A horde of Japanese children sitting on the floor

On my flight from Fukuoka to Sapporo there was also a group of high school students going to Hokkaido for a school trip. So the plain was completely full and it took forever to get everyone boarded. They sat on the floor while waiting, for some reason. The chairs behind them seem empty and perfectly fine.

Darts and Tequila in Magic bar Red Carpet

After visiting Nishioka, Hiro and I returned to Red Carpet. There I got to see another magician called Nishi do some magic. He used a Japanese 500 yen coin, which later turned into a clear glass version of a 500 yen coin. Which then kept growing and growing to larger sizes.

There were other guests there as well, and Hiro also did a big show at the counter. He did his normal impressive stuff, but he also started doing strange tricks like producing unlimited numbers of small rubber penises and making them light up. When I asked to take a photo of them, he brought out a paper bag with lights that shone along the same theme, and the camera was overwhelmed by this light so you cannot really see the magicians in the photo either. They thought that was great, but the girl sitting next to me thought it was not great, so she suggested taking another photo. The result is the top photo of this page (fairly normal).

Me and a girl I ran into 3 times in Fukuoka (during 2 days!)

This girl was one of the girls from the night before, who was there again. When all the other guests left, Hiro decided we should all play darts, in teams of two. He and Nishi are really good at darts (perhaps they spend the time when there are no guests there playing with the darts machine), I suck at darts, and the girl was very drunk and not that good at darts when sober either (she said). So as luck would have it, I was paired up with her, and we of course lost badly. The losing team then had to take shots of tequila. Then we changed teams, and repeated the process. No matter what team I was in, my team always lost, though.

After drinking lots of tequila, we changed to card games instead. We first played "babanuki" (which means almost the same as "old maid" in English, and the rules are the same as for that game). This is mainly a game of luck, so I was worried that I would be stuck with even more tequila, but I got out safely very quickly. Then they changed to games based on skill, and I was safe for the rest of the night. They thought it was impressive that I could clear the table in memory games after having lost that many times in the tequila darts games, but it was not that much alcohol, and keeping track of cards is not that hard.

In the end, it was a lot of fun, but every time I was about to leave someone would say: "What? It looks on your face as if you are about to leave. You cannot leave NOW of course!" Always for some fairly unconvincing reason. In the end, I got back to my hotel just in time to have one hour of sleep before having some hotel breakfast and going to the airport. Luckily, the flight from Fukuoka to Sapporo is quite long, so I got a lot of sleep on the plane. And then I went straight to our university to work the rest of the day too.

In the plane, I ended up sitting in the seat next to one of my colleagues also going back to Sapporo from Fukuoka. This was by chance, but not that much of a coincidence since there is pretty much only one flight to use for use in this situation, and unlike the Sapporo-Tokyo route where they fly 777s, between Fukuoka and Sapporo they fly 737s, which have much fewer seats.

Kyushu University new campus

By riding the subway to the end of the line, changing to a train for an even longer trip, and then getting on a local bus, I finally managed to reach the new campus of Kyushu University, where our meeting was to be held. It was a very nice campus, and you could see beaches from the train on the way there (no one was swimming in November, despite it being like a cool summer day in Sweden, when lots of people swim). They were still reconstructing the shape of the mountains to erect more buildings.

Our meeting was the usual, people from the other groups in our big project where we cooperate reported on what they have been doing recently (and we did the same, of course), and everyone talks about who should do what in the future. I had to do a presentation too, but since I have not really done anything relevant to this project lately I had been asked to show the same thing I showed to the same people last time, which always makes me feel like I am wasting their time. I tried to show some new things, but there was not that much to show.

There was also a dinner, with buffet style Italian food. The pizzas were great. The pasta was good. The rest was also good, actually. I ate way too much. I talked to several researchers that I have been in the same room with before, but who I had never really talked to. One of them used to visit Stockholm (where I am from) several times per year to discuss cell phone standards many years ago, he said.

Sumo wrestlers taking the bus

Fukuoka has a fairly good subway system, but lots and lots of people also ride buses. I was planning to take a bus to the place of our meeting, but there were too many others with the same idea, so I would not get there on time by bus, I was told by the old man helping people. I saw some sumo wrestlers getting on a bus, though.

Fukuoka

On Monday I had to fly to Fukuoka to be at a meeting ridiculously early on Tuesday morning. Fukuoka is far south from Sapporo. We had snow falling in Sapporo when I left, but in Fukuoka it was 18 degrees Celsius, which is like an OK but slightly cool summer day in Sweden... So I walked around in t-shirt. I had some Hakata ramen in a food stall near one of the rivers, which was nice.

First class lounge

Curry, bread, stew, and egg on a stick.

We are currently going to a project meeting in Eindhoven (Netherlands). My professor travels obscenely much, so he has the highest level bonus card on most airlines. He can bring one more guest with him into the lounge, so this time I got to go into the first class lounge.

More bread based things, and some fruits.

They have very nice chairs, lots of different types of alcohol that you have unlimited access too, and quite a bit of food. They even having very good bread, which is not so common in Japan. I tried the beef curry, the beef stew, the bread, a muffin, something called pumpkin tortilla, fruits, and chocolate. They also had dried natto (fermented soy beans, smell and taste horrible :-) which I skipped.

Fermented soy beans and chocolate in the same basket.