Soup curry lunch

Since I bought a bicycle, I have been trying to get my colleagues to go to lunch outside the university, but they are lazy bums and usually give some excuse ("It is raining", "I will have a huge dinner, so I will not have lunch", etc.) and just go to the cafeteria nearby instead. Sometimes I manage to convince one of them to come with me though. Recently, the trick seems to be to suggest going for soup curry, a local Sapporo specialty.

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.

Dogs

After our "viking sweets" extravaganza we went to the Odori park to look for one of my French student's friends. We found a group of people all having the same type of dog who had also gathered in the park. It was a bit strange to see 10 to 15 dogs of the same type running around like crazy.

I did some magic tricks for the French student's friend and the young Japanese girls she was drinking wine with in the park.

Our Russian student then said he was hungry and wanted to eat. This was a bit weird, since he had "all you can eat" pizza, sweets, pasta, etc. from 14:30 to 16:00 and he said he wanted to eat again at 18:00... He said it was not weird at all, since 18:00 is when you usually have dinner (well, not me; I usually have dinner at around 22:00). I still think the "we had enormous amounts of food two hours ago" factor into account, though.

Viking food

One of our students in our lab always talks about how little money he has. I once told him about a place in Sapporo where you can have 80 or 90 minutes of "all you can eat" of pizza, pasta, salads, some rice based dishes, 40 types of cakes, ice cream, and waffles and crepes that they make right in front of you when you ask for them. This costs 1380 yen (or 1680 yen for 90 minutes during dinner time), which is very cheap, something like 10 or 14 Euro (depending on how hard the Euro is crashing right now).

So this student has been asking me to take him there many many times. It is not difficult to find so I guess he could have gone without me too, but apparently he wanted company. Last Sunday we went there. It was me, the French student, his girlfriend, and one more student, from Russia.

In Japanese, buffet style "all you can eat" type of deals are called "viking". So we had "sweets viking". You can also have "Indian Viking" and other things that sounds a bit strange to me, since the word "viking" in Swedish (or English) has no such meaning.

The restaurant is called "Shall we sweets". Which is also a bit strange. In Japan, they use "shall we" and "let's" without verbs. As in "Let's Hokudai school festival" or "Let's English!".

Anyway, the food was good but I ate too much. We also had a table near the window, and since the restaurant is on the 8th floor, we had a nice view too.

The Russian student surprised me by eating for about 15 minutes, and not eating very much during those 15 minutes either, and then saying "I am full. I cannot eat any more"... So it would seem having "viking" for him is a bad deal, since he could have had more or less the same amount of food by buying a sandwich for 200 yen in the convenience store, haha. My French student's girlfriend also surprised me by speaking better English than the French student.

Because it is ... green?

Today I found a vegetable drink that has all the minerals you could possibly need in our coop shop. The product name is "Green da ka ra". In Japanese, that means "because it is green". It is however not green. At all.

Flesh Banana Juice

Yesterday I went out to eat yakitori ("grilled chicken", which means skewers of chicken but also allows for lots of other things, like bacon) with two colleagues. We go out twice per month and so.

Yesterday's place was very nice. We also had long (7 hours) discussions on weather there is human caused global warming, if Jews came to Japan thousands of years ago and made Japanese people sing songs in Hebrew at Jewish like festivals, if you can call a system where groups of people around you can overrule your choices an anarchy, if Greek people are descended from aliens from Sirius, and many other things.

We also went to a New Orleans style bar (the first place closed at around midnight). There they served "Flesh Banana Juice" and other interesting things... ("r" and "l" are written the same in Japanese, so translations sometimes have this type of error).

More Swedes

Today, I met three new people from Sweden (more or less, at least) who are currently in Sapporo. One of them is doing a six months post doc thing at the same university I work (though not in computer science but in dentistry), and the other two are the rest of the family.

One of them had found my blog, and learned that we have an "English conversation practice lunch" every Friday, so they showed up and joined us today. By this, we even managed to outnumber the Polish group, since only three Poles showed up today (sometimes six of them show up, though). They were very nice.

There are not so many people from Sweden in Sapporo. I know of 5 others, though there may be more Swedes here that I have not met. There is apparently a Swedish guy who has lived near Sapporo longer than anyone else (around 30 years) but no other Swede has ever met him. He is like Bigfoot or something, a legend that most people know but no one has seen him for real. My Greek colleague claims to have met him about a week ago, though. Reportedly, the Swedish guy lives on his own farm outside Niseko (a ski resort not far from Sapporo) and never comes to Sapporo.