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.

Swedish shirts, magical phones, and exploding glass bottles

Some time ago, a guy came to our magic bar wearing a shirt that that said "Sweden". He likes Sweden because of sports, he said.

There was also a girl there who claimed to not do magic but who had a very magician looking cell phone decoration...

During this evening, I needed a new bottle of soda water for some cocktail I was making and one of my colleagues was putting bottles of soda into the refrigerator since all the bottles there had been used up by this time. He stretched out his hand that had two bottles towards me and I thought "great, he is giving me one of these two bottles since I need soda". Turns out he was thinking "here, take these two bottles of soda and I will go get more". So I grabbed one and he released both.

The glass bottle fell very cleanly and landed standing on the floor but the glass broke any way and things went flying everywhere. Soda is not so bad to get on your clothes so that was fine. I noticed later that I had several small cuts on my face from glass passing a bit too close for comfort, though. Since the cuts were very fine, there was not that much blood. And when I got around to take a photo, someone had wiped off most of the blood but if you look really carefully there is a small speck of blood left near the center of the photo, haha.

Oiran parade and Susukino Festival 2015

Back in August there was the yearly Susukino Festival. They close off the streets in the entertainment district from 18 to 22 during three days, and instead of having lots of taxis blocking the streets you have lots of tables serving not very good food and cheap drinks. Our magic bar had a stand together with a yakitori place that has very good food.

You run into lots of friends in the Susukino festival

The first day of the Susukino festival has an "Oiran parade". Two girls (usually from the hostess clubs in Susukino) have to practice how to walk around dressed like an oiran. This involves wearing many layers of kimono and carrying a very long kimono belt that weights several kilos. There are also lots of other people in the parade, since an oiran would not walk around alone, I guess.

The oiran in orange

Oiran in purple

Oiran wear very high geta (Japanese clogs) that are very difficult to walk in. They also have to walk in a certain complicated style.

This year it only rained on day out of three, so financially I guess the Susukino festival this year was more successful than usual (it usually rains like crazy for at least two days). We had a pretty good spot, but a very small area.

It rained a little the first day, but some people still stayed.

I usually show up in yukata for Japanese festivals (you have to use every opportunity to wear a yukata, since there are so few of them). This makes doing any actual work hard, though. It is also a pain doing magic wearing a yukata. But doing magic at the Susukino festival sucks anyway, so I figured why not?

Some reasons for disliking doing magic at the Susukino festival includes rain (ruins anything made of paper, like a deck of cards), strong winds (blows away cards, sponges, threads, paper money, anything light), no space to stand (very very crowded), people being completely unfocused (people they know pass nearby and start talking to their friends all the time), and much more. People are usually very happy and enjoy the magic, though.

Students from my university dancing in the street

There are other entertainments during the festival too. There is a yosakoi (team dancing) competition, and the team from my university was there of course. There are also karaoke competitions and musical performances. There are mobile temples being carried around too.

This kid wanted to see "one more magic trick" for 5 hours, haha.

Doing magic to the son of a friend who went to the trick art museum with me in Tokyo.

New yukata on day two

Two people I kind of know

In Susukino, you meet a lot of people that you know when everyone is drinking in the street. Normally everyone is hidden away in the hundreds of small bars here. I walked past a table where two guys who are so into fishing that they looked up information on the Internet and then found their way to a bar I often go to just because a "famous fishing expert" they follow on Facebook mentioned he was there drinking. They recognized me from the one time we met in the bar, and bought me drinks and food in the festival. They were drinking with one of the transvestite dancers from LaLaToo, our famous transvestite show club.

Tourists from Taiwan (?) with a selfie stick

My blond friend and his colleagues passed by

Mobile temples carried by thirty people trying to pass through the crowds.

The people I buy my cameras from stopped by our place, and then continued on to our bar!

I spent a ridiculous amount of time barfing cards out of my mouth to try to get passersby interested in our little stand

Yet another yukata on day three

Doing weird things for magic

My friend's version

After spending Friday night and most of Saturday in Tokyo doing boring work, I got back to Sapporo slightly before midnight. I was scheduled to get up ridiculously early on Sunday too, to go to a friend's wedding. I stopped by our magic bar on my way home (it is on the way from the station to my place) to see if my colleague who would be alone in the bar on a Saturday (the busiest day) since the other magicians were off working at some sporting event. Normally there are three of us in the bar on Saturdays, and if it is busy that is not really enough. Doing all that alone is not great.

My version.

It was pretty busy when I got there, and soon after I arrived the bar was full. So I had to stay around to work for a few hours. Another guy was coming from our other magic bar since they were closing early (slightly after midnight), but when he showed up some of his friends showed up and since the bar was full they could not come in. So he ended up leaving with them, taking them to some other place. So I had to stick around even longer.

I did a magic trick where a huge whiteboard that says something in Japanese that is similar to "Surprise!" in English, which everyone likes this year. In fact, some people liked it so much that they asked the next magician to do the same thing during his performance. So he had me write the same thing on his stomach. With a non-erasable pen. That sure surprised everyone. But seemed like a fairly stupid thing to do. But he is dedicated to entertainment, I guess.

I left while the place was still pretty full, but at least the other magician had come back again so there were two of them. When I woke up the next morning, I could have used 4 more hours of sleep, though. At least. And it was a busy day with weddings, magic shows, and then going back to Tokyo for more research meetings...

Fun in the magic bar Twister

When practicing taking photos without holding the phone and without using the timer, our magician boss took this photo. Which shows how much fun we have in our magic bar.

Magicians and their t-shirts

One of my magician friends had a new t-shirt this weekend. It says "Irish you were beer" and is S:t Patrick's green and has a clover. When I said it was funny, the other people asked me what it says and I explained that it is a joke on the phrase "I wish you were here" and the fact that Irish people like beer. Other people the asked me to check their t-shirts with English on them to see if they too had something weird written on them.

I had a t-shirt that Amazon claimed would look like an optical illusion with black dots appearing where there are no black dots but that turned out to have colors not really clear enough for the illusion to be effective. I was asked to "look cool" because the drunk people wanted to take a photo of me, but all my attempts were apparently "very much not cool". They instead suggested that this photo that they took when I was talking about something else was "very cool".

15 onigiris!

There is a guy who comes to our magic bar who brings food worth something like twice the (fairly expensive) price of visiting our place. That means he brings a lot of food. Like 20 hamburgers from McDonalds, or 10 huge nikuman filled with sweetbeans... Since there is usually only two people working in our bar, that is too much to eat.

A few days ago he visited the magic bar when I was also there. He had brought 15 very large onigiri! Since I was there, there were three of us to share these onigiri, but it was still a lot of food. You could maybe eat two of them if you were hungry. They were very very good, though. He knows of a lot of very good restaurants.

People keep bringing cakes!

The guests in our magic bars recently keep bringing cakes. There was even an "Attack on Titan" cake that someone had specially made (they sent a photo to the cake shop, which surprisingly enough did not know of Attack on Titan).

Long time no see

During our Golden Week holiday, a girl who used to work one day per week in our magic bar showed up. I had not seen her in about two years, so it was fun to talk to her again. Also, she has 30 decks of cards at her place that she was supposed to give to me for my birthday three years ago but that she has never gotten around to actually hand over. She said that she will "bring them soon", haha.

Edible presents

There is a group of guests in our magic bar that are good friends with one of the other magicians. They always bring food for him when they visit. And they bring lots of food. A few days ago they had brought 5 cartons of chicken nuggets, 5 hamburgers, lots of French fries, several packs of corn salad, many small cartons of milk, and much more. Slightly more than my magician colleague was able to eat by himself, so I got a small pack of milk. I did not know McDonalds sold milk. It was not that good.

One of my friends also showed up, and she had gifts for me. Since my name comes from the word for "dove" in Hebrew, she had brought the Tokyo omiyage cookie "hato sabure" (dove cookie) for me. It was broken, but tasted fine.

Small cake

On my way home from our farewell party, I got a message that a guest in our magic bar who recently doesn't come very often was in the bar, and that it was his birthday. I stopped by to say hello and got a really really small cake. It was delicious.