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Christmas in Japan!
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
Bonenkai - 2008
Time is running out for the year 2008 and in Sapporo that means it is time again for year end parties. They call them bonenkai, and unlike the Christmas parties I am used to, they happen any day of the week. Our lab group held our year end party on a Wednesday last week. Our lab joins with 2 other lab groups for the party and that makes for a few more bodies and a lot more fun.
Most of the students spent the day on the ski slopes while the senseis and I worked. We all met at a resort hotel about 45 minutes from Sapporo called the Jozankei View. Yes, for those readers who have been following this blog closely, it is the same place that we went to last year. There is a water park there with water slides and we all joined up for an hour or so of swimming before dinner. Shawn and I actually spent most of the water park time in the outdoor hot tub. There is a beer vending machine just outside the entrance to the pool area - what Canadian can resist a cold beer in an outdoor hot tub during winter.
Dinner there is a delish buffet with a mix of Japanese and Chinese food. As is common in many resort hotels in Hokkaido, everyone spends the entire time in the hotel wearing yukata provided by the hotel. Here is Shawn, dressed and ready for dinner. I still find it a little strange to dine in the hotel robe with 200 other people wearing exactly the same thing.
After dinner, we retired to one of the rooms for the party part of the evening. The students had diligently arranged all of the snacks and drinks. Here is a shot of the party room.
No need for couches when you can sit on the floor!
We added a Canadian favorite (well, one of our favorite winter treats anyway) to the drink menu. We shared a bottle of Fireball cinammon whisky around and it was a huge hit (mostly). It was the first time anyone in the room had even heard of such a thing (except for us of course) and so it was fun to share such a strange drink with them. A special shout out to the pack-horses who brought this to us in Asia when we realized that we can't buy or order it here!
The highlite of the party was an unexpected one. One of the senseis who had been to this hotel before and knew that there are no ice machines (AND they charge $10 for a bag of ice!) thought to bring his own ice for the drinks. He had a large cooler full of massive pieces of ice wrapped up in paper. As they were serving up the first round of drinks (Fireball on ice please!) he told us all where the ice had come from. He had gotten it on a research trip to the Japanese research station in Antarctica. He brought the ice back and had kept it in deep refrigeration since. The ice block had been dated at 100,000 years old. It was packed with tiny bubbles and he told us to listen to it fizz as air, one hundred millenia old escaped from the ice. Stone age ice - now that's how to have a drink "on the rocks".
Most of the students spent the day on the ski slopes while the senseis and I worked. We all met at a resort hotel about 45 minutes from Sapporo called the Jozankei View. Yes, for those readers who have been following this blog closely, it is the same place that we went to last year. There is a water park there with water slides and we all joined up for an hour or so of swimming before dinner. Shawn and I actually spent most of the water park time in the outdoor hot tub. There is a beer vending machine just outside the entrance to the pool area - what Canadian can resist a cold beer in an outdoor hot tub during winter.
Dinner there is a delish buffet with a mix of Japanese and Chinese food. As is common in many resort hotels in Hokkaido, everyone spends the entire time in the hotel wearing yukata provided by the hotel. Here is Shawn, dressed and ready for dinner. I still find it a little strange to dine in the hotel robe with 200 other people wearing exactly the same thing.
After dinner, we retired to one of the rooms for the party part of the evening. The students had diligently arranged all of the snacks and drinks. Here is a shot of the party room.
No need for couches when you can sit on the floor!We added a Canadian favorite (well, one of our favorite winter treats anyway) to the drink menu. We shared a bottle of Fireball cinammon whisky around and it was a huge hit (mostly). It was the first time anyone in the room had even heard of such a thing (except for us of course) and so it was fun to share such a strange drink with them. A special shout out to the pack-horses who brought this to us in Asia when we realized that we can't buy or order it here!
The highlite of the party was an unexpected one. One of the senseis who had been to this hotel before and knew that there are no ice machines (AND they charge $10 for a bag of ice!) thought to bring his own ice for the drinks. He had a large cooler full of massive pieces of ice wrapped up in paper. As they were serving up the first round of drinks (Fireball on ice please!) he told us all where the ice had come from. He had gotten it on a research trip to the Japanese research station in Antarctica. He brought the ice back and had kept it in deep refrigeration since. The ice block had been dated at 100,000 years old. It was packed with tiny bubbles and he told us to listen to it fizz as air, one hundred millenia old escaped from the ice. Stone age ice - now that's how to have a drink "on the rocks".
Monday, December 15, 2008
Delinquent
Apologies to you all for my inexcusable delinquency in updating this site. As it turns out, since my last post life here has been - dare I say - normal? For me, there hasn't been outstanding things that I felt worthy of blogging about. Wait, that isn't entirely true. I simply have gotten complacent and expectant with life in Japan and don't recognize a good blog opportunity now, as well as I did before.
For example, I would be remiss if I didn't make note of and congratulate my American friends for their impressive and inspirational recent election. We could have used a result like this some time ago (we being the rest of the world), but nonetheless you stood together and collectively asked for change. In Canada, we too had a chance to do just that, but instead opted for "status quo" (more or less). The Canadian election result, unlike the optimistic American result, appears to have been a questionable decision.
Of course we were glued to the CBC online news feed as the Canadian election results came in here in Japan. There wasn't much "hype" in Sapporo over the Canadian election, as you could imagine. The American results, however, were a different story. We attended a party at a bar run by an American guy that night. He was delighted with the news and put on a beer special that couldn't be beat, videotaped the election coverage and we all sat in his small windowless bar drinking beer in silence as we heard the now-famed Obama speech. Lots of people cried, the gathering was mostly American but there were smatterings of other countries there too. We sat at a table with a woman from Georgia (the American state, not the country), a couple from Australia, and a guy from England. And of course, there were a couple tables of Japanese people who starred in utter amazement watching how much we all cared about what we were seeing on the television. It was certainly a unique experience to see both of these elections covered through online news here in Japan.
Now, Japan has also had a recent change in political leadership. In September, Japan's Prime Minister at the time, Fukuda, announced that the financial crisis, among other things, was too much to handle and he was quitting (sound ominously familiar Canada?). So, amazingly, Fukuda steped down from leadership (who knew you could just quit because it was too hard?) and was replaced by Taro Aso. So Japan is now under the leadership of PM Aso. I wonder how Canadians have been using the same name for our leader?
OK, ok, enough politics - but I really had to share the Prime Minister Aso joke! The holidays are around the corner and I hope everyone has fun and relaxing booked into their schedules. Similar to Canadian office Christmas parties, Japan has "end of the year" office parties (called bonenkai in Japanese). Our lab group will have our bonenkai today in a resort town called Joznakei. We go to a big hotel there that has a waterpark and great onsen and hang out overnight and return the next day. I will be sure to update the blog with the antics from this year's bonenkai.
In the mean time, here is a link to our lab website. I was only recently sent this page myself, otherwise I would have passed it on sooner. If you don't have an asian font pack loaded on the computer you are using, you may only see non-sense characters on this page. Unfortunately, the site is in Japanese so I can't read most of it, but you can click on my name (lower center box) to get to some English.
For example, I would be remiss if I didn't make note of and congratulate my American friends for their impressive and inspirational recent election. We could have used a result like this some time ago (we being the rest of the world), but nonetheless you stood together and collectively asked for change. In Canada, we too had a chance to do just that, but instead opted for "status quo" (more or less). The Canadian election result, unlike the optimistic American result, appears to have been a questionable decision.
Of course we were glued to the CBC online news feed as the Canadian election results came in here in Japan. There wasn't much "hype" in Sapporo over the Canadian election, as you could imagine. The American results, however, were a different story. We attended a party at a bar run by an American guy that night. He was delighted with the news and put on a beer special that couldn't be beat, videotaped the election coverage and we all sat in his small windowless bar drinking beer in silence as we heard the now-famed Obama speech. Lots of people cried, the gathering was mostly American but there were smatterings of other countries there too. We sat at a table with a woman from Georgia (the American state, not the country), a couple from Australia, and a guy from England. And of course, there were a couple tables of Japanese people who starred in utter amazement watching how much we all cared about what we were seeing on the television. It was certainly a unique experience to see both of these elections covered through online news here in Japan.
Now, Japan has also had a recent change in political leadership. In September, Japan's Prime Minister at the time, Fukuda, announced that the financial crisis, among other things, was too much to handle and he was quitting (sound ominously familiar Canada?). So, amazingly, Fukuda steped down from leadership (who knew you could just quit because it was too hard?) and was replaced by Taro Aso. So Japan is now under the leadership of PM Aso. I wonder how Canadians have been using the same name for our leader?
OK, ok, enough politics - but I really had to share the Prime Minister Aso joke! The holidays are around the corner and I hope everyone has fun and relaxing booked into their schedules. Similar to Canadian office Christmas parties, Japan has "end of the year" office parties (called bonenkai in Japanese). Our lab group will have our bonenkai today in a resort town called Joznakei. We go to a big hotel there that has a waterpark and great onsen and hang out overnight and return the next day. I will be sure to update the blog with the antics from this year's bonenkai.
In the mean time, here is a link to our lab website. I was only recently sent this page myself, otherwise I would have passed it on sooner. If you don't have an asian font pack loaded on the computer you are using, you may only see non-sense characters on this page. Unfortunately, the site is in Japanese so I can't read most of it, but you can click on my name (lower center box) to get to some English.
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