The mayor

Today the mayor of Sapporo showed up in our lab. He is interested in some of the work we are about to do here.

Our lobby has never looked this nice before!

Around one corner, a pile of heavy stuff.

Around another corner, a pile of not so heavy stuff.

Our lab has too much stuff (we get money that can only be spent on buying things, not paying salary, and we are not allowed to throw away things bought with research funding without going through extreme amounts of paperwork) and looks like a disaster area normally. Today the lobby and the route the mayor was expected to take to the conference room was cleaned up. But things were just moved slightly out of sight, so no overall improvement.

The mayor walking into my photo shot.

I wanted a picture of the mayor for my blog, but our secretary said that that was out of the question. I said if I was taking pictures of the university grounds and he happened to walk into frame it was not my fault, right? She said I am clever but that she things I should not use 20% of my cleverness for doing good things and 80% for doing bad things (her current perception of me). My Greek colleague said that she is wrong, it is 100% bad...

Me and the mayor.

In the end I was called upon to translate the fairly difficult Japanese used during the one hour proceedings into English in real time for one of our visiting professors. That was tiring, but then again I managed to get a picture of me and the mayor in frame at the same time.