Veterinarians, funny shoes, strange food

The cute depictions of what animals you can eat were also good.

Today was the first day of the school festival at our university. The festival consists of the students dressing up in funny clothes, selling strange food, playing music, organizing games, etc.

The dark meat in the bottom of the picture is ostrich. The parts with toothpicks in them are alligator.

The best food is usually provided by the veterinarian department. The veterinary students always sell food based on some strange animal. This year they sold deep fried alligator meat and deep fried ostrich meat.

The staff also had funny shoes.

Vodka based food

Yesterday it was Sunday and most restaurants I go to are closed on Sundays. Yesterday, there was a soccer game between Japan and some other country, so one place I often go to was open just to gather people watching soccer together. I went there after the game was finished and asked if it was possible to order food. They were not so happy about that, but I said that anything at all would be fine.

The guy started cooking something in the back, and sometimes came out to fetch things he needed. Like a bottle of vodka. How many dishes contain vodka? Anyway, he made something that he called "Special gumbo", which was pretty good.

Cannibalism

Hato sabure

Yesterday in our magic bar, a magician came and visited us. He has recently moved back to Sapporo from a long stay in Tokyo. Now he was back from another Tokyo trip and brought us "omiyage" (souvenirs, usually cookies) which is the Japanese custom (you have to give something to every person you have ever met, after each trip).

He brought "Hato sabure", dove cookies. This is a fairly famous Tokyo omiyage. My name, Jonas, also means dove. I have been asked by Japanese friends to always bring hato sabure from Tokyo since I am also "hato".

Yesterday, three Japanese friends of mine also were in the magic bar at that time, and they thought it was hysterical that I was eating a hato sabure, since my name also means "hato", and since I was (and usually am when meeting them) wearing a t-shirt with animals being cannibals (yesterday it was a family of pigs eating fried pork).

Later, another group of 5 people who are my friends also showed up, so more than half the people that came yesterday showed up because of me...

Eating with knife and fork

Just outside our university there is a very nice restaurant that serves Japanese food and some stuff inspired by Western dishes. They have a very good chicken saute, for example. They also give you knife and fork to eat with (though there are chopsticks available too, if you prefer that), which is rare. All tables are covered with maps of different places. I ended up with a table with maps of Tokyo.

Not very green tea

Every Friday we have "English lunch" in the school cafeteria. The school cafeteria provides green tea for free to all customers. The tea machine I used seemed to be a bit tired, because my tea was not very green and tasted pretty much like lukewarm water.

Mexican food, politics, and alcohol

Mexican tacos with spicy chicken.

About twice per month, my Greek colleague and my Swedish colleague go out to eat together. If I am free, I usually tag along too. This week we went to a restaurant that serves Mexican food.

We also usually end up discussing politics, or conspiracy theories. Me and my Greek colleague more or less see things the same way, though there are some things we disagree on. Our Swedish colleague on the other hand, has surprisingly different views on all kinds of things.

All of us like arguing, so we keep going for hours and hours even though we have never ever made any progress in any direction as far as I can recall.

A very sweet cocktail.

We had dinner from 19:30 to 23:00 when the restaurant closed. Then we continued on to a bar I know and stayed there until 03:00... I asked for any cocktail that was somewhat rare and that I would probably never have tried before. I ended up with a "maccha-moni" (in Japan, "spumoni" is a famous cocktail, containing Campari, tonic, and grapefruit juice; maccha moni has maccha (green tea) liqueur instead of Campari) and something that I did not catch the name of.

Barbecue and magic

On Tuesday I was invited home to one of my magician friends. He is not a magician by profession (he is a barber), but he does magic as a hobby. There was a big barbecue party outside the house he lives in. There were nine of us in total, I think. His father, who is also a barber, also does magic as a hobby, so we all had to show magic tricks. That was fun too, and the food was great.

Shrimps and meat. If you grill the shrimps long enough, you can eat the shell too.

Bamboo shoots. These, you have to peel off the outer part, since it is too tough to eat.