Take Your Onna to Work Day

I skipped a morning of work this past Thursday and Shawn took me for a ride at Snowmobile Land. When we left the apartment in the morning it was nice and clear, but by the time we arrived at the lodge it was dumping snow. The weather is always different downtown compared to the mountains nearby. It is only a short subway ride away, but is always vastly different weather conditions. What that meant however, was that there was about a foot of fresh powder for us to cut trail in.


This snowmobile tour place is pretty amazing. They have a massive fleet of some of the oldest snowmobiles I have seen, check out the photo above (the guy in the photo gives Shawn a ride to work every morning). I am not sure that machines this old are even still running in most places. Watching Shawn ride around on it in the deep snow looked more like he was riding a big noisy toboggan. They have about 90 snowmobiles in the fleet and have begun installing fenders on most of them because some of the tourists have trouble finding the brakes and use the machine in front of them to stop. The age, and abuse the fleet goes through is a real testament to the mechanic who, through some sort of wizardry, keeps all of the machines running like a charm. They all start on the first or second pull and, although they sound rough, they don't have mechanical troubles often (except when the odd tourist misses a corner and wraps the thing around a tree).

We arrived early, before the busloads arrived, said hello to the other staff who were there prepping for the day, bundled up and hit the trails. We were lucky enough to cut through fresh snow on almost all of the trails and were covered head to toe in snow the whole time. I think that Shawn had fun showing me around, and of course it was a good chance for him to not have to worry about going slowly and using hand signals to indicate slowing down and turning. He did have to help me get my snowmobile unstuck a couple of times, but it wouldn't be a day out for the two of us if he didn't have to help me out of some sort of jam.




We returned wet and happy. I put in an afternoon of work then Shawn picked me up and took me to our fave kaiten sushi place in Sapporo eki. We ate salmon and tuna until we were ready to burst and giggled at the sushi chefs who shout and grunt out orders throughout the meal.

Stinky Sink Monster

I have been quite happy with my little blue bubble of an office. It is a quiet little space and I have it all to myself. No other people cooking instant noodles on the side of my desk, I don't have to think really loudly to overcome raucous chatter and I can adjust the heat to my liking (for some reason everyone here way overcompensates for the cold weather with the heaters).

Recently however, there has been a malicious odour that has made things less than appealing in this otherwise peaceful room. Today, I took up arms against the stench. Job number 1 was locating the source. After emptying garbages and wiping counters and sweeping out the corners of the room, I found it. There is a sink in the back of the lab that has a weird built in standpipe (effectively an elevated drain that means that water pools in a bowl at the bottom with no way to drain fully). I haven't used this sink myself, but it seems that someone did - a long time ago.

Usually this wouldn't be a problem I don't think, when there is clean freshwater sitting in there. The problem is that the water in there (and coming from every faucet in this delapidated building) comes from a cistern on the roof that is rusting and packed full of all sorts of bacteria (seriously, a cistern... this is a science lab building....). So the water is disgusting to begin with, has been sitting in the bottom of this sink with nowhere to go for a long time now, and since I have been working in here and warming the room up every day the bacteria are in full party mode.

I nabbed a bottle of bleach from a main floor bathroom and armed myself with long tools and thick rubber gloves and took to anihilating the community of slime in the sink. Sadly, I didn't think to take a photo of the black sludge that was coating the underside of the drain cap and the sides of the standpipe, it was quite a sight. I did take a photo of the sink once it was in a more presentable state. Who makes a sink with a fixed standpipe anyway. What a pain that thing was to clean out!


The stink monster now safely dead, I sat back down to work. Unfortunately my mind wandered back to the time when had started working here. The first couple of bright-eyed days when I didn't really understand where I was. Yes, those couple of days before the students had thought to tip me off about the state of the tap water and when I filled my coffee mug directly from the tap.
Ughhh, time to go vomit.

The BS News

I miss being in touch with current news. I wasn't ever really one to follow news very closely, but it was nice to be able to get a dose while cooking dinner in the evening. Being unable to read or understand average speech (way too fast for me still), I don't get the snipets that I did at home.

Most of my access to news comes in the form of CBC streaming audio, but because of the time difference the live streams that are on at convenient times of the day for me tend to be weird overnight shows. I also enjoy The Hour (a CBC TV program that airs episodes - without commercials!! - online... here's link). Every once in a while we virtually tune-in to comedy shows like the Rick Mercer Report (link here), The Daily Show (click here) and the Colbert Report (another link). The comedy shows are good because of their entertainment value, but they also toss in just enough current topics to help us feel a little more connected than otherwise.

Shawn brings the Japan Times home every now and again. It is a Japanese newspaper in English. It tends to have loads of US news - we don't read much about Canada in there, but at least we can get an accurate weather forecast.

I do manage to look at the evening news now and again when I am on the cardio machines in my gym. They usually have lots of food content - broadcasting from some kitchen somewhere, that kind of thing. They are also quick to skip past the "bad" stories, you know chalk outline in a parking lot or shot of a girls bike abandoned in a park then cut to mom crying, but always spend lots of time and replays on things like a small deer trapped on a rocky cliff somewhere or a woman who breeds persian cats. The best part about looking at the news at the gym (I say looking because I definately can't read the subtitiles) is putting my own story line to the images they show. The news show is actually called "BS News", so I try to attach fittingly BS stories to them. Really, who in the world do they hire as translators in this country!

Yuki Matsuri

Sapporo has a famous winter festival called Yuki (=snow) matsuri. Here is a link to the "official" website (click here). When I first heard about it I thought, "how nice, they have a festival for snow". As time went on, there was more and more hype about it (although all of the locals don't seem all that jazzed). Once the army rolled into town one whole month before the event and began preparation for the festival, I started to wonder just how big this thing was going to be.

Shawn and I dropped by Odori Koen (=Odori park, a big park in the middle of downtown) one day when preparations were about 3 weeks along to see just what they were up to. We were glad that we did because we got a chance to see how they go about creating the snow and ice sculptures. The proportions were amazing as were the number of people working away at this thing day and night. They built massive blocks of solid snow using plywood frames. When I say massive, I mean blocks that are 1 city block long and 6 stories tall - solid packed snow - for the bigger sculptures. The smaller ones were carved from blocks that were 3 meters tall. Scaffolding was built around the snow blocks then people went to work carving. Here is one of the scaffolding set ups and the people cutting and scraping away.


Here is construction of another one of the big blocks. In the first photo you can see the the wide view, the second shows a close up of some people working on a face.



Snow carvings constituted the majority of the scultures in Odori, but there were a few ice carvings too. As with the snow sculptures, the ice carvings were bigger than I could have imagined. Here is a photo of the biggest ice sculpture in construction.


On the weekend before the big opening, Shawn dropped down to the park to watch some of the carving and, as he does, made a few friends. The men who were carving a miniature replica of a Japanese shrine were happy to pose for a few photos for Shawn and eventually handed over the saw and let him help out. Here's a shot of Shawn, saw in hand, cutting off a piece of snow.


And here is the finished product of Shawn's (and a couple of other artists's) handywork.


Once the festival was in full swing, the tourists hit town in droves. I have run into more foreigners in the past couple of days than I have in total since arriving. The statistics say that about 2 million people come to Sapporo from all over the world in the span of a week to see the festival. That is a whole lot more people speaking english than we are used to... nice! I can make 5 friends per hour just having an Americano at Starbucks.

OK - now for some photos of the finished products.

Remeber the man's face that was being worked on above - he is in the center of this one on horseback. This was some kind of ad for Narnia the movie.


And here is the ice sculpture from above lit up and finished. It is a replica of the original Sapporo train station.


This is the life sized version of the shrine that Shawn helped out on. It was one of my favorites. It was incredible how much detail they incorporated.


And to end it off, here is one (another movie ad as I understand - it seems I am way out of touch with movies right now) this time with people in front for scale. The couple in this photo are our friends Anthony and Yoshiko who hosted dinner for us last weekend. They wandered through the festival and drank hot sake with us.


In a couple cold hours we were able to see most of the big carvings but missed the last two blocks of the park where most of the smaller carvings were located. I think that they had teams from different countries come and compete and also a section where local teams had a chance to try their hand at carving. We are going to go back again and see if we can get a look at the other carvings. This time we will wear warmer clothes and bring a thermos of tea.

Weekend Of Fun

Last weekend we celebrated Shawn's birthday. I put away the computer and books and he took a few days off work.

We started on Friday night with a trip up the Moiwayama ropeway (website here) for a romantic dinner overlooking Sapporo. Moiwa is a mountain on the edge of the city. You can ride a gondola to the top where there is an observation deck, a requisite gift shop where you can buy trinkets with the Moiwa chipmunk on it, and a restaurant. The photos make the restaurant look really fancy, and I suppose compared to a place where you buy a ticket for ramen from a vending machine, it was. The food was good, the menu had the ever popular soup curry and they had "local" wine. We ordered a bottle of wine and enjoyed curry while the fog lifted over the city. Here is a photo of our view (look closely and you can see our reflection in the window).

From the observation deck you can see the sea of Japan to the left and the Pacific to the right (not in the photo above though). It is really a nice view. But we don't recommend the "local" wine. It was brought to our table in a clay wine chiller and we thought that would be a good sign. When we looked inside the chiller though, it was empty - no water. I guess this place doesn't realize that this wine accesory actually has a function - or maybe it was because we weren't at home or on safari.

On Saturday we slept late then had a nice breakfast - Shawn's favorite - salmon lox on a cream cheese bagel. He fell in love with this breaky at the Solstice Cafe (here's a link). If anyone visits Victoria, we highly recommend it and you absolutely cannot go there without trying Dave's famous hot chocolate (also one of Shawn's fave's).

That afternoon we went to a friends apartment for a coctail and dinner. The hosts were Anthony (a British guy that Shawn works with) and Yoshiko (his wife who works at the Canadian Embassy). They put on a huge spread of food and have a really great apartment (and their living room looks directly into our bedroom....weird). The idea behind the bash was celebration of Shawn's birthday (he even baked a cake - yes! that means they have an oven) and announcement that they are expecting. It was a nice night and a huge treat to hang out with friends in a place where the smoke isn't so thick that you need goggles to see who you are talking to.

The following day we woke up early and went to a ski hill. We went on an all inclusive package again (the deals are too good not to) but this time to a hill called Kiroro. The hill was farther away but had more runs. I snowboarded again and spent less time using my face as a brake. On one run I decided that it would be best if I stayed on the beginner run, but it turned out to be too low of a grade for a weak boarder like me, so Shawn and the other skiiers had a good laugh as I bum scooted my way down the run.


Shawn strapped on the skis for the first time since childhood. He wanted to get on skis again and see how he did because a local modelling agency called him up and asked if he was available later this month for a job. They also asked if he skis, to which he answered yes, only because he wasn't sure what they were asking (the word for "like" is also pronounced ski). So, in case they call back with an offer of this job, he wanted to double check that he would be able to make a go of a day on skis.

Here's a shot of the view from the top of Kiroro. It is a new resort and is close to Otaru (sea of Japan side of Hokkaido). You can see the two hotels in the valley below. We had a nice day of skiing ended off with a soak in the sento that is located above the rental shop (a ticket to the bath was included in the package). It had an indoor and outdoor bath and was a perfect way to end the day, and of course helped us sleep the entire 90 minute bus ride back to Sapporo.

Kimono Dress Up Day

Shawn was taking language lessons at the university when he first arrived. They were held during the day on week days so now that he is working he hasn't been able to attend as much. The lessons aren't as formal as the undergrad course that I was in and was run mostly by volunteers ladies who put on the lessons for free for husbands and wives of foreign researchers (cool hey!).

Every year these same volunteer ladies offer to bring in their own kimonos and dress up foreign ladies. So when they brought out the sign up sheet during one class Shawn wasted no time in signing us up (well me really because they don't dress up the men).

When I arrived for the "dress-up" session none of the ladies recognised me, but there aren't many white people so they quickly deduced that I was Shawn's wife. They absolutely poured over me and took me around and introduced me to the other instructors as Shawn-san's wife, he is so kakuii (=cool). They even got me to bring out my camera and show around a photo of him - man he is popular with the ladies here!

Once everyone arrived we dove into kimono time. There are a lot of layers and I ended up strapped in by at least 15 strips of cloth that were hidden by important in holding the whole operation in place. There is no way that one person could dress themself. I had two ladies, sometimes three, positioning and pulling and knotting at one time. The main woman charged with dressing me told me that she has two daughters and that is how she became so skilled. She also told me that everything that I was wearing belonged to her - wow. Here are a couple of photos, my favorite part is the obi (big colourful waist strap) and the intricate knots that they tie with it. I tried to ask the significance of the different knots but didn't get much of an answer other than that yes, there is significance to different knots.


They also did our hair and make (=Japanese for make-up). They had full gear for everyone including really uncomfortable shoes and white toe socks. It was impressive to see how many women they dressed up in a short time. They had a professional photographer there who also volunteered and snapped photos of the whole event. They are providing us a cd of all of the photos too and all they asked for to cover their costs was 100 Yen (=$1). They even offered to mail the disc to me because I don't come to their class.

One woman brought her daughters along to get geared up. Here is a photo of them. They were adorable! I am not sure where they were from but their mother wore a muslim head scarf. It is incredible to see how quickly the foreign children pick up on language and cultural nuances. They seem to almost instantly move, gesture and act exactly like Japanese people.

I was the only white woman there and the Japanese ladies all seemed to get a kick out of me in kimono and continually commented on how well the colours of the kimono complimented my "complexion" (you'll notice that I was in white). There was one other woman who stuck out maybe more than me, she was from Cameroon. Below is a photo of the whole lot of us. It was a fun afternoon and I can't believe how much the volunteers did for us. Watching them all work together was like watching a busy bee hive, everyone was doing something in synchrony with someone else. I am going to have to pick up treats to leave for the ladies when I go and pick up my disc of photos.