JAL Sakura loung

The JAL lounge curry. Quite spicy.

The JAL lounge always has nice bread.

On March 5 we flew to Lausanne, Switzerland, for a work meeting. We got tickets that gave us access to the JAL Sakura lounge at Narita airtport (we flew Sapporo-Tokyo-Frankfurt-Geneva and then took a train to Lausanne). The Narita lounge is very nice and has great food.

The chicken soup was great!

This time they had nice sausages.

Since we have to get up at 4 in the morning to catch the change over in Tokyo, I usually have breakfast in the lounge if I get to enter the lounge (which is not that common). They have nice bread, which is rare in Japan, and good Japanese curry. This time they also had nice sausages (also rare in Japan) and a great chicken soup!

Fruits.

No Japanese meal is complete without miso soup.

Income Tax Report, in Japanese!

These are the papers we first thought I needed.

Today I went to the tax office to get help with my income tax report. It has to be filed before the 15th of March, and I will be in Switzerland more or less until then (starting tomorrow).

Last year and two years ago, I went there and asked how to fill out the forms to show that I had received some income from Sweden that should be taxed here in Japan. They were very kind and helpful but since no one had ever had to deal with anything like this before, we ended up having to "go ask my superior" several times, and in the end five or six people were hovering around me trying to figure out what to do.

This year I had no income from Sweden, but I had my income from my job at the university, which the university files all the paperwork and pays all the taxes automatically for, but also some income from doing magic shows at kindergartens etc. Last year I had a whopping 6,000 yen income from magic shows, that I got taxed a few hundred yens for. This year I had more income since the kindergartens have started paying me five or six thousand yens per show instead of one thousand. Despite me telling them I will do it for free for them (which means less hassle with visas and taxes; especially the visa stuff is a real pain).

Anyway, this year a man at the reception desk of the tax office recognized me and said: "Weren't you on TV last year? Very late at night... Hanatare NACS?" So he had seen me do magic on TV and remembered (and recognized!) me despite the fact that I wore a blond wig and a fake nose when on TV (to "look like a foreigner").

This is the book that tells me I do not have to do anything at all!

My assigned helper had me fill out some papers specifying magic shows, the pay for them, and deductions I would like to make. My spendings for magic shows are things like 200 yen subway fare or buying balloons to break in the show for 105 yen, so getting a few percents of that back on my taxes is not worth the time it takes to write it down. I said I did not really want to make any deductions to save time. After quite a while of filling out papers, he said: "So your total income from this is only 52,000 yen? [yes] If you earn less than 200,000 yen from business on the side but have paid taxes for your main job, you do not have to report it."

In the end, it turned out that I did not have to do anything at all this year. Not even logging in to some system and clicking "OK, all the reported numbers are correct". Nothing. Very surprising. Good news that I did not have to fill out the rest of the papers, but it would have been even better if this had been known earlier... This was probably my fault, since the instruction manual on how to fill out your income tax papers clarified this rule on page 36. 40 pages of bureaucratic Japanese is not something I can manage to read myself though. Which of course is still my fault, since I should have studied Japanese and then have been able to read this kind of stuff too.

Towels!

Last night was the last night of a three day celebration of the five year anniversary of Dragon Bar, a  bar where one of my friends work. Since the other two nights were nights when I was in our magic bar, I only had time to stop by on the last evening.

They handed out free towels to celebrate this event. I am not sure why they chose towels, but I guess it is always useful to have towels.

Shopping for clothes

Yesterday I went out looking for clothes for the first time in over a year. I need new trousers. In the end, I bought three pairs of trousers, one for 3,000 yen, one for 10,000 yen, and one for 30,000 yen. One pair is for daily use, one is for my friends wedding, and one is for looking weird (will probably mainly be worn when performing magic). The weird ones were 30,000 yen and the wedding ones were 3,000 yen.

During my walking around, I had chance meetings with people I know only twice. When spending several hours walking around downtown, I usually run into more people by chance that that, so I am starting to notice that many of my friends have left Sapporo...

Unagi

This weekend, a Swedish guy who works as a pilot and sometimes pilots planes that come to Sapporo was here for two nights. He piloted a plane here and went skiing in the mountains during his day off in Sapporo. He then came to our magic bar together with the captain of the plane, and we ended up having lunch on the day he piloted the plane back to Hawaii.

He has been in Japan quite a lot, and he does not eat meat, so it is sometimes difficult to come up with interesting restaurants to show him. In Japan they usually put bacon in your "vegetable pasta" and do other things like that to make the taste become clearer, so coming up with types of food with no meat is not as easy as one might think. Sushi is of course the most obvious thing to go for, but he eats sushi without me so I would prefer to take him to restaurants that serve something else. Last time we had okonomiyaki, which is fun because you get to cook your food yourself on a hot iron plate in the table.

This time we had unagi, which means eel in Japanese. Japanese eel always has a quite sweet sauce and is usually served in a box like this. I like it, though Japanese people often ask if I "can eat eel". Apparently they think it is a type of food that foreigners find strange, but we eat eel in Sweden too.

Return gifts: nice and insulting

Our secretary had put a present on my desk. There was a note explaining that she wanted to give me something back since I gave her chocolate (as a thank you for always helping us with random stuff that is not really included in her duties) on Valentine's Day. The note explained that since I am fat and need to go on a diet she had not chosen to give me chocolate (which would be the most common return gift) but instead had gotten me things that I should give to my mother.

The note also said that she was busy and that I should stay away and not talk to her. She is pretty funny, our secretary.

And there is more snow...

The snowing never stops! These pictures are taken last Friday, but after that it snowed like crazy during the weekend too. Especially Saturday night was bad. It was also stormy, so windy it was hard to walk around outside.

During a rare break in the snowfall, I found a lamp post that still managed to pull its head above the snow line.