In Tokyo for a day

A shop selling such normal things as a yellow suit, or a doll like dress.

On Monday I had to go to Tokyo for a project meeting. That meant getting up at 6 a.m. and getting back home at 23:30, so I was a bit tired... The meeting was not all that fun either.

Some more Tokyo fashion.

I did have a fun stewardess in the plane to Tokyo though. I was bored in the plane and kept practicing some different ways of shuffling cards etc. She looked at me and seemed to be about to say something a few times during the flight but never did say anything. After we had landed and we were waiting for the doors to open she came up to me and asked: "Are you magician?" I answered in Japanese that it is not my main job, but that I do magic in a magic bar during the weekends.

She was very impressed that I could speak Japanese despite being blond, and after learning I was from Sweden she mentioned that she had a friend who married a Swede and moved to Sweden. She also said she would come to Hokkaido again next week, so I gave her the business card of our magic bar. It would be fun if she actually shows up in our magic bar.

A small part of all the high school students cramming into my plane.

The plane was otherwise full of high school students who had been in Sapporo on some school trip. There were more than 100 of them! (The line between Sapporo and Tokyo is one of the few domestic flights using Boeing 777-300s, so there was space to put all the kids). Another colleague who flew on a different flight said his plane was also full of high school students on their way home.

I had planned to have an hour of shopping in Tokyo (booking a really early flight) and having plenty of time to find the place of the meeting. My professor showed up on Friday afternoon and said that he had decided that we should have a meeting one hour before the project meeting in Tokyo, so my plans were destroyed. I did reschedule my travels and ended up having almost 30 minutes of shopping and a lot less time for travelling and finding the meeting place.

One of my favorite t-shirt shops.

I did manage to buy a few weird t-shirts. One shop owner told me that a guy who used to work in the same store had now moved to Sweden and was very impressed with the Swedish society.

Later, when trying to find the meeting place, I passed two European looking men walking in the opposite direction. They were speaking Swedish to each other! There are very many foreigners in Tokyo compared to Sapporo, so I saw several in one day, haha.

This vending machine was selling books.

At the meeting, I was supposed to show our system but my professor ended up using up all our allotted time (and some more) so there was no time to show our system. On the way back to Sapporo, the airline rescheduled me to an earlier flight, so I got home slightly before midnight instead of slightly after, which was nice. The stewardess on the way home also asked if I was a magician. She did not seem to have any friends who had moved to Sweden, but she had a father who did magic, she said.