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.

Iraira bo

This is a Japanese puzzle game where you have to lead a small stick through a maze. If you touch the walls of the maze it makes a really annoying sound (many different sounds are available).

This is called an "iraira bo", roughly a "makes you irritated"-stick. It is based on a similar element in a Japanese game show on TV (which had a much bigger stick). I never made it through the whole maze, but I did get a bit farther than in the video below.

My first presentation in my new lab, and Settlers of Catan

Yesterday I did my first presentation in the lab I now belong to, and this was the first time I met any of the people in this group. I gave a short overview what I have done in my life so far (mostly about my work). After the seminar was over (there were other presentations too), I was invited to stay around and play board games. We played one game of Settlers of Catan, but then I had to leave to catch the last subway train home (I usually go by bicycle but it was raining heavily and I had to lug around my computer which does not do well with rain, so I had come by subway). They have lots and lots of board games, and they seem to be very nice people.

Small children and insanely difficult ball games

Last week when I stopped by Ropossa to have some dinner, suddenly the place was filled with kids. One of the guys I went to Las Vegas with was there, with two of his children and four of his grandchildren. They had ordered pizzas, so I got some very nice pizza by just being there.

The grandchildren where between 1 and 3 years old, I think. One girl and three boys. One of my neighbors, who was the "Miss Ice Queen" of the Susukino Ice Festival two years ago, was also there. The three young boys all swarmed her and climbed all over her and wanted to play with her the whole evening. The little girl did the same with me. Everyone else thought this was funny, because apparently that is how the grownups in the family also behave.

When they left, someone else showed up and brought lots of bread they had baked. I received huge amounts of bread too. And of course you get pasta and other "light" dishes as the regular serving in the place too...

They have lots of games in Ropossa, and they showed me a new game. You have a big plastic spoon, and a fairly heavy yellow ball. You are supposed to balance the ball on the spoon, and then move the ball through different obstacles. First you throw it through hoops and catch it with the spoon again, then you put it in a slide that shoots out the ball and try to catch it with the spoon etc. The final goal is to place it on a small pedestal using nothing but the spoon. This was insanely difficult. You are supposed to do all of these in sequence, and if you drop the ball you have to start over. It took me more than 30 minutes to clear the obstacle course.

I was told that the only other person who had cleared all obstacles in sequence is the mama of Ropossa. Almost no one has even managed the final balancing thing, even without doing the rest of the obstacles first. So it is not just that I suck at sports, the game is actually quite difficult.

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".

Birthday present with only 5 minutes left

With 15 minutes or so left of my birthday, I got a message from a friend that "I have a present for you, you should come". So I rushed to her bar, and got a birthday present. This is the first time in I don't know how many years that someone gave me a birthday present on my actual birthday (with 5 minutes left of the birthday). The present was great. It was a t-shirt with a photo of me.

So this is a photo of 38 year old me wearing a t-shirt with a photo of 37 year old me. Next year I will use this (or a similar photo) to make a t-shirt that 39 year old me can wear, and every year the central image will become smaller, haha.

I also got food. For some reason I got spaghetti with meatballs with candles stuck in the meatballs.

Then the "mama" of the place sang Happy Birthday for me. This, I believe, is quite rare. I have been there many many times but I have never heard her sing. She sings quite well, though.

They also had a new game. There was a small skeleton that projected images of ghosts on the walls and on other people. If you saw red ghosts you were supposed to shoot them with the ray gun, and if you saw green ghosts you were not supposed to shoot. The ghosts also moved around a bit, but not that fast. The game kept score of how many red ghosts you had shot, etc. A very entertaining game.

Shiritori with drawings

In Japan, there is a game called shiritori (from "ass" and "take" in Japanese). You take turns and you name a word that has not been mentioned before and that starts with the Japanese letter that the previous word ended on (hence the name of the game).

Yesterday I was Shanghaied into playing this game, but with pictures instead of saying the words out loud. So you have to figure out what the guy before you drew, given that the word started with the last letter of the previous drawing. And then you have to draw something starting with the last letter of the latest drawing.

I like the "tanuki" "fox" ("kitsune") "rat" ("nezumi") section in the middle of the game above.

Playing games at Ropossa

My score

This week I stopped by Ropossa one evening and was handed lots of new puzzles and games to master. One game used wireless blocks that display one (Latin) letter each, and you have to put them next to each other to make words. You have a small amount of time to make as many words as possible using these letters, and then the system tells you how many correct words you made and how many was possible using these letters.

The maximum score

Everyone thinks that since I am blond, I am a great master of English (though we actually speak Swedish in Sweden), so I was expected to get a perfect score. This was quite difficult, since there are so many words you can make with five letters in English so it is easy to forget one word even if you know it. I did actually get a perfect score after several tries, though.

Noah's ark logic puzzle game

I also played a game called Noah's Ark. You get hints saying that "the lion and the giraffe should have two other animals between them" and "the hippo should be facing another animal" and similar things. Then you are supposed to line up the animals on the ark in the correct order. A kind of logic puzzle. It was quite fun, though the target audience is probably kids that are younger than I am, haha.

I was also given a few pieces of candy that were quite sour and tasted like Japanese dried plums. The bag was quite nicely designed, with an old newspaper look.

 They were also playing with a kind of projection mapping toy in Ropossa. You put your smart phone on top of a paper box that contains a plastic model of a house. Then you display a movie with your phone, which is projected onto the plastic model and it looks like professional projection mapping on real buildings, except smaller. I was told that I could have one of these models/boxes, but since I do not actually have a smart phone I could not use it so I turned the offer down.

Gei sen

The French and Russian students and the girlfriend also took me to a game center, or gei sen in Japanese. There you can play arcade games, dancing games, gamble on slot machines, try to catch toys or candy with crane games, etc. I managed to catch a toy, and the others played shooting games. I was very impressed with some Japanese people I do not know who played a dancing game where the machine apparently recognizes not only your steps but your arm movements and general body pose too. They were dancing were well and synchronized as a pair.

Games and tequila

I was introduced to a new card game in our magic bar a Sunday a while ago. It is originally a card game for kids, made in Germany. In the Japanese version I learned, the loser of each round has to take a shot of tequila, which I guess is not so common in games for children...


The game itself was quite nice. You have a set of cards with the numbers 1 to 15. All players have one set like that each. There are also scoring cards, numbered from -5 to 10. These are shuffled randomly and one at a time are put on the table. You then select a card from your set of cards to try to get that scoring card with. The basic rule is that the person who uses the highest card will get the card on the table. You can only use each of your own cards once.

So using high cards to get high scoring cards would seem rational, but you have to factor in all other players and some special rules. If the scoring card has a negative value, the player with the lowest card will have to take the scoring card. If there is a draw, all players with the same number are ignored.

This was quite a psychological game, and I did not have to drink tequila more than one time despite over ten rounds.

Then we changed to a more luck based game, and I ended up having 7 shots of tequila in just a few rounds...

New card game

My friends in the magic bar taught me a new card game yesterday. It seemed a bit complicated at first, but it is not that bad once you get used to it. As all games in our magic bar, it is a drinking game.

You have 2 cards in your hand. There is a pile of cards on the table. When you play a card, the value of that card is added to the accumulated value of the pile. The first person to add a card that makes it 50 or higher has to drink half his glass.

The game continues, and the first person to add a card that makes it 102 or more has to drink all of what is in his glass.

After you play a card from your hand, you take one more card from the stack of unused cards, so you always have two cards in your hand. If you forget to take a card and someone points it out, you have to drink half your glass.

If you do not want to play any of the cards you are holding, you can also chose to play from the stack. You then play the top card of the stack, whatever that may be, instead of one of your own cards.

There are lots of special rules:

Anyone playing a card that makes the pile 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, or 99, has to drink half his glass.

Anyone holding a joker when someone goes over 101 also has to drink the full contents of his glass (if you go over 101 and still have a joker in your hand, you thus have to drink two glasses).

An ace can count as 1 or as 11, your choice.

An 8 can count as 8 or as 0.

A 9 can count as 9, or count as 0. When playing a 9 as 0, the order between players is reversed (e.g. clockwise becomes anti-clockwise).

A 10 can count as either 10 or -10.

Jacks count as 10.
Queens count as 20.
Kings count as 30.
Jokers count as 50 (thus, if you get a joker the best you can hope for is to drink only half your glass, unless people play lots of -10s).

If you play a card with the value 0 (an 8 or 9) when the value on the pile is for instance 99, it counts as you also having played 99 (i.e. you have to drink half your glass if both digits are the same).

If the value of the stack goes down below 50 again (e.g. someone plays a 10 as -10 when the value is 55), the next person to drive it back up to 50 or higher has to drink half his glass, just as before.

If you play several rounds, the loser of the previous round gets three cards (and always has to have three cards in his hand), thus having a better chance of getting useful cards like 8s, 9s, or 10s (but also a higher chance of getting jokers).

A round starts with the top card of the stack of remaining cards being played, and it counts for its face value (i.e. an 8 counts as 8, not 0). The loser of the previous round goes first.

As an extra special rule, anytime a number that corresponds to your name is played, you have to drink half your glass (even if you did not play it yourself). One of my friends is called "Goro", and "go" is 5 in Japanese, and "ro" is 6. So anytime the stack becomes 56, he has to drink. I am "yo-nasu" in Japanese, which since "yo" is 4 and "na" is 7 means that I had to drink whenever the pile turned to 47. One round it became 47, and stayed 47 for 4 plays (no one wants to go over 50, so lots of 8s and 9s were played), which meant I had to drink 2.5 glasses right there.

Those are the rules. Drunk people tend to make more and more mistakes, getting even drunker. A quite fun game.