My interesting hotel room in Montpellier

I reached Montpellier in the evening, and it was around 30 degrees Celsius. I found my hotel fairly quickly, and my room was clean and spacious. About twice the size of my apartment in Sapporo. It had air conditioning and wireless Internet that worked without problems. It was also very cheap.

There was a "Sex Shop" on one of the streets outside my window.

The location was great. Very close to the station (though I did not go to the station even once), close to three different tram stations (useful when going to conference venue), and 1 minute walking distance from the old city center, where all the interesting things in Montpellier are found. So there were lots of good restaurants nearby, and many beautiful things to see.

My ridiculously cramped toilet. Shouldn't they have put it in facing the camera instead?

Perhaps there is something important on the other side of the wall that makes the toilet unusable, I though. It turns out to be nothing but empty space, seemingly made just to make the toilet cramped... French architecture.

The drawbacks included being close to the station (noisy trains breaking noisily early in the morning when passing close by), being close to the city center (people partying until three A.M. every night on the street outside my window), having a window that could not be closed (not a problem except for the noise, but combined with point 1) and 2) on the list of bad things, not great), and a toilet that was so close to a wall even a Japanese (who are generally tiny) girl could not have gotten her legs between the toilet and the wall...

The window to the very lively city center could not be closed. Another somewhat questionable design decision.

I managed to explain to the staff in the local pharmacy that I wanted ear plugs, which solved my noise problem.

Welcome to France

I had a stopover at Charles de Gaulle airport on my way to Montpellier. I try to avoid this airport and every time I end up there I get reminded why... haha. It is very big, and I guess it has grown over time so now the design is also bad. It is difficult to figure out where you are supposed to go, and it usually requires walking or 30 minutes through areas with few signs and no staff.

I bought a sandwich, which was good, though :-)

There were lots of people walking around with automatic weapons in the arrival hall. Not sure what they were doing.

To France

I am in France for two days of working. Since I actually have to work and since the Internet at my hotel is a bit slow, updates will come later. Here are two shots of the airplane food, though. It was pretty good.

Another festival: wrestling, unicycles, magic

Wrestling

During the weekend there was another festival in the main shopping area of Sapporo. I saw some wrestling, some very impressive team unicycle synchronized performance, and a guy I know did some magic.

Baton twirling

Balloon animals

Magic

Unicycles

Traditional dancing

Trying stilts

Broken

Yesterday my boss in the magic bar called me and asked if I had time to help out a bit since the rest of the staff were home with fever.

In the refrigerator I found a bottle of soda water that had frozen and thus broken. Strangely enough, none of the bottles around it were frozen, and it was completely surrounded by other bottles with the same contents. And the refrigerator is not that cold.

Food, and strange tea

Pizza

Yesterday I had dinner with a magician friend of mine. We went to a place called "Cheese Cheese", which has won awards in Italian pizza competitions. We ordered pizza, which was of course very good.

One of the many "Happy Birthday"-plates served

Around us all tables were full, all the other customers were in their early twenties, and all were girls. And apparently, almost all were born on the July 2. The lights in the restaurant dimmed five times, and every time the staff came up to some table, sang "Happy Birthday", gave cakes to the people at the table, and took Polaroid pictures. We were waiting excitedly for our turn, since the kept coming closer and closer to our table, one table at a time. They sadly stopped at the table next to ours, though.

The "dorce" menu

Since no one came and gave us cake (my friend is born in May, and I in October), my friend suggested we order desserts ourselves instead. They had a "dorce menu" that they gave us when we finished our pizzas. I am fairly sure it should be spelled "dolce", but I am not Italian. In this restaurant they encourage you to draw on the table with crayons, so I wrote a message for them there.

Custard creme dessert with raspberry instead of custard

The "dorce menu" had "seasonal katarana: raspberries". In Japan, "katarana" comes from "creme Catalana", which if I understand correctly is more or less the same as "creme brulee". In Japan, katarana is always frozen, though. So it is a frozen creme brulee (creme brulee is creme brulee in Japanese too). As far as I know, creme brulee is based on custard, so raspberry katarana should be burned frozen custard cream without custard but with raspberries instead. And it was.


After eating way too much for dinner, we went to try a place that is open 24 hours per day and has "all you can drink, plus some snacks" for 390 yen. They have two bars in this chain, that are placed in buildings right next to each other. We went to one of them by random selection, but it was not that much fun. So we moved on to the second one, which had much funnier staff when we were there. 

Tea, made in a somewhat original way

The all you can drink menu included many types of tea, and my friend who apparently thinks the 21℃ summer heat is "cold", wanted some hot tea. The girl who was making tea for him was ... not so good at that. It was instant tea, i.e. you put some powder in a cup and pour boiling water on it. You would imagine it is difficult to fail when using that, especially if it is your job to do this kind of stuff. But she managed. She tried to prepare the tea in a pot but put way way way too much tea in it, and when she poured in water everything overflowed and the result in the pot was a mixture of tea paste and slightly wet tea powder...

Today's soup, "made by the staff"

We also noticed that they had "today's soup" on the all you can drink menu. So I tried to order that, but she told me that they were out of soup. But if I did not mind instant soup, she could make instant corn soup. Which took 10 minutes (so it was not so instant), and the instant powder in the bottom of the cup was still in powder for even after I stirred it a bit for myself after receiving the soup. She also served something that was more or less melon soda mixed with coffee creamer to the buy sitting next to my friend. The guy on my left tried to order some food (also 390 yen), but she said that they were "out of rice... or not out of rice really, but she did not feel like making any food", haha.

All in all, it was a very funny place to visit, though you should not have too high hopes for sophisticated drinks.

Chance meetings

Chicken Nanban

On Saturday I was having dinner alone. I had "Chicken Nanban", which comes from "chicken in the way of the southern barbarians", which means "Western style chicken" (the first Westerners to come to Japan came by ship from the south), which means fried chicken with pepper seasoning and tartar sauce. When I was more or less finished someone suddenly poked my shoulder, surprising me quite a bit. It turned out that a friend of mine was just coming into the same restaurant to have dinner.

Today I had Indian food for lunch, and of course a friend turned out to be having lunch in the same restaurant. Almost every time I go there, I run into someone I know. This time it was a girl who lived in the same dorm as me when I first came to Sapporo. I have also met people from my work place (at non-work hours, by chance) three times, some Japanese people who are friends of my friends, and other foreigners I know a little...