Surprisingly difficult puzzle

Back in Sapporo, I was given a puzzle to solve in a bar I often visit to have dinner. This puzzle turned out to be quite difficult, and it took me several visits to this bar before I solved it. The goal is to get all the pieces into the frame, of course.

Since the pieces do not fit by just reordering them using the "obvious" way to put them into the frame, I thought the round corners and non-round corners and the fact that if you put to cat heads towards each other you get some slack etc. had something to do with the solution. but neither of these things had anything to do with the puzzle solution. These red herrings cost me two nights of puzzle failure, haha.

Ridiculously difficult "egg shaped kendama"

Almost...

The last night of September, I was shown something called "egg kendama". A kendama is an old Japanese toy. It has a ball that you are supposed to land on different parts of a wooden handle. The egg shaped kendamas similarly had marbles and you were supposed to shake the thing to get the marble to stay on top of a small pedestal. When it was placed there, the egg would balance upright, when it was not there the egg would fall over.

This turned out to be very difficult. I finally managed to get the egg with only one marble balanced, but the one with two was too difficult for me to finish before they closed the bar. For some reason they gave me a piece of cloth made out of some material that was "extra good to wipe smart phone screens" with.

I came back a few days later to try to clear the two marble challenge too. I did manage to do it that day. And then they wanted to take a photo with both eggs balanced together, so I had to redo the first one too.

Puzzles and magic

In the bar Ropossa where I often eat, they have a new 3D puzzle. The standard set has 6 identical plastic bars that you can position so that they stay together in the shape of a cube. I was told that I should use two sets and make this slightly more complex shape. Which was pretty difficult.

Me and the magician Akkey trying to assemble this puzzle

Noticing that someone is taking pictures

Annoying face for the camera

It took me a few tries before I figured out how the puzzle was supposed to be put together. Then it took a few tries to put it together like that, since it would be really great to have one or two extra hands when assembling the pieces...

Incorrect configuration

Incorrect, but still something

The cubes should not be this loose

Finally getting everything right

There were other guests there too, of course, and I was asked to show some of them some magic tricks. They seemed to enjoy that and then took photos with me while wearing poo-shaped hats and weird glasses.

I also met the cousin of my friend who runs this bar. She was funny. She also played along very well when I was asked to do magic for her and the people sitting next to her.

When they were playing with Japanese spinning tops ("koma"), one of the other guests fell asleep. His friends managed to get a spinning to to spin on his head without him waking up.

I was, as is so often the case, asked to show my funny underwear too. I like this design, which has the Japanese symbol for "driver under training" that you put on cars to indicate that the driver does not have his licence yet. The text says "beginner" or "inexperienced" in Japanese.

Difficult puzzles and magician's secrets revealed

I was asked to assemble the six plastic parts above into a cube. It was not so difficult to figure out how this should be done, but it was very difficult to actually put them together like that. It would have been useful to have one more hand.

My Swedish friends and I were enjoying strange puzzles and some food but at around midnight our magic bar called me and said that someone I know was there and wanted to see me. So we left and went to the magic bar instead. There, I found a Polish guy I used to work with when I just arrived in Sapporo. We were in the same lab for two years or so, but now I am in a different lab and he lives in a different city, so we do not meet very often. He was on his way from Kitami to Buenos Aires, It was nice to have a chance to talk to him again.

There is something looking like a fake finger stuck to this box of breath mints with a magnet on a table in a bar we visited. I pointed out that revealing magicians' secrets like this was perhaps improper but was told that "no, it's fine".

Seven horses

At Ropossa I was shown a New Year post card that says "there are seven horses [not exactly correctly translated] hidden here". It was quite clever. If you cannot read Japanese, it is probably completely uninteresting, though, haha.

I was also shown a black and white photo that some people have trouble seeing what it shows, but once you have seen it clearly, you can never un-see it. And I was given a big nail to hammer through my hand, as a gift. Very sturdy construction.