Sapporo

The other day we went to Sapporo because I decided to go back to Canada earlier than I had expected and I had to speak to JAL to change my ticket and pay a little money. I'll be coming back to Canada on March 6th now (and no, we didn't break up so don't have to worry). The picture on the right is out of the train window on the way to Sapporo - I have no idea which city it is.

But before we left for Sapporo we went to the speediest noodle restaurant ever. You order your food, instead of from a menu, from, what looks like, a vending machine, at the front of the store. It prints you out a receipt, you hand it to the waitress that is running around like a crazy girl, and within minutes you have your food. My gf and her brother got their food mere moments after we found a seat and sat down. I was really suprised. It puts McDonalds to shame in every respect. It's faster, tastier, healthier, more filling, cleaner, employees are more friendly, and the price is almost the same (a "combo" I guess it would be referred to as, is about $7.00 - What I ordered was $4.50 and I was pretty full after). Iced green tea is a complimentary drink for every customer so you don't have to worry about buying a drink either.

Sapporo is a really nice city and it's downtown really feels like Japan - much more than Asahikawa. Sapporo is somewhat similar to Vancouver population wise but is more crowded. In the picture it doesn't look very crowded but I think it's mainly because it was snowing like crazy and windy to boot. Chilly chilly. But check out the cross-walks! Notice how they crisscross all over the intersection. In Japan pedestrians all walk at the same time at busy intersections and cars wait. It's kinda neat.

Japan is really... unnerving. There are call girls everywhere and advertisements for them posted all around the place. In Japan, they say "T-Back" for "G-String" so you can try reading this advertisement on the left and see if you can guess what they're trying to say. There are Japanese/English advertisements and signs everywhere also - most often they have some kind of spelling mistake or the grammar just doesn't make sense haha. Actually... I was just watching TV and found out that the highest paid "Hostesses", as they call them in Japan, get paid upwards of $10,000 a month. The highest they had on the show is paid $30,000 a month which is $360,000 a year. It kinda makes me sad that these girls, whose only job is to talk to desperate guys, have a higher salary than almost everyone who has gone to school for years and years and has, what we think, a high paying job. I'm happy this sort of work is illegal in Canada. Actually there are "Hosts" in Japan also - and you guessed it, they're males who chat to girls for a fee. Weird eh? Whatever happened to meeting people on your own? In Japan you can just buy temporary friends - saves the trouble of making real friends haha.

But besides that, Sapporo is really pretty. We changed my flight time first and then we went to this giant covered stripmall. It's 7 blocks long and has shops along both sides the entire way. Cars can't drive either - just for walking. But each block there is a cross street which cars drive along. Also each block is numbered so its easier to figure out which "mall" your favorite shops are in. First we went to sing some karaoke, as usual haha. The place we went to had a beautiful entrance but the rooms were cramped and kinda old. Also one of the microphones smelled so disgusting we couldn't even sing with it. But it was fun none-the-less =D We stayed for about 2 hours and then it was off to find something to eat. Actually we got sidetracked by an arcade and decided to play some medal games since they're so fun. They had our favorite machine but we weren't so lucky that day and our medals were depleted a lot sooner than usual but I finally have a picture of a giant medal machine!! hahaha (because I know all of you are so interested in it -_-'). There are... 12 stations I think? or 16? I can't remember. And there's a giant rotating screen in the middle and there's balls all over the place and metals flying this way and that and music and lions dancing and pounding numbers which creates more flying metals and balls. It's really fun.

For dinner we went to an "all you can eat" bbq. Each table has a hot plate in the middle of it which is used to fry your food! Who would have thought =D The table was pretty small though... so it was difficult to eat haha - but tasty! and cheap. It was １５００円 per person for all you can eat with no time limit. We ate our fair share. Both of us were pretty stuffed before we even finished our food. I wanted to drink beer for some reason so I ordered a beer. There were 3 sizes to choose from. Small, medium and large. I thought large would be fine - that it wouldn't be large... but I was wrong. I've never seen such a big mug before... nor so much beer in anything except a pitcher. I know in the picture it doesn't look that big, but trust me - it is. Compare it to my hand or to your hand. It's about 3 fists high. Make a fist, put it on the table. Make another fist and put it on top of your first. Now move your bottom one above the 2nd one and there you have it (it's about the height of a pitcher of beer).

Otaru & 15 Months

Two days ago my gf, her family and I went to Otaru to do a little sight seeing and pick up some seafood. It was a pretty cool place. The area we visited was, I think, one of the main tourist places. Most of the buildings looked so old and some were definitely historic or semi-historic at least. There was one restaurant/bar that was in an old train station. Down the middle of the building there was a hallway from one end to the other of the building with train tracks running along it and to one side there was a beautiful restaurant and to the other, a bar. Probably half of the shops were souvenir stores. Some of them were really cool. I bought some souvenirs for some of my family and friends and a couple for myself. I bought a "Kiki's Delivery Service" card holder. It's really cute and it's one of my favorite Miyazaki movies so I thought it would be a good souvenir.

My gf and I bought a 2 peice magnetic keychain with a guy's face and a girls face kissing haha. It's so cute. I think I'll bring back the girl side to Canada with me and she'll keep the guy's. And then we bought these little gems that were quite expensive. I chose 白 and my gf chose 緑色. Every color has a meaning and mine's kinda... everything. I guess they ran out of ideas or something. My color is supposed to adapt to the wearer's feelings or problems to fix them I guess. My gf's color, green, is supposed to help build a big heart and help with money I believe. They're kinda interesting... but expensive. For the 2 of them it was １７０００円 o_O but well, it's our anniversary so what can you do right? haha.

We also bought the most expensive chocolates I've ever seen hahaha. We only bought 2 because well... it was too expensive to buy more. Each peice of chocolate was ２４０円 so for 2 peices it was almost $5. We got a tiny little bag with pretty tape though. But sadly the chocolates weren't all that amazing. Sure, they were tasty, but what $5 chocolate isn't going to be tasty right? I wouldn't say it was worth $5, but maybe if I meet a chocolate fanatic I can tell them I ate Le Tao chocolate and they'll be impressed... if they know it hahaha. I believe it's only a small Japanese company since it doesn't have a link on Wikipedia and google only brings back results of Japan... Otaru specifically. It was good though.

Yesterday was our real anniversary day so we went downtown. We wanted to go for dinner but it was too early at the time so we went to an arcade to play some "metal" games. I took a picture of the one we played today the most. At this arcade there weren't really any interesting ones or big fancy ones so we decided on a cute little one that had a lot of minigames. It was really loud though and started to give us a headache after a while even with our scarfs stuffed infront of the speakers. We moved to a new one after a while but our coins disappeared pretty quick and we left haha.

We found what looked like a nice Izakaya and went in to eat. It was pretty good but nothing amazing. After dinner we went for some karaoke. I'm really starting to enjoy karaoke a lot. Maybe my singing is improving even! Still terrible, but now only... kinda terrible - I hope haha. I've been trying to sing some Japanese songs but it's hard to read Japanese so fast. But I'll keep trying =D so far my favorite song is 胸がドキドキ from the anime Detective Conan. It's fun to sing and I know the tune ^_^ Karaoke in Japan is much nicer than in Canada, as I've said before, but I have a picture to prove it now haha. In this room that we were in yesterday it's $3/h during the day and... $6/h at night. There's big flatscreen LCD TV and the karaoke machine has pretty lights (I know, completely useless, but if you like Apple computers you'll appreciate the pretty stuff like completely useless lights). You choose songs by 2 remote control LCD touch screen displays. Both English and Japanese interfaces (and Chinese too I believe... but I've never investigated the chinese button) and best of all... 2 large Bose speakers which pump out gorgeous karaoke sound. Actually the Bose speakers are kinda a pain because you realize how terrible you really are since you can't blame your terrible singing on sound quality hahaha.

Round 1 & Valentines

Round 1 is an arcade kind of place that has all sorts of stuff in it. You pay $15 and you get to stay for 3 hours and do whatever you want. They have a Tennis court, curling, batting cages, pitching practice, minigolf, volleyball, badminton, soccer, bowling, mini bowling, billiards, fishing and basketball for sports. Also there are massage chairs, manga, karaoke, rollerblading, a big arcade you can play as much as you want, a kids area with lots of balls and stuff and one of those electronic "bulls" which is in the background of the picture to the right. It's really cool. Fantastic idea and tonns of fun. For $15 you can't go wrong.

I went there one time with my gf and her brother and a few days ago I went again with her and her friend Kawa. After we played sports for a while we went to the kids area to check it out and were pleasantly suprised. There were 2 different small rooms full of balloons and fans. One had a tonn of small balloons and one had a bunch of giant balloons. The giant balloon room was a lot of fun so we took some pictures in there, as you might have noticed above ^_^. After, we went up a bunch of stairs and took a slide down into the "kids area"... and it was really staticy. I went down a big spiral-ey one first and I could see lightning bolts flying off my shoulders to the slide. It was also fairly noisy. The two girls didn't seem too inclined on going down the slide after that but I managed to convince them to go down the shorter, straight slide. My gf went first with the same result. She touched a metal railing at the bottom and got zapped pretty good haha. Her friend, I think, was a little more cautious about the railing but was overly cautious of the slide. She hugged herself and flew down it like no tomorrow, slamming into a padded wall at the bottom hahaha. The whole area was pretty full of static. We climbed through a little maze-like contraption which had metal bolts in it... 危ない。 My gf got zapped again from the bolts.

And then there were tricylces... It's been a long time since I tricylced, that's for sure. It was a tonn of fun too. We were there at around 11pm or 12pm so there were no kids so we had the whole place to ourselves haha. There was a path around the "kid area" for the trikes so we went around a couple times. It was pretty difficult for me to petal though - I think I'm a little too tall. My gf and her friend had some troubles too but they managed it easier than I, I think. Those are the massage chairs in the background of the picture of my gf and her friend. After we triked for a while we sat down to relax for a few minutes there.

We played some arcade games but didn't have very much time so we decided on a game of mini-bowling before we left. Almost every time my gf wins at bowling but for some reason today just wasn't her day. It was pretty fun though. The whole night was pretty fun. Canada should get a Round 1. I have no idea why it doesn't actually. I bet it would make a tonn of money. I think Canada's problem is they charge too much for everything. If it was cheaper, this stuff would be a lot more popular. Sucks.

For Valentines day my gf and I went to a different arcade and movie theatre and watched 28 weeks later. It was fairly mediocre. Nothing too amazing or fantastic - it was a little too busy for most of the movie. The action never ceases - never lets up - it gets a little tiring after a while. After that we played some coin games. In Japan they're a tonn of fun. In Canada it's a lot more expensive and the return is almost nil so the fun ends quite soon. We spent $20 and got 240 coins and played for 3 or 4 hours. At one point we had more than doubled our original coin count but in the end, of course, we ran out. Then it was off to Gusto. It's kinda like Denny's but a little bit tastier and a little less oily. Still expensive like Dennys but what can you do. Actually it was really cheap in the end... Actually Gusto paid me to eat there haha. I paid for our dinner with ５０００円 but the girl mistook it for １００００円 and gave me change accordingly. I actually wasn't sure myself who was at fault for a while. I also had a １００００円 bill in my wallet and a day or two previous I had 2 of them in my wallet so I had to do a little detective work to figure it out. At the time her mom was waiting for us so we had to hurry out so after we were in the car I started asking questions. I figured out that I, had, indeed, given her ５０００円.. Our dinner was ２７００円 so she gave me ７３００円 change for the ５０００円 I had given her. So in the end she more or less gave me ２３００円 to eat there which is roughly $22CAD. I feel really bad.. their register is going to be pretty off and we were already too far away to go back (it's nowhere near where she lives). Maybe some day we'll go back and buy a lot of food to kinda make up for it... or something.

What makes me happy

In no particular order, here are 10 things that make me happy:

1. My girlfriend
2. My Family
3. Helping people (especially if they don't know I'm helping)
4. Eating
5. Talking to and hanging out with friends
6. Speaking a different language
7. Reading
8. Learning something new
9. Remembering happy memories
10. Snow (pretty, dry snow)

I got this from here, where I go to read when I can find free time. If you have a little spare time, fill this out too ^_^ they're kind of interesting to read.

Also, read my previous post if you haven't already. It's actually new stuff I've written about.

A Winter Wonderland

I've done a lot since coming here and I've almost assuredly forgot some things but I'll try to recap as best I can. I've been trying to take pictures but I keep forgetting my camera or else I'm enjoying myself too much to remember. In any case, I've captured some moments on camera. I hope it will suffice for now.

I'll start off with the weather. It's cold here, as I've mentioned in my last post, but I don't think I put a picture... maybe I did but whatever, here's a picture of near my gf's place. We were walking to the grocery store at the time. There's snow piled everywhere!! It's great. It really makes me want to go jump in the snow like when I was a kid. It's cold but not unbearably cold. Sometimes my nose gets kinda frozen but that's about it. Nothing to complain about =D

Downtown Asahikawa 旭川 is pretty interesting too. I've only been on a couple of the streets but there's a main street meant for walking only. There's walking paths on both sides and the street in the middle is also for walking... does that make sense? Probably not. Actually the picture on the right is a picture of a different street... so maybe forget what I said until a little bit later. It's nice though. Inside this small mall there is a giant statue of the castle from Howl's Moving Castle. In Canada I would never have expected to see this kind of display but in Japan I don't see it as out of place - just cool. Actually the place that it's in is just about deserted. There's 2 restaurants, a place where you can buy bus tickets.. and that's all I've seen haha. So I'm not really sure why they chose here to put this piece. Maybe it's cheaper to keep it here or something. In any case, I'm not complaining. It's cool.

The other day my gf and I went to the Asahiyama Zoo (In Asahikawa). Apparently it's pretty famous in Japan - one of the most famous I think. And for good reason... it was really cool!! They had so many interesting animals I had never actually seen before. Like penguins!! and lots of them too. Some were swimming, some were running around, some were getting ready for the daily "penguin walk". It was really a pretty interesting thing to see. The walk way through the penguins "area" went underground and under the water that they swim in so I took a few pictures from underwater.

Then there was a tiger!! At least I think it's a tiger... If it's not please leave me a message and let me know what it is haha. Well, whatever it was, it was pretty neat to see in person. To be honest it was one of the most boring animals we saw in the zoo. It walked around in circles the entire time we watched it. Hardly interesting. We tried to take a picture with it behind us but it didn't really work out... you can only see a really small part of its back between our shoulders haha. So I won't put that picture on here.

And polar bears!!! Now that is something I thought I would never see. Penguins.. I thought it possible, but not polar bears. They're a lot bigger than I expected they would be.. and a lot tougher looking. There's two polar bears at this zoo and both of them have a lot of scars - one a lot more than the other though. Sadly neither went swimming while I was taking pictures but I still snapped a few good ones. I'll post up one to see.

We went to visit chimpanzees and orangatangs. Here's a picture of Hime saying hello to one of the chimpanzees who came to visit us and the little kid beside her. Don't worry, we let the kid say hello first before we took pictures ^_^ We didn't have very much time so we had to leave soon after that. We're going to visit again sometime. I want to watch the penguin parade. Actually we had planned on watching it but we ended up getting pushed back from the front and we had to wait another 15 minutes for it to start so we gave up since we were on a tight schedule. There's a picture of all the people lined up waiting to watch it. Actually, the reason I took this picture is because the view was nice and there was a giant ferris wheel haha.

After the Zoo we went downtown and found the ice sculptures had been started. There were sooo many sculptures and soo many people working on them. It was on the street I mentioned earlier in this post. All these sculptures are in the middle "walk way" or whatever you might call it on snow pedestals. Some of them are amazingly beautiful. We got downtown at around 4:30 so the sun hadn't gone down and I was able to take 1 picture with the sun up. All the other pictures I took are after the sun went down and so are kind of dark. I'm not really sure but it seemed to be a 1 day type of competition. At 4:30pm most of the sculptures were really starting to shape up and all my pictures around 6pm-7pm were almost complete. I really want to go down there again soon during the day to take some pictures of the finished peices of work =D

And today for lunch we made Takoyaki. I think I mentioned it in a post a long long time ago... But at the time only Kenji was reading my blog I believe. I really like Takoyaki and Kenji was the one who introduced me to it when we went for dinner and drinks together at an Izakaya restaurant on Davie street in Vancouver. So thank you Kenji for introducing me to Takoyaki ^_^ I'll explain what Takoyaki is. Tako is Octopus and Yaki is "fried" so thus the name. Even though there's a lot more too it and the Octopus itself isn't fried at all haha. First you take the Octopus as seen above and cut it up into small peices that would fit inside a 1 inch ball. Then you heat up your Takoyaki plate (like a hot plate but with half spheres) and mix up your Takoyaki mixture. (Now I know these instructions are useless but I want to explain how anyway) Next, pour the mixture into onto the tray, filling all the half sphere things. Add in some green onions, tempura bits and one peice of tako. Wait for the inside of the sphere to heat up and get.. more or less cooked. Then, using an extra long toothpick (forgive me for not knowing this word haha) spin it around so the previously exposed upper side can also cook. Spin spin spin until it's done. One package of this stuff makes a lot of Takoyaki balls... Like 50 or something. Man, is it ever filling. Her mom and dad ate some but they didn't want many. The last batch (the one I'm making in the picture) we gave to Hime's grandparents to enjoy. Actually It's kinda fun to make them but after you get full you don't really have that... drive to continue making them hahaha.

After we ate we decided we needed to take a walk to try to walk off some of the weight we most assuredly put on during lunch. We walked to the shrine near her place. The vew is amazing. This picture is overlooking the area where she lives. I have no idea which is her house but it's probably in there somewhere haha. I didn't take any pictures of the actual shrine itself because I feel it's kind of rude. But I really like this type of gate they have over everything. The style is absolutely wonderful. It's a little disappointing our culture doesn't have this kind of "style". After we left the shrine we took a different route back to her place that walks over the main road in the above picture. It's also pretty but I wanted to the show the snow piles along the side of the road. It's actually quite difficult to walk side by side along this path due to the snow. In some places it's high enough to brush my elbow while I'm walking. I'm not sure when I'll stop enjoying the snow... probably never ^_^ I really like snow, it's so pretty.

Also... my Japanese is not really coming along as well as I had hoped. I'm still not able to speak Japanese. I'm going to have to redouble my efforts... or more than that haha. I'll try to update this blog often but my first priority is going to be learning Japanese.

Ryu and Ming, I hope you guys are having fun in Vancouver. I really miss it (>_<) we're going to have to hang out in the future some time for sure. Thanks again for coming to the airpot with me ^_^ It really meant a lot =D