Swedish chocolate

In Sweden people eat chocolate. My brother recommended a new product from the Swedish chocolate maker: chocolate with salty almonds. It was great.

You can also find chocolate with licorice cream inside. This is great too.

I also stumbled across a store selling common chocolate bars but with non-standard text on the wrapping. These say "congratulations", "hug", "kiss", and "make out".

Buying weird t-shirts

I bought some weird t-shirts from Amazon and they arrived two days ago. They don't look as good as they did on the web page, but I still like the chocolate one.

Way past White Day, but still

I spent most of March travelling for work, and the rest of March travelling for fun, so I did not have time to return the White Day gifts I am expected to return after receiving Valentine's Day gifts. I returned some in early April instead.

The big Pocky sticks come individually wrapped.

And they are very big.

From one woman I got an enormous block of chocolate. I was thinking a lot about what to get her, and in the end I went for giant sized Pocky sticks. And since men are expected to return at least three times as much or as expensive stuff as they received, I bought three huge packs of Pocky sticks.

This is the "light snack" that comes for free with the drinks in this bar... not so light.

Another girl working in the same place also gave me a small Valentine's Day gift. I remembered that she likes the Choco Ball chocolate that is popular here, but I did not remember what flavor she prefers. So I got her one of each. They apparently also come with labyrinth puzzles on the box so you can pass time with them after finishing the chocolate too. She had misspelled my name in Japanese (written a non-existing letter) when she gave me chocolate, so I misspelled her name on the return gift too. She thought that was funny.

In Japan, random products come with something called Bell Marks. It can be found on some types of tea, some types of chocolate, some types of shampoo etc. The tea I usually drink at work has Bell Marks on the bottles. The Choco Ball chocolates also have Bell Marks. If elementary school children collect Bell Marks, these can be traded in for a new piano for the school or things like that, so I have been asked by an acquaintance to bring Bell Marks.

More Chocolate

When I visited Ropossa before Valentine's Day, a girl working there said that she would be handing out chocolate on Friday and Saturday. Since I work on Fridays and Saturdays, I cannot come here then, I said. She said she would put one chocolate gift away for me.

When I stopped by Ropossa to have dinner recently, she gave me a Valentine's Day gift that had a name tag with what was reasonably close to my name in Japanese on it. There were some extra lines there that the other Japanese guests thought were funny, and they kept making fun of her the whole evening (for not being able to write Japanese).

I was also given a bottle of sugar, for unclear reasons.

Giant chocolate (and zombie chocolate)

All my foreigner friends say :"That is one huge piece of chocolate" when they see this photo, and all my Japanese friends say: "You look good in sunglasses" when they see it (despite the sunglasses being bought in the dollar store for 1 dollar to use in a magic trick).

Yesterday I received a huge chocolate bar. Really huge. If you open it up, it contains the same Meiji milk chocolate as the normal sized chocolate bars they sell that look the same except smaller. It just contains a very much larger amount of chocolate.

This was given to me by a friend who every year says "I cannot believe you never get any chocolate at Valentine's Day" (which very many people say to me). This year, I have received quite a lot of chocolate though, so maybe my 10th Valentine in Japan is finally when everything changes and I get treated like the Japanese men around me.

Anyway, my friend said the same thing last year, and I said that I guess I am just very unpopular. She said she was sure that was not the case, but then again not even she herself gave me any chocolate last year... despite us having that discussion a few days before Valentine's Day. So I am not sure why she is so surprised that everyone else does what she does.

This year, she gave me this huge block of chocolate, though. And a small box of chocolate that tastes of strawberries and of mochi (gooey rice cakes made from sweet rice). I also got a small piece of chocolate promoting the zombie anime Francesca.

Giri-choko from our secretary

In Japan, they have the concept of "giri choko" ("duty chocolate", 義理チョコ). This means that women have to give chocolate our cookies (home baked) to all their colleagues on Valentine's Day. Men do nothing in particular on Valentine's Day, thought there is the concept of "gyaku choko" (逆チョコ, reverse/opposite chocolate), which means that a man gives chocolate to a woman (the opposite of normal behavior in Japan).

Since I work at a university, there are very few women around. Since I work at the computer science department, there are in fact very very few women around. There is rumored to be a female professor somewhere, but she works so much I have only seen her once in the 9 years I worked here. And I even worked on the same floor as her for 3 years... There are a few secretaries, but they are located in a different building, so they do not give any chocolate to me. We do have our own secretary, though, and she provided some chocolate for us this year. Very nice.

Some ideas that are not good but still became products: Pizza flavored chocolate. Blue cheese flavored chocolate.

The convenience store across the street had a massive price cut on two chocolate products. One contains two types of chocolates: pizza flavored chocolate and cheese flavored chocolate. The other one also contains two types of chocolates: blue cheese flavored chocolate and Gouda cheese flavored chocolate.

All of these sound like horrible ideas. The fact that they have to sell them at a serious discount also indicates that everyone else also thinks so. I figured that I would at least get an interesting story for my blog and bought one bag of each to try these weird creations.

The pizza flavored chocolate is pretty bad, but it is still the best of the four types. The blue cheese chocolate is not as bad as I had feared, but it is still bad. It gets second place. The Gouda cheese and the cheese chocolate were a tie for the worst idea.

You get three or four of each type, so I have spent the afternoon trying to convince my colleagues to try new and exotic chocolate flavors. They are skeptical, but one of them tried the two flavors that I think are the "best". He agreed that they were not good, and complained that he had a weird taste in his mouth for a long time afterwards...

Valentine Party at One Star Bar

Chocolate fondue with tomatoes and bread...

Yesterday there was a party for "lonely people" (on account of it being Valentine's Day soon) in a place called One Star Bar, where one of my friends works. I was asked to do a magic show there, and there were other performances too. There was also some light food, and unlimited alcohol from 18:30 to 23:30, the common way to have parties in Japan.

There was a set of amateur karaoke, where different people came on stage and sang songs of their own choosing. There was no karaoke machine with music and lyrics, instead there were two guys playing guitars (and you had to remember the lyrics yourself). The quality of the singers was very high!

Later, three women forming the group Amuse entertained us with different types of songs for half an hour or so. They were great. They played piano and flute, and sang. They covered a wide range of music, with musical pieces from the Phantom of the opera and Les Miserables, anime and computer game songs, pop songs, and much more.

I did about 30 minutes of magic on the stage. It went over very well. My friend helped by giving me a very nice introduction where he explained that I "had come all the way from Sweden just for this event" and things like that. It helped set the mood to "not too serious", so my funny tricks were properly appreciated. Afterwards I was also asked to visit some of the tables and do some more magic for people who said they wanted to see some more.

Since it was a Valentine's party everyone also got some chocolate. So my Valentine's chocolate count for 2015 is through the roof compared to previous years, and it is not even Valentine's Day yet!

Deep fried chocolate

Our school cafeteria has, probably related to Valentine's Day, started selling "chocolate croquettes", deep fried chocolate cream. It is fried like their potato croquettes etc., and this does not really go well with sweets. It is cheap, but I would not really recommend it.

LEGO blocks made from chocolate?

A girl I know gave me an early Valentine's Day chocolate gift. It was chocolate in very bright colors, shaped like "nano blocks" (a LEGO block clone). And the boxes claim that you will be able to build different models too. We were both wondering how that would work, since chocolate seems a bit brittle.

It turns out that you get block shaped chocolate to eat and a bag of plastic nano blocks to build the models with, The chocolate is only block shaped on the top, so they cannot be used to build models, sadly.

I assembled the models and I think I made them correctly. I did end up with about 50% of the pieces unused, which makes me a bit unsure... did I miss building some part of the models?

Early Valentine

In Japan, all women are expected to give chocolate to 1) people the find attractive and want to date, 2) anyone they are dating, 3) anyone who works at the same place as they do and who is male, 4) anyone they know who is male, 4) their friends (this is optional).

Everyone in Japan tells me they get huge amounts of chocolate at Valentine day every year, but I never get anything. This year, someone already gave me a Valentine chocolate gift. It was so big that with only this one gift, I think this is the year with the most Valentine's gifts so far for me! A great start.

Of course, on "White day" (March 14), you have to give back something that is at least three times more valuable to anyone you got chocolate from, so receiving lots of things is not only positive. My good looking friends complain to me that they have to spend several weeks travelling around with a huge truck full of chocolate just to return the favor to everyone they got chocolate from a month before...  A problem I have never had to deal with.

Champagne filled trousers; visiting A Majide again

I also dropped by the magic bar A Majide again. There I talked to master Kubo for a long time about new crazy magic props he had built and things like that. At a late hour, two women working in the bar next door and a fairly rich looking man showed up. He bought champagne and gave me lots of it. He also gave me a lot of chocolate from the U.S. He travels a lot for work, he said. He will be in Sapporo next week, for instance.

One of the girls had never been to a magic bar before, and her reactions to the magic were really funny. The man had been to magic bars in Tokyo, and it turned out he had met the magician Yamato there, so they already knew each other.

During one magic trick, there was too much surprise going on, so someone's champagne glass got turned over, and almost all of the champagne ended up on my trousers. Everyone worried about the girl next to me, but she was perfectly fine (since I absorbed all the champagne with my clothes). I had only brought one pair of trousers to Osaka, so I guess the guy sitting next to me on the plane back to Sapporo a few hours later might have wondered why this crazy foreigner smelled like an alcoholic so early in the morning...

Christmas presents from Sweden

I got home and found a not in my mailbox saying that someone had tried to deliver a parcel larger than my mailbox (which is tiny) and had put it in one of the larger mailboxes that are intended for situations just like this. So I found a large parcel full of Christmas presents from my parents.

I got dried mushrooms, chocolate, licorice, a kitchen towel with descriptions of edible parts of animals, a cheese slicer, and more chocolate. The cheese slicer is nice to have, since things like this are not sold in Japan. On the other hand, cheese is only sold in super small quantities, so you cannot really find any cheese to use it on either.

I also received something labeled "reindeer poo". I tried to eat some of it (who wouldn't?) and it turned out to be chocolate.

Buying huge amounts of DARS chocolate

For some reason, December 12 is considered to be "DARS day" here in Japan. DARS is a line of chocolate. This year, our coop sold DARS bags for 1212 yen (because it is December 12), which contained lots of chocolate but also came with three cute plush toys shaped like the characters used to sell "Choco-balls". This is another line of chocolate by the same company.

I wanted the toys, and since I have too much money anyway I bought one set just for the toys. I tried giving away the chocolate but did not succeed that well (one box for a student friend, one for our secretary) so I ended up eating lots and lots of chocolate for dinner. The toys are nice, though.

Ice cream flavored chocolate

Our coop now sells ice cream flavored chocolate. Or more accurately chocolate that has the flavor of the non-ice cream parts of some strange ice cream you can buy in Japan. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Showing your underwear in a Japanese bar

Eel bones. Healthier than chocolate. Probably.

I stopped by the snack bar Ropossa and met several people I know. One of them had brought chocolate from Osaka and someone else had brought dried eel bones, which to Japanese people is more or less the same kind of snack.

There was a new game there were you push a button to make a plastic gymnast spin on the bar, and another button to make him release the bar. The goal is to spin him fast enough and release him at the right timing to make him do a 360 in the air and land on his feet on the mat. This was pretty difficult.

Osaka is famous for funny comedians, and this Osaka souvenir cookie brand (Omoshiroi Koibito, "funny lover") is a pun on a Sapporo souvenir (Shiroi Koibito, "white lover" (Sapporo gets lots of snow, which is white)).

I also happened to meet a girl there that I sometimes run into with whom I ended up having a funny conversation a while back when the rivers where overflowing in the middle of the night. She (and everyone else, since the warning system woke you up every 15 minutes anyway) was on Facebook and said that she was right on the border of the "evacuate because of landslides" area, on the "safe" side. But since the areas kept growing, she was wondering if she should evacuate too. She also said something like "and I am not even wearing underwear", so many people commented that she should probably at least put on underwear in preparation for evacuation.

This woman was wearing a kimono and looked like the "mama" of a bar, though she was just a customer like me, so everyone thought it looked funny when we sat next to each other. She pretended to be the mama and pour me beer (which I was not drinking) etc. too. 

Another friend commented that she should put on underwear and evacuate to this friend's house, since it was far from the landslide areas. This friend lives across the street from me, so I added that she could also evacuate to my place, which has the benefit of being on the 9th floor and thus safa against even severe flooding. Also, there is no requirement that you wear underwear here, I added. They thought this was funny, and commented along the lines of "So Jonas does not wear underwear at home". I added that I was in fact wearing funny underwear (Superman underwear), but that it was not a requirement. They thought it was funny and said that the next time we meet I will have to show them my underwear...

So now that we met again, she said: "So, show us your underwear!" And I did.

I was wearing underwear with 10 different playing cards on, which they thought were "cute".

Free chocolate

When work finished on Thursday there were no longer any flights out of Tokyo, so my flight back to Sapporo from Kawasaki was scheduled for the next morning. I found a capsule hotel to stay in. A capsule hotel means you get a plastic tube to climb into which is high enough for you to sit in if you are short like me and which is pretty much exactly the size of a small bed. There are normally two or three layers of capsules on top of each other, and they are stacked 30 to 50 in a room, so if you are disturbed by people snoring, you will not get a good sleep in a capsule hotel. You only have a curtain to close your capsule with, and the capsule walls and floors are just a few millimeters of plastic.

Capsule hotels are usually cheap compared to their relatively good locations. This time, they also gave me free chocolate for staying there! They also have shared baths that are normally of pretty good quality. Sometimes they have saunas and other things too. They also provide free combs, toothbrushes, etc. like all hotels do in Japan.

Sad and lonely Valentine's Day (again)

Possibly partly my chocolate

In Japan, Valentine's Day is huge. It is also a bit backwards compared to Western countries. Women are obliged to give chocolate to all male co-workers. This is called "giri-choco", from "duty" (giri) and "chocolate", since they are duty bound to distribute this chocolate. Home made cookies are also OK.

Women can also give chocolate to men they are interested in, to indicate that "I like you".

If you receive chocolate, you are obliged to return the favor on "White Day", March 14. You are also supposed to return a gift at least three times as expensive as what you got. For giri-choco you have a giri to return the gift. For "I like you" chocolate, returning something means "I like you too", I am told.

The Valentine exhibits in stores around town are bigger than the Christmas exhibits in December, so this is a huge thing. Every year, and this year was no exception, well meaning Japanese try to explain this culture to me. They also always tell me: "As a foreigner, you will get huge amounts of chocolate from all the women around you, since Japanese women are fascinated with foreigners".

Every year, I end up getting very little or no chocolate at all. This year was the worst so far, with no chocolate at all received. There was a small plate of chocolate on the desk of one of my colleagues, and when he was not there, the rest of us figured "this is probably for everyone, right?" and dug in. So I did have some chocolate but it was more like "stealing" than "receiving a gift".

Not my chocolate

One of my magician friends had lots of customers dropping by our magic bar just to give him chocolate. He got too much, so he let me eat some of his chocolate.

Christmas present

Late at night a met one of my friends and 8 of his friends. One of his friends had Christmas presents for everyone, so I got one too.

Big size?

My colleague bought a piece of chocolate and it said that this was the "big size" version. Compared to for instance his pen or earphones, the chocolate does not look that big though... If they also sell a small sized version of the same chocolate, would it be big enough to see without a microscope?