Last day at work

My contract here at the university expired on Monday, so I put a stamp in the last square in the book for stamping.

I am told my contract will be extended for this year too. From April 1, which was two days ago. I have not received a new contract yet, but every year they seem to be late, so I am not very worried. Yet.

There is a new page in the new stamping book, which has my name on it. So apparently at least someone in the office also thinks I still work at the university. That is probably a good sign.

Shopping for weird chopsticks, and chinpira-clothes

I had some time on Sunday to visit a store where I bought some really nice trousers during the summer. I wanted some similar ones now, so I stopped by and asked them to order some for me (my size was not in stock). I also ended up buying five new t-shirts there...

And when I walked past another store, a guy came out and said: "Ah, you! We have a pair of trousers I am sure you would like!" They did. The trousers did not fit, though. But I ended up buying a jacket there instead. Then, a guy from yet another store came out and said that he remembered me being a magician and suggested I should buy a new jacket in their store. Which I did.

I also took a look around in the bookstore Village Vanguard that has mostly non-books. They have lots of joke props that are often useful in magic. I ended up buying two sets of chopsticks, one with Luke Skywalker lightsabers (I also thought about buying Obiwan Kenobi lightsabers since I like Obiwan more than Luke as a character, but Luke has the nicer lightsaber design) and one shaped like the katana of some famous Japanese man (there were many, named after various famous samurais, presumably).

Oh, I also bought a banana shaped wine cork.

Really weird, but fitting, chairs. And matcha.

I spent Sunday sitting on a chair with very uneven legs. This was good, though, since the floor was also uneven. The floor was strongly bowed, and all chairs were cut to fit that. So you cannot move a chair to a different table.

I was there with a friend who was in Sapporo for the weekend. I suggested this cafe since I wanted to have matcha (bitter green tea) and this place serves almost only matcha. It turned out that my friend had brought omiyage (presents when travelling). Which were matcha cakes.

Strange things to drop in lobby

When I got home one night, someone had dropped some hair(extensions) outside our elevator. How tired or drunk do you have to be to drop parts of your hair and not notice or not care?

Ropossa: wedding stuff, girls falling for me, women touching me in strange places

Something cheese like made from the first squirt of milk from young cows after their first calvings.

Last week I dropped by the magic "snack bar" Ropossa, and it led to an interesting evening. I showed up wearing a pink t-shirt with a family of pigs eating deep fried pork, with very sad faces. A young woman there said: "Ah, I have the exact same t-shirt!". She had seen me wear another shirt in the same series (cows eating steak, hens eating fried eggs, a salmon eating salmon sushi, etc.) and had bought one with pigs for herself a while ago. She had never seen me wear the pig version she said.

Chinese deep fried dessert

I took this as a sign that even people with normal taste in clothes can wear these shirts, which I find to be very funny shirts. My friends keep telling me only weirdos would wear such shirts. I wrote about meeting this other person who also owns the same shirt on Facebook, and one more (Japanese) person chimed in that she also owns such a shirt. Both these two did however later specify that they would of course never wear these shirts where someone could actually see them wearing them, and they only use them as pajamas...

Someone had brought huge amounts of Chinese food to Ropossa, so I got a large serving of that. I also got something that was kind of like cheese and was apparently made using "the first squirt of milk from a young cow after her first calving", and thus quite rare. What is so special about this first squirt was unclear.

As often happens, I was asked to do some magic for other people. There was a young girl (12 years old, perhaps?) there with her mother. I showed her some magic tricks, and she reportedly became much more quiet and shy than normal when she was around me (I had never met her before, so I don't know how she normally behaves). But she seemed deeply impressed by me being blond etc.

The mama of Ropossa thought this was very funny, so she asked me to do the trick where the cards suddenly spell out "I love you" in Japanese to this girl. I did, and she became quite red in the face. Later she told her mother that it was the first time anyone said "I love you" to her, haha. Too bad it was some weirdo foreigner. She even asked for my physical address afterwards.

It turned out that the reason her mother was in Ropossa was that she had just had the girl who owns a pork eating pigs-shirt and the Ropossa mama witness and sign her marriage papers. She and her future husband were going to hand over these papers to the city office the next day to get married, and they were celebrating in Ropossa.

Later, a cake that said: "Happy Wedding!" showed up, and they were asked to cut the cake together (which is customary in Japan). The not so much like a cake-knife knife that they had to use did have a nice red ribbon. It turned out to be one of the magic handkerchiefs that they use for various magic tricks in Ropossa that had been re-purposed into a wedding accessory.

 I also ended up doing some magic tricks for the company boss of some company who was there with four of his staff. He was so impressed that he paid for everything for me at Ropossa. And for everything for the girl who claimed to own a pig shirt, despite her not being involved in any way and we having met by chance in Ropossa, haha. He also asked the only woman among his staff to come over to where we were sitting, and I did some magic tricks for her too. She was a perfect spectator, cute and amazed by everything and anything. I made a rubber band disappear and she started looking and feeling around for it with a confused face. Was it in my hands? No. In my sleeves? No. On the floor? No. The she started parting my legs, still searching. The girl with the pig shirt then stepped in and said: "This is not really that type of establishment!" and sadly stopped the other woman.

Late at night, a very funny man who also sometimes makes magic props showed up. Even later, a man I had performed for in Ropossa and then later came to see me in the magic bar also showed up. So I was asked to do some more magic. I did a new trick which involves giving away a present "randomly" determined by the spectator for one of them. The other one then asked if it would be a different present if I did it for him too, so I said "Of course, but I can only do the same trick once per day.", which is a well known "fact" about magic in Japan. He said: "Didn't you say you did this trick for the cute woman who left a while ago? And that she reacted in a funny way to it." As luck would have it, that happened at around 23:30, while these two showed up at 1:00, so I explained that since it was now passed midnight it was not the same day.

Before leaving, I also got some presents. I got a huge fake diamond, and an old American half dollar.

Free food, free drinks

On Wednesday I went out for the Sapporo specialty soup curry with one of my colleagues. We then continued on down to One Star Bar, where one of my friends works. I once asked him what kind of omiyage (souvenirs Japanese people give to everyone they know after they have traveled somewhere) he wants in general. Most Japanese omiyage are edible sweets, but my friend does not like sweets. He suggested cup noodles from all over the world. I have given him cup noodles from Sweden, Germany, and Poland.

Now, someone else had given him cup noodles from Hong Kong, and he asked if we wanted to try them with him. We did. They were not that different from cheap Japanese cup noodles.

He also asked me to do some magic for two girls and a man that he also knows. They were very happy with the magic, and they kept buying drinks for me. I could not really find a nice timing to leave, so I stayed three hours or so after my colleague had left with the last subway...

I also gave them a card from our magic bar, and two of them showed up in the magic bar on Friday night, together with another young and very cute girl. Very nice people.

Weird behavior in a bar

A while ago I had a day full of surprises. A magician colleague of mine called and said that a guy from Australia who does not know Japanese was coming to the magic bar, so if I had time he wanted me to show up so someone could speak English. I got there towards the end of the time for these guests and did some magic in English for them. The guy turned out to be Danish, but he now lives and works in Australia. Meeting people from Denmark is very rare in Sapporo.

Then a Japanese man in his late forties (probably, it is hard for me to tell with Japanese people) entered. He was alone, which for non-regulars usually means that it is someone who does magic. This man was no exception, though he was a beginner in magic.He turned out to speak excellent English (quite rare in Japan) and he talked to me about all kinds of things after I had shown him some magic. When I went up to him and said that I too would do some magic (after one of the other magicians had finished), he also said: "Ah! I saw you in the newspaper. That is why I came here!". Since I was in the magic bar where I usually do not perform (we have two bars), and it was a weeknight (when I don't generally perform), it was a lucky coincidence for him, I guess. Meeting a Japanese man who speaks fluent English is perhaps even more surprising than meeting a Danish guy from Australia.

Since I had gone straight from my university job to the magic bar, I was starting to feel hungry at around midnight, so I decided to go have some fried chicken in another place in the same building. There I ended up sitting between a guy from Osaka and a woman from Sapporo, who I have said hello to once or twice but not really talked to.

When I was talking to the guy from Osaka, suddenly the woman on my other side pulled at my arm and started pressing her fingers quite strongly into strange places on my arm and hand. I was a bit surprised, and looked at her for a while, trying to figure out what she was up to. She said she works as a masseuse. The points she were pressing did seem to be spots that when I was doing martial arts were recommended as: "if you press here, it really hurts"-points. She kept pressing at various points and looked at me with a slightly disappointed face. I think she may have been trying to get me to feel pain (which succeeded, haha) and was disappointed that I did not seem to be in pain (after all the martial arts training, I got used to people doing painful things to me, so as long as it seems to be only pain, no real damage, I do not care so much).

She said something along the lines that usually this thing hurts and did something more. I said that yes, especially here between the thumb and the index finger, it hurts a lot and showed her where it hurts on me. I said that it also hurts a lot if you press fingers in between the skull and the jaw where they connect beneath/behind the ear, but she said she did not think so. I said that indeed it does and she said she did not believe me. In the end she asked me to show her where, so I pressed gently behind her ears, which seemed to hurt. She said she was disappointed, because now she had "lost" to me. She tried pressing on some lymph nodes again, but then finally my chicken arrived, and I could get a reprieve from the pain, haha.

So I started eating my fried chicken with the provided chopsticks. While I was still eating, she pulled at my arm and bent it into a strange angle again. Not the arm I use chopsticks with, but still it made eating a bit difficult. I said that maybe she could wait until I had finished eating, and nodded towards the chicken I held with the chopsticks. She then proceeded to bite into my chicken that I held in the air with the chopsticks, and she eat about half of it. This surprised me quite a lot, haha. I asked if she was hungry, and perhaps wanted some more. This seemed to be the case, since she bit off the rest of the chicken I held with the chopsticks too...

I am not sure what she wanted to achieve, but perhaps she was worried about me getting fat and was trying to save me from unnecessary Calories late at night. Anyway, that was a very surprising finish to a somewhat surprising evening. When the masseuse was busy talking to her friends and I had finished my chicken, I took my leave and went home.