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".