Party in the Swiss ambassador's residence

When I took this photo, the ambassador asked me if I was doing some form of industrial espionage to steal business from Swiss chocolate manufacturers. I said no.

Last Tuesday I had to go to Tokyo, to the home of the Swiss ambassador to Japan, for a research meeting. Actually they wanted my professor to come, but he is travelling abroad somewhere so he e-mailed them and said that I would go instead. He did cc me on that e-mail, but actually being asked might have been nice too...

Very tiny but very good beef.

The meeting was to start at 9:15 on Tuesday morning, so I would have to leave Sapporo on Monday night to be there in time. Monday was however a Holiday here in Japan (the "Sea day") and I had other plans (a wedding). In the end, I got up at 4:30 am and took the first flight out of Sapporo to Tokyo, which meant I arrived at the ambassador's residence slightly before 10. By then, the presentation that my professor thought was most important was just about finishing (it ended slightly before the scheduled time), so I missed 97% of that.

The desserts were covered in gold. I guess Switzerland just has too much gold and stuff.

There were three more presentations after that, and then a panel discussion. There were two very good presentations that I enjoyed, and there was also some very nice food.

I did however get a very bad cold on Monday evening, so flying back and forth to Tokyo was not great. The super hot summer of Tokyo was not that nice either, but my ears going weird from the flying had me most distracted. Last year I got "sudden deafness" and lost the hearing on one ear. Though most of the hearing came back three weeks later, I would very much prefer not to experience that again (and some hearing never came back). At that time my ear felt weird but did not hurt. After flying, it felt quite similar... I figured it was just the combination of a cold and flying, but it still made me uneasy, haha. I kept checking "do I still hear low frequencies OK?" with ear phones in the plane etc., many times. I am getting paranoid about my ears acting weird. Especially since the chances of not becoming permanently deaf from sudden deafness decrease quickly with time from onset to when you start treatment. If I get that crap again, I want to find out quickly :-)

Growing vegetables in an umbrella?

In Japan, people sometimes use objects that I have seen in the West too, but in completely different ways...

24 hour party

A place I often go to for food had a 24 hour party during the weekend. It was very loud and quite nice the few hours I was there. I stopped by in the middle of the night and in the afternoon. In the afternoon, the place was VERY hot. It turns out that since the building only houses bars and establishments like that, the cooling of the building is turned off centrally between 7 am and 16 pm.

Hanging out with magicians

Last week I ran into a bunch of magicians I know and ended up having dinner with them. I wrote about that on my other blog, so I will just link to that from here: Dinner with magicians.

Flowers in the park

From time to time they change the flower arrangements in the Odori Koen park in the middle of Sapporo. Right now, the arrangements are very nice.

Clothes shopping

It has now become summer here and most days it is over 30 degrees Celsius. I for once had a whole day with nothing at all schedules and spent it shopping around for clothes. I need jackets to do magic sometimes, but it always gets too hot if you wear a jacket. In the super hot summer, perhaps they sell very thin jackets, I hoped. And they did.

In one store I ran into a guy who said he had seen me on TV. He helped me pick out two very thin jackets and I apparently entered their store during the special "time sale" period of the day and got 60% off on the price on the tag. When I was paying he also mentioned that actually we had met once before. Six years ago he sold me a jacket in a different store in another part of Sapporo. Very good memory, that guy.

I also bought another jacket in another store, and hung them up near a pair of trousers I bought recently. The trousers caused our secretary to complain to me that my clothes were too gaudy. I said they are white with some black on them, neither white nor black are very loud colors. She said the color was not the problem.

Amazing paper constructions by professionals

I got a souvenir from a friend who had apparently been travelling. It was a camera shaped paper box, containing candy. It worked in a quite ingenious way, so you could press a "button" on the camera and the "shutter" would open and you could get some candy. The candy also contained horoscope type messages.