My new title

One of my colleagues who also got promoted or at least changed over to a new contract of the same type as me made a bunch of new business cards. Apparently our titles are now 特任助教. This means something like "specially appointed assistant teacher".

My rude bathroom scale

My body weight when wearing clothes. I blame my wallet, filled with enormous amounts of bills, of course, for the two extra kilos compared to when naked.

I bought a bathroom scale a few months back. It tells you your weight in kilos, but it also tries to measure body fat percentage and other things. You also tell it how tall you are and it then tells you on a scale of "slim, slightly slim, normal, slightly fat, fat" what it thinks of your body constitution, and it recommends you how many calories you are allowed to eat each day.

My scale tells me I am "fat" every single morning, no matter how many kilos I lose, haha! It recommends eating between 1500 calories and 1650 calories (depending on how fat it thinks I am).

Cheap food and half naked women

Not even one of all the girls in these billboards ever worked here, haha.

One of my few male friends wanted to go out to dinner. We discuss ideas for magic tricks together but have not met for a few weeks. He had three new ideas he wanted to show me, and I had two I wanted to try on him.

He decided on the restaurant, and we ended up in a newly opened izakaya (Japanese bar). Their selling point is that all waitresses are young girls wearing almost no clothes. Most of the waitresses wore bikinis with a very short skirt (still showing most of the lower part of the bikini too) or very small hot pants and a bikini top. Some wore very short skirts, colorful brassieres and very tight see-through shirts on top.

The drinks were pretty cheap, but the food was a bit on the expensive side. The food was not bad, but was probably very very cheap for the izakaya to make. It was a lot of microwaved stuff with cheap ingredients.

Our waitress helpfully distributed our ramen salad from the big bowl unto small plates for us, but she was not so good at that. There was only ramen and a few lettuce leaves on my plate. There were lots of other ingredients in the bowl though...

This is what it looked like after I distributed the salad contents more evenly.

Some of the girls were pretty funny when they had time to talk to us.

The funniest part was that my friend kept asking them: "So, are you one of the girls in the advertisements?", since they had extremely large billboards all over the place, and they have huge adverts in a lot of magazines lately. They all said "no", and one of the girls told us that all the girls in the promotional stuff are hostesses from some Tokyo hostess bar, haha. Strangely enough, almost all the waitresses were a lot prettier than the girls from Tokyo used in the advertisements. Apparently Sapporo has a high rate of pretty girls (though the funniest waitress was actually from Otaru, our neighboring city).

None of these girls ever worked here, but the clothes look like the same ones used by the staff.

More billboards with unrelated girls from Tokyo.

My friend kept ordering yuzushu sours, and ended up puking in the toilet. So towards the end, I ended up drinking his cocktails since he did not seem to be up for more of them...

Taking photos of the food was OK, but no photos of the staff were allowed.

New T-shirt, still not Japanese

I noticed that my t-shirt that states that I am not Japanese (私は日本人ではありません) had a huge hole in it! So I went out to buy a new one. I found one by a different maker that states 日本人ではありません which means the same, but I liked the first way of writing it better.

卍LINE

I saw a flyer for "卍LINE", stating that there is a release tour for a new album going on. In Asia using a swastika is not weird, but being from Europe it always surprises me a bit... And this time they also have a "mein floor" and other German sounding things, haha.

Country Ma'am Ice Cream

The cookie maker "Country Ma'am" has recently put out cookie filled chocolate and now cookie filled ice cream. My colleague convinced me we needed to buy ice cream after lunch one day (this is probably one of the reasons my bathroom scale keeps calling me fat every morning...) and I tried the Country Ma'am ice cream. It was quite good.

Long time no see

My camera focused on the wrong thing when I tried the self timer... (focused on my hand when I pressed the button I guess)

A friend of mine who is Japanese but spends most of her life abroad (four or five years in the U.S. before we met, half a year in southern France right after I met her, then half a year in Canada, one year or so in Paris, two more years in Canada etc.) is just back in Sapporo and will stay here a few months.

She had had a job interview and e-mailed me asking if I had time to meet for coffee (well, tea in Japan, but still). I left work earlier than normal and headed out to try to find her. She was browsing cameras at Bic Camera, so I ended up getting to talk to one of our magic bar's regular customers (who works at Bic Camera, in the camera department) too!

My friend and I ended up having dinner in a nearby restaurant, which was very nice. She is very funny to be around.

Not the second best pasta of my life, but good

Many years ago when she was also living in Sapporo we once went to a restaurant that had two penguins in an aquarium. There I had the second best pasta I have had in my life (the best was in a very expensive place in Italy). Sadly, the restaurant closed down some time after that... But we ordered a similar pasta this time too. It was not on the level of the penguin restaurant, but it was still good.

My friend wanted to have Creme Catalan but she also saw Gorgonzola cheese cake with honey on the menu, so we had to order both desserts. And some other food. Not great for my dieting, but very nice.