Not a dryer

When I was in Stockholm, I saw this thing in a public bathroom. It says "tork". In Swedish, this means "dryer". It can be used for things that dry your hands, or for things that dry clothes or bigger things.

This was located next to a sink for people to wash their hands, so you might expect it to be something that dries your hands. It was, however, not. It was a soap dispenser.

It turns out that Tork is a company (not Swedish) that makes, among other things, soap dispensers.

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".

Strange shop names and strange products

We apparently have a restaurant in Sapporo called "Eat me". Which, if my knowledge of English slang is up to date, is not a very nice expression. We also have shops selling something that looks like water and is called "Luxury yogurina". Maybe yogurt flavored water?

Polar bear flavored cookies

The Country Mom line of cookies now have something called "Shiro kuma" flavor, which literally means "polar bear" flavored. They are named after a type of ice cream called Polar Bear, though, so they do not taste like bear. The Polar Bear ice cream is white and filled with fruits and sweet beans, which is also what these cookies are. Not bad, but the normal vanilla flavor is better.

English words that are used in weird ways in Japan

I have had conversations with my Japanese friends were both parties use the same words, but were everyone gets the feeling that something is wrong with how this conversation is going. This can happen because in Japan people use English (or French, or German, etc.) words to use something similar but different from what the words mean in the original language. It gets extra confusing when the same thing happens in Swedish.

One time this happened to me it was related to the word marmalade. In Japan, this means "orange flavored jam". In Swedish we have a word "marlmelad" which means almost the same as marmalade in English. In Swedish it generally refers to something that is like jam but thicker than jam. It is most often based on citrus fruits, but can be used for thick jams made from raspberries or whatever too. In Japan "marmalade" is a word that describes a flavor (and that flavor is orange flavor). In Swedish, what we call "marmalades" can come with many different flavors, and marmalade is not a word you can use to specify a flavor (but in Japan you can find "marmalade flavored" candy etc.).

Today, our coop sold a product with a similarly confusing word usage. It was "soft serve ice cream flavored" cookies. In Sweden, ice creams (soft serve and regular) come in many different flavors, so describing the flavor of a product (like a cookie) as "ice cream flavored" would be like describing the color of your house as "boat colored". Boats come in many colors, so it is not a good explanation.

The cookie box contained vanilla flavored cookies and ice cream flavored cookies. The ice cream flavored ones turned out to taste of vanilla, but perhaps with slightly more cream flavor. If they had also been called "vanilla flavored", I would not have thought that to be a bad description.

"I'm sorry" beer

After having seen almost naked body builders, almost naked samba dancers, not particularly naked jugglers, and more, we decided to have some food. My friend took me to a very small place that she likes because they do not allow you to smoke there (in Japan, many people smoke, and they smoke everywhere except outdoors).

This place served some interesting food. We had pork stuffed with goat cheese, "extremely spicy" meat balls (that my friend could not eat because she cannot take spicy food), deer sausage, octopus salad, and some other things. They also had some interesting things on the drink menu. My friend ordered some thing called "I'm sorry beer".

This refers to the maker who says that he will not make "normal" beer, he will only make whatever fun beer he likes to make. I am not sure that is something you need to apologize for. This beer was yuzu flavored. I tried a little, but since I don't like beer, I did not like this either.

After leaving the restaurant, an old woman complimented either me or my friend, or possibly both of us, for looking good in yukatas. At the festival, some other old woman complimented me on wearing a yukata more or less correctly too. She thought that since I was blond, I could not understand Japanese, so she kept talking to my friend as if talking to me and/or as if I was not present, expecting my friend to translate. I kept answering back in Japanese, but the old woman did not seem to realize that my friend never actually translated anything, and that I spoke Japanese to her, and she just kept speaking to me through my friend. This happens from time to time in Japan.

Soup curry donburi?

Our school cafeteria has started selling スープカレー丼 ("suupu karee don"), which is a mix of "soup curry" and "donburi", food served on rice. Since soup normally does not have rice in it, the name is a bit weird. The food was good, though.

They also have "soup curry ramen" and something called "Furano style omuraisu". Furano is a place outside Sapporo famous for flower fields, and omuraisy is rice with omelet.

Last day of the Sapporo festival

The last day of the Hokkaido Shrine Festival one of my friends said he was going there with his wife, and suggested I join them. When I finally got home from work, they were already almost finished and more or less on their way to work (they work nights) but we managed to meet up and walk around for half an hour or so together.

Me, my anti-pollen mask, and my friend

Foreigners in yukatas!

I saw two other foreigners also wearing yukatas. They had also managed to get the best yukata accessory: Japanese girls in yukatas. I am told that since yukatas for men don't have pockets, the traditional thing to do is get a girl to carry your phone, wallet, and whatnot in her bag, since Japanese yukatas for girls come with bags. I have had very little luck in finding this accessory, and when I had a female friend walk around with me she said that "no, I will not carry your wallet or camera for you". Though she did volunteer to take my cash and put it into her bag.

"Pizza stick". Not pizza, not stick shaped. Delicious, though.

My "pizza stick"

Cucumber on a stick. Common festival food.

White Sparkling (carbonated yogurt)

Our university coop sells something called "White Sparkling". It turns out to be carbonated yogurt. Not bad, but not that good either.

Fighters for girls

Today we found a bunch of folders titled "Fighters for girls" outside the computer science department administrative office. It turns out to be information on buying pink clothes, pompoms and sweets to support the local baseball team. Which apparently is called Fighters. Much less heroic or interesting that then title first seemed to suggest.

Going back to Saitama

After a pretty tiring but very fun day in Tokyo, we took one of the last trains back to Saitama. These trains are incredibly packed with people in the mornings. They are super long and completely full. Once the platform starts to become slightly visible again after one train unloads all the commuters, the next train is already arriving, so you almost cannot cross the platform in rush hour. Late at night the trains are more credibly packed, but we still had to stand.

I found something called "rusk ice cream". Rusk is a hard biscuit and ice cream is not hard, so this made me curious. I bought one just to see what it would be like. It turned out to be normal chocolate ice cream. Why they decided to call it "rusk ice cream" remained a mystery.

In Japan you can find all kinds of strange and sometimes wonderful bread, like this breakfast bacon and egg bread.

I am Sayama tea, and Sayama tea Cola

We visited a tea shop in Sayama, a place in Saitama. There they sold something called "I am Sayama tea". They also sold something called "Sayama tea Cola". They gave us some very nice tea for free, in cups that were super cute. They were made so that the tea ended up in a cherry blossom shape (this being the cherry blossom season in Saitama, and cherry blossom viewing is a huge thing in Japan).

I bought some Sayama tea Cola to see what that could be. It was a green carbonated liquid that tasted neither like tea nor Cola. It was not very good.

Outside the tea shop they had goldfish or carps swimming around. One of them was much fatter than the others. It looked like it had swallowed a tennis ball or something. They were very quick in their movements, though, so I could not get a good photo.

Mochimochi motchii mayochii

This bread is called "mochi mochi motchii mayochii", which is a funny name.

Ham or tuna, or both?

I saw a sign advertising "tuna dried ham". If it is ham, it is not tuna, right? If it is tuna, why not call it something other than ham?

Rabupi ice cream? Lingonberry ice cream?

Near the parking lot close to the suspension bridge, there was a small shop selling ice cream. They had bitter green tea (matcha), of course. They also had something called the "twin" which had both "yama momo" (presumably peach, from "yama" for mountain and "momo" meaning peach) and "rabupii". I had no idea what "rabupii" might be, and when I asked our Japanese relatives they also had no idea. I decided to order a rabupii ice cream to see what it might be. It turned out to be strawberry, and on other signs with the same photo it just said "strawberry" in Japanese...

Peach and rabupii

When I ate my ice cream I told my brother that it was "disappointingly normal". Some Japanese couple that happened to walk by at that moment looked at me and laughed and said "Normal?" I clarified that it was not bad, it was pretty good, but not special. Just normal good strawberry ice cream. They then gave up on buying their own ice cream.

At our next rest stop on the way back, I saw a place selling "koke momo" ice cream. This is a word that means "moss peaches" if you translate it literally, which is a funny word. In English, these berries are called lingonberries, and they are very common and popular in Sweden. You would not see lingonberry ice cream very often in Sweden, though. But I bought one, and it did indeed taste like lingonberries.

Espresso tea

The vending machines just outside the room we did our presentations in sold something called "Espresso Tea". It was not that good.

Naked, but not very good

There was a line of juices in Las Vegas called "Naked". Some of them were pretty good, and some where not. The "Protein zone" was not good. It tasted like drinking sawdust put in water. But it was very healthy.

A girl named Carlos

In Sapporo there is a chain of bars where the girls have bunny girl costumes that show off most of their butts and are also pretty revealing in general. As I understand it, the girls will come and stand at your table and drink with you, and they gain most of their income buy getting paid for each drink you order for them to drink (you pay for your drinks and for theirs).

This chain of bars is called Million, and it is apparently very popular so they have expanded a lot and have many of these bars. They also have very many advertisements in various magazines. Last night I was looking at one of these advertisements while my friend was checking his phone. I noticed that they had printed photos of the butts of the girls presumably working there and written their names (stage names) on playing cards. So there is a "three of clubs" girl showing her butt, for instance.

While there are only 40 girls on each page, they have several duplicated cards even on the same page, but with different girls. This of course also means that there are many cards that are not represented at all, which seems like a strange choice.

When looking closer, there are also some names that makes you wonder who decided that would be a good name for a girl. I would not choose "Shampoo" as a name, but maybe some people think it is cute. "Orangina" and "Calpis" are juices sold in Japan, and if I ever have to suggest a stage name for a female friend, I would not choose either of them. Then we have "Jack", which when hearing I would guess was not a girl, but maybe it is short for something you would call a girl. But then we have "Carlos". What kind of girl is called Carlos?

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...

Is this a banana ice cream bar?

The convenience store in the building where I live now sells something that is called: "Is this a banana ice cream bar?" Which makes me wonder if it is a banana ice cream bar or not. Having a question mark in the product name looks a bit suspicious...

Update: I bought one and checked. It is a banana ice cream bar.