Eccentric clothing

People tell me I dress strangely, but compared to this ordinary looking Japanese man I think I do not stick out that much, right?

Getting home and feeling tired

After all the magic shows and photos, I finally got home and tried to get my makeup off. I had to fly to Tokyo early in the morning (like really early, taking the train at 6 in the morning early), and could not look like a zombie at that time.

While a lot of the paint and glued on stuff starts to peel off before you want it to, some of the stuff sticks like crazy and applying water, soap, glue solving magic stuff, scraping with tools, etc. does not always help.

This time I had quite a lot of stuff stuck to my face after a lot of work. I decided to get two hours of sleep and continue in the morning. Then I got almost all of the grey stuff off. But later I noticed I had some paint stuck in my ears and at other locations that are hard for myself to see.

What is weird with this photo?

While having a drink at a bar where one of my friends work to rest up after my magic show, a guy I know a little and who sometimes uses my Facebook updates of where I am and seem to be having a good time as recommendations of places to visit (on other days, when I am not there) showed up and ended up in the seat next to me. He wanted to take a photo together with me. My friend the bartender suggested he should take a photo without making any Halloween style poses, just looking normal. And to use this photo on Facebook with no comment as to there being a zombie beside him, just posting it with something like "Drinking in One Star Bar again.".

Looking "normal"

Other people in the bar also wanted to take photos, but they wanted to take photos being bitten by a zombie or things like that.

My Halloween stalker

There is a girl who I first met because she often comes to our magic bar. Now, her friend is also married to one of my friends. I keep running into her when I am dressed as a zombie or something similar. And in weird places, not in our magic bar or some place like that.

Once, I was meeting another friend for Halloween and she was going to a party and I had to go work in our magic bar, so we just met to say hello and see the other's costume choice. When talking there, random people kept coming up to me and asking if they could take a photo of or with me. So when I was talking to some random office worker outside KFC, this Halloween stalker of mine also showed up. I have also met her in the corridor outside a karaoke place. I have met her outside the shared toilet in a building with 93 bars. I have met her in the Sapporo Art Forest park (although at that time I was there for the Star Wars exhibit and was not actually dressed weirdly, only wearing Star Wars clothes). I have also met her in our magic bar when working dressed as a zombie, but that is not surprising.

This time, I was packing up my stuff after my magic show and was about to leave the bar I had performed in when I noticed my Halloween stalker sitting at a table not far from the exit. She seemed surprised to see me.

Magic show at the H's Cafe Halloween party

H's Cafe (read "his cafe") is a bar in Sapporo that among other things serves great hamburgers. Possibly the best burgers in Sapporo. They also have Halloween parties. Last year I was asked to do a magic show at their Halloween party, and they were apparently happy with the show and asked me back this year too.

The whole place was decorated with fake spider web and strange paintings that looked scary from some angles and not so scary from others. H's Cafe has a fairly young (early twenties? I cannot really tell with Japanese people even when they have not painted their faces for Halloween) clientele, and the Halloween party was no exception. You had unlimited drinks for the duration of the party and you could get free hamburgers and chocolate too.

There was a costume competition, and anyone in costume got a number to stick to themselves somewhere and you could vote for two or three numbers to win the costume competition. The winners got a H's Cafe free pass, which means you can eat and drink for free during November, under the condition that you are there with at least one other person (who will have to pay for their food and drinks). This year I ended up in second place in the costume competition, but I did not have time to use the free pass (the university keeps me too busy).

Scary reflection in the red bull cooler

My magic show went well this year too. People laughed at the right times and were surprised at the right times. It is always a bit difficult for me to do magic in weird costumes. No pockets where you are used to having them. People cannot understand your facial expression. Things like that. After my magic show was finished, people I know showed up by change (they had no idea I was doing a show, I had no idea they ever visited this place).

A group of vampires, and me. The girl in blue (rightmost) won the costume competition.

Three guys dressed up as "people who forgot to dress up for Halloween"

I took a photo with this guy last year too (last year he won the costume competition)

Face paint starting to peel off

Dressing up

Back in Sapporo, I was asked to do a magic show at a Halloween party one week before Halloween. I had bought a t-shirt in Sweden that has a skin color print that makes you look like a girl, and I used this and a wig I bought but never used for my slit-mouthed-woman costume back in August.

I also added some torn pieces of skin that you could peel back. I had to get up really really early the next morning and fly to Tokyo, so I did not want to have a costume that would take too much time to get out of after the party was finished (sometime after midnight)

Cinderella?

One night when leaving our magic bar after midnight, I saw a pair of shoes in the hallway. No other living being was in sight.

Surprisingly difficult puzzle

Back in Sapporo, I was given a puzzle to solve in a bar I often visit to have dinner. This puzzle turned out to be quite difficult, and it took me several visits to this bar before I solved it. The goal is to get all the pieces into the frame, of course.

Since the pieces do not fit by just reordering them using the "obvious" way to put them into the frame, I thought the round corners and non-round corners and the fact that if you put to cat heads towards each other you get some slack etc. had something to do with the solution. but neither of these things had anything to do with the puzzle solution. These red herrings cost me two nights of puzzle failure, haha.

Japanese products and chance meetings in Stockholm

In Stockholm, there is a shop that sells specially imported goods from Japan.When visiting this store, I saw some ramen from Sapporo. Since I can eat all kinds of Sapporo ramen whenever I want, I did not buy any, though.

I also ran into a guy I know from high school and university in Stockholm. He was there with his two children. He lived in Kyoto for a while. I was happily surprised to see him. It had been at least 10 years since I last saw him, I guess.

We talked over the Internet from time to time in Japan, for instance when the Swedish embassy called everyone living in Japan early in the mornings to suggest evacuating from Tokyo with some early flight during the Fukushima incident, even though we both lived very far from Tokyo and did not have to evacuate and if we wanted to could have done so much better without going to Tokyo first...

Natto, fermented soy beans. Look like the eggs in the movie Alien, and smell really bad. But I am told they are very healthy.

Amazing things from Canada

While I was in Germany working, the owner of our magic bar was in Canada with his mother. When I met him after we both came back to Sapporo, he had several amazing things that he had bought in Canada. One was a stuffed tiger toy that turns into an elephant! Now I want to make something similar myself.

He also had some maple fudge that he gave me. That was pretty good too.

Ridiculously difficult "egg shaped kendama"

Almost...

The last night of September, I was shown something called "egg kendama". A kendama is an old Japanese toy. It has a ball that you are supposed to land on different parts of a wooden handle. The egg shaped kendamas similarly had marbles and you were supposed to shake the thing to get the marble to stay on top of a small pedestal. When it was placed there, the egg would balance upright, when it was not there the egg would fall over.

This turned out to be very difficult. I finally managed to get the egg with only one marble balanced, but the one with two was too difficult for me to finish before they closed the bar. For some reason they gave me a piece of cloth made out of some material that was "extra good to wipe smart phone screens" with.

I came back a few days later to try to clear the two marble challenge too. I did manage to do it that day. And then they wanted to take a photo with both eggs balanced together, so I had to redo the first one too.

Cool uniforms in the escalator

In Japan, people think I dress weirdly. I see lots of people that I think dress strangely too, though. These two girls had very cool uniforms, and seemed to be out shopping.

Last yukata day of 2015

My friends tell me that you normally don't wear a yukata after August, but I had a new obi and a yukata I had only used once, so I used that yukata in September too. I had dinner at a friend's place and was asked to do some magic to some people who also showed up. Doing magic in a yukata is pretty inconvenient because it has no pockets and your sleeves get caught up in everything on the table if you try to move your arms.

I was also shown some magic prop that I had not seen before. There were three plastic koalas that apart from the colors seemed exactly the same. Despite this, the magician can determine which koala he is holding without looking. It took me quite some time to figure out how, haha. A clever idea.