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.
