This trip we are in Hakodate. I am sitting in the cafeteria (if you can call it that) of the dormitory after the first long day of work. Yesterday was trying and at times I felt a bit like I was the main character in a weird slapstick comedy.

We started out from Hokkudai on Friday morning and had a lovely drive through southern Hokkaido on a beautiful sunny day. I was tired from sleeping poorly at my noisy dorm the past week, so I dozed on and off during the 6 hour drive (I don't have my international drivers licence yet so the students have to drive for me). I asked very specifically whether this place was the same as the last place that we stayed where towels were provided etc., and was told yes, it was the same and should bring all of the same things as last time.

We unloaded the car once we arrived and one of the students showed me to my room. Walking down the hall, he paused by the first door, pointed and said “this boys room”. We continued down the hall to the last room where he pointed at the door and said “this girls room”. I went into the room and it was traditional Japanese style with one large tatami mat room with futon for the floor to sleep on (no bed – and there was a bed in the last place so that should have been my first clue). There was a small traditional style toilet in the room and a separate bath. Both the toilet and the bath looked really old, but so did everything else in this place so I didn't think much of it. After the long drive, I really needed to take a leak so I used the toilet. Turns out that I should have checked to see if the plumbing was connected first...... So today I have to tackle cleaning the toilet in my room – at least is was a #1.

We didn't have very much time before low tide so I went back to the lab to help prepare the gear and dinner before we went out. I guessed that since the toilet in my room didn't work, neither did the bath and in anticipation of being very cold after a night in the wind and salt spray I wanted to know where the usable bath was (and I was actually a bit scared of the look of the bath in my room). I asked and the students looked a little uncomfortable but sucked it up and took me to the shower room which is off the kitchen (seemingly an add on because the baths in the rooms were no longer functional). There are three shower stalls off a small main carpeted room, each with a sliding door. The students said that this is the shower room and that the magnetic chart on the hot water tank outside the door is used to indicate whether the person in the shower is male or female and whether any others are allowed into the main room while that person is in there. Of course this whole chart (here's a photo) is in Kanji and they were giggling away (so was I) as they explained this to me, knowing fully that I would walk back to this thing in 5 minutes and have no idea where to move a magnet. They also told me that no one really uses this system anyway.



Ok, whatever. I can deal with that because at least each shower stall has its own door and privacy. I was certain that the students would be more concerned than I anyway. So the next thing I asked was where to find the towels (there were towels provided to us at the last dorm). They all looked confused and panicked and told me that there were no towels provided by these places. So it turns out that at the last place, towels were provided to the women but not the men – hence my confusion when I asked if this place would be the same as the last and they answered yes. Good thing that the student who was left behind to write his thesis leaves a towel stashed here for himself.

All of that behind us, it was time to gear up and head out for work. It was a cold night. I measured a rock surface temperature of 1.5 degrees at the wind exposed site. Work went fine and this site was much easier to walk around at than the sites at Akkeshi. We finished work and returned to unload and clean gear and eat some dinner around 23:00. Tonight we had Nabe and I helped one of the students cook it (it is really easy to cook). We had cod heads in our soup (here are a couple photos)

and as luck would have it, I ended up with the remnants of the eyeballs in my bowl of soup. Really that seems to be par for the course given the way that the rest of the day had gone. In the end I didn't eat the eyeballs, or much of the rest of the head. We all had a good laugh at my reluctance to eat such things.

I slept well last night and was thankful to not have a construction crew drilling holes in the concrete next to my head in the morning. This morning, I write this blog while looking out at an angry Pacific and monster waves crashing over the rocks outside the dining room window. That will surely make tonight interesting.

Field Photos

I have finally managed to get my hands on some of the photos that I took during the last field trip. I will be heading out to the next field site this Friday to carry out the same sampling program near a place called Hakodate on the southern tip of Hokkaido. I started out writing this blog with the names of the students in the photos included, but have since thought better of posting their photos and names on the internet for anyone to see – this blog is open for anyone who finds it to read. So, in the interest of anonymity, I have not included names of the students here. My apologies for the sterile nature of the text reads as a result.

This first photo is a masters student in the lab (background is a lab hopeful, he will take his Hokudai entrance exam in January and if successful will join the lab). The Msc student is identifying the functional groups (grazers, producers, predators etc) of species on the rock in front of him and calling out the data to the person behind him. The plot that he is collecting data from is a “successional plot” that had all of the creatures removed from that bit of rock 3 years ago, and the community that has moved in to replace it has been surveyed by this lab three times per year ever since. They use these data to test theories about community change over time using mathematical and statistical modelling.

This next photo shows a PhD student in the lab. He is measuring the temperature of the rock surface as part of the environmental monitoring portion of the survey. In his right hand you can see the top end of the thermometer. This student was very quiet around me for the first couple of weeks that I was here, but has since warmed up considerably and his English is very good. During our last stint in the field, he patiently taught me some common Kanji characters and tested me at every meal on my meal appropriate Japanese words (things like “let's eat” and “thanks for dinner”).

This last photo is another MSc student. In this photo he is hiding in a hollow under a rock assembling the hand torches that we used to burn the rock surfaces. As you can tell from the photo, it was a very wet dark night for us. This student has also been an interesting personality and has kept his distance from me for the first while. His labmates have told me that he has been especially nervous about talking to me because he is insecure about his spoken English (incidentally his written English far exceeds that of his sensei (=supervisor)). With that in mind, I made sure that I forced him to talk with me while we were in Akkeshi and even asked him to take me to the store one day. That gave me a chance to ask him all sorts of silly questions about vegetables that I don't know the name of and fish that I didn't recognize. He has relaxed a little around me since then and even made a special effort to take me to the Akkeshi fish market and waited patiently while I took photos of the fish and shellfish in the tanks.

The countdown to Shawn's arrival is now 7 days. I am very much looking forward to seeing him. And my boss has told me that one of the guys can't make it to the third field trip (scheduled for 1 week after Shawn arrives) so we can take Shawn to the field with us. Now, I will just have to see if we can find hip waders in a shoe size large enough to fit him!

Nine Days

Only 9 more days until Shawn arrives in Japan. I am looking forward to having him here and have found myself thinking of all of the fun places that I will show him when he gets here, and all of the other places that I have wanted to go to but haven't yet. Life in a place like this is will be much more fun with someone to share my experiences with.

My host researcher gave me a gift a few weeks ago that I will bring out of wraps once Shawn arrives. He gave me “his and her's” chopsticks for us. They use matched pairs of chopsticks for married couples (I have told everyone here that we are married, this is the easiest way of explaining who Shawn is to people for now) here. The woman's set is slightly shorter than the man's set. I thought that was a thoughtful gift and a nice way to share a bit of Japanese culture with me.

I went out for kaiten sushi last night for my first time. Kaiten sushi is “revolving” sushi – the kind of restaurant where the plates of sushi move around on a conveyor belt and you grab whatever kind of fish you want and then pay for your empty plates at the end. I tried raw squid for the first time, but the rest of the sushi was stuff I have tried before. Raw squid is not too bad, but the Brazillians who I was dining with didn't approve of eating such things. It was a good meal, and cheap (kaiten sushi is generally cheaper and not quite as nice sushi). Sapporo is a place that is known for having good kaiten sushi places; I have been warned that kaiten sushi in other cities aren't the kind of place that you want to go for a meal if it can be avoided.

I failed yet another Japanese language lesson today – this being in classes with language majors is damaging to the ego! I am getting down to some microscope work later today and maybe the gym (a friend is going to show me where he has been going, he says that the pool is nice) so that should wash away some stress.

Furniture Pick Up

This morning I met one of the PhD students in the lab (they call PhD "doctor course" here) who had foolishly agreed to help me pick up the furniture that I bought from a Hungarian woman who is downsizing in preparation for leaving Japan. I needed help because I don't yet have a licence to drive here and therefore couldn't rent a vehicle to move the things, and I needed another set of hands to help carry things like the bed.

We picked up the rental van, a decent sized cargo van and headed out to pick up the bed first. The apartment where we picked this up was on the 5th floor of an old apartment building with no elevator. At least there was only the bed to get there because too many trips up and down the narrow staircase would have been a rough way to start the day. As it was, getting the bed out of there was tricky and involved bending the mattress around the corners of the stairway at each floor.

The next apartment was on the second floor which made carrying things down easier. We had just enough room in the rental van for all of the furniture, good thing I rented the big one. I was not allowed to move the furniture into the new apartment early (I am supposed to get the keys on the 20th) despite the fact that it is empty right now, so I have stored it all in the back corner of our research lab for now. Good thing Japanese furniture is small - I don't think I will be saying that once it comes time to have two of us sleeping on that "double" bed though. This photo shows the furniture all packed away in the corner and research gear hanging to dry in front of it all.



The student was a huge help and I don't think that he fully realized how much stuff I was getting and how much work he was in for. After returning the van, I took him for lunch to thank him for his efforts. He has lived in Sapporo for a long time now so I asked him to pick a good restaurant nearby. He took me to a “soup kalayi” place (in english this is soup curry – I love the misspellings here). He told me that this is really popular in Sapporo and Sapporo is famous for this type of food. The food is Indian curry soup with a bowl of rice on the side. You can order it more of less spicy, but even the mild dishes pack a good punch. Here is a picture of the food and my helpful mover.



The restaurant that we went to was supposedly one of the most popular soup kalayi places near Hokudai, and the line up at the door and 15 minute wait for a table was evidence enough for me. The food was fantastic and I had a macha lassi with my meal that was not only a funny melding of cultures, but really tasty too! This little place is only a couple blocks walk from the new apartment that Shawn and I will move into at the end of the month and now that I know how to order food there, we will probably eat there often.

Dining with this student was a good chance to fire questions at him about all sorts of things like what the kanji for chicken looks like to the colour of license plates and what they mean (his spoken english is really strong). One interesting thing that I asked him to explain to me was about the "official" birth year format here. In Japan they use a strange system to determine your birth year for official documents and I have been wondering why when I write 1977 on the forms here, people have been getting upset. The way it works is (I think based on what I understood anyway) that your birth year is the number of years that the emporer (tenno) has been on the throne when you were born. For example, if you were born the year after an emporer dies and is succeeded, then your birth year is 1. Mine official birth year is 52. It seems like a strange system because the year doesn't really tell you much about the person's true age. Oh well, add it up to another kooky thing that I learned about but don't really understand.