Snow Storms, snow angles, and plastic food

It has been a cold and snowy week in Sapporo.  Bre is working on her snowball throwing.  I put together a video of the throw.

We went on a walk to the Homac hardware store to buy a bread machine.  When we went outside there were giant snowflakes falling.

 I tried to show here how the snow was falling so strongly that your visibility was limited.  Out on the field to school there was no way to see where you are going.  If you look at the right side of the photo below you can get an idea of what it is like.

 The snow stopped as quickly as it had started and I found this fascinating place where you can see the effect of the heated sidewalks.  In this photo you can see exactly where the heating coils are laid out under the sidewalk.  Heating a sidewalk sounds inefficient, but having tried to shovel the snow out in front of my apartment building several times I can tell you that heating the sidewalk has its advantages.  In fact if you look closely at the second photo of the area where the cars are parked in front of our apartment building you can see that it has been heated and has no snow sitting on it.

I tried this panorama photo in the parking lot by the hardware store.  Just ignore the disappearing cars.

 This is a photo of some of the piles of snow on campus.  The plows push them off to the side of the road.  It gets more tricky where there is a sidewalk.  On our bus ride to the ski area I saw some places that get more snow than Sapporo.  In places they had snow piles as tall as the bus we were riding in!

 

 

From left to right below is a photo of Olga, Valdez (in the sled) Aiume (sp?), Jody, and Bre.  We all went out together to look at the illumination and go to a sushi restaurant.  In the photo we have just picked up Valdez from the day care center and gotten him into the sled that he rode in most of the night.  Jody sang "Jingle Bells" to help Valdez enjoy his sleigh ride.

 The following three panorama photos are taken near Sapporo Station.

If you look closely at this photo you can see where the camera didn't quite get the panorama alignment right, but it still gives you a good idea of what it is like to be here.

 We found the Old Hokkaido Government Building.  It is modeled on the Massachusetts State House. It looks very nice in the snow.

Jody seized an opportunity to test her new jacket by making a snow angel.

Near our sushi restaurant in Sapporo Station we found this place.  Aiume explained that it is a milk/dairy based restaurant.  I was impressed by how good the fake food looked in the window.  If you want waffles, or milkshakes this is the place to go.  If there real food is a good looking as the plastic food in the display case you will be in for a treat.

あけましておめでとう

That's all for now,

Kyle (and Bre)

Kagami mochi

For Christmas Bre and I had some friends over for brunch.  They gave us a gift of Kagami mochi.  It literally means mirror rice cake, a traditional Japanese New Year decoration.  Bre assembled the Kagami mochi while I took photos to document the event.  We were also given this printout explaining about Kagami mochi.  I have included the link here to the Wikipedia page about Kagami mochi.

 An important part of the Kagami mochi is the daidai, a Japanese bitter orange.

 It sits on a stand called a sanpō, over a sheet of paper called a shihōbeni which is supposed to ward off fires from the house for the following years. 

  Sheets of paper called gohei folded into lightning shapes similar to those seen on sumo wrestlers belts are also attached.

I told my mother about the Kagami mochi and she told me that mochi was the first solid food that I ate as a baby.  I am looking forward to trying the mochi.

Happy New Year!

-Kyle (and Bre)

Bre's walk to work

Last week I decided to take photos of my walk into work.  I held the camera in front of myself at the level of my belly button.  Every 20 steps I would take a photo.  Today I downloaded the photos, straightened them (apparently I'm not very good at holding the camera straight when it is at my stomach) and put the photos together into a movie.

The movie takes 2 minutes, but my walk takes about 20 minutes.

Ironically, even though I took these photos only a few days ago, there's been so much snow in the last week, that my walk to work does not look the same anymore.  There are more piles of snow along the edges of roads and in parking lots.  The steps where I have to go through the fence into the field have almost disappeared in the snow.

Hopefully, my little video gives you a sense of my daily life here.

-Bre

Skiing on the Emperor's Birthday

Bre, Tanya and I went skiing yesterday (12/23) which is also the birthday of the Emperor of Japan.  It is a national holiday so there were lots of people who took the day off to go skiing.  The weather was not very good.  It snowed and the wind was strong with gusts powerful enough to pick up the snow and make whiteout conditions.  We had a good time anyway.  I took a few photos which you can see below. 

The red building houses the main gondola lift.

In the panorama photo you can see the gondola.  When the wind would gust really strongly the gondola would temporarily close down.  Almost every time I took the gondola it was very crowded.  There would be a line down to the stairs (the glass enclosure on the front of the building) leading to the gondola.  However, I did hear from Tanya that she took the lift once by herself near the end of the day and that the wind gusts cause the gondola to swing much more with one person in it than when it has the usual 4-8 people.

The photo below was actually a time when some of the clouds cleared and you could tell where the sun was. 

 In this panorama you can get a better sense of the crowd waiting in line to get on the gondola.

Here is a 2 minute video that I put together of the day.  I edited out most of the blowing wind sounds.  It doesn't have a crash, but you can see Bre's skiing improve throughout the day.  I did manage to crash once when goofing off, but tragically there are no videos or photos to share.

On an unrelated note to the skiing adventure my friend Anton shared this funny sign.  It reminds me of some of the other English signs I have seen around town which have been translated incorrectly.  You can tell what it is supposed to mean, but something was lost.  Or perhaps you are supposed to throw away your garbage to the tenant. 

That's all for now,

Kyle (and Bre)

Japan from the outside in

Bre and I have been in Japan for 1.5 months now.  Despite our time here I still feel at times like an outsider.  There are some things that used to seem foreign that are becoming normal.  For example this photo below is of one the Hokkaido University dormitories near our apartment.  The painting looks wild and I assume has all kinds of cultural context that I don't understand.  It isn't that I have gained the cultural context to understand the mural so much as I have just become used to this mural and also I have become used to the idea of not understanding what is going on.  Living in a country where I am not familiar with the culture or language just means that not knowing happens that much more.

Bre got a giant fancy Mac Pro to run her tsunami models on.  She was able to use some of her research funds to purchase the computer.  It came to her office the other day when I happened to be there.  For scale I had Bre crouch next to the computer.  She also got the 27" monitor.  I teased her that the monitor is so big that she wont be able to see Adit any more; Adit shares the office with Bre.

Here is a photo of the computer all set up.  Note Bre's giant smile.

I found this bike on my walk yesterday.  I thought it was pretty funny to put it in the middle of the frozen stream.  Like it is a statement about the impermanence of human construction, or the universal prankster nature of college students.  Perhaps someone read one of the feminist signs saying "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" and took it literally.

This crow looks like it is trying too hard.  Take it easy crow!  Don't have a cow, man!

There is a murder of crows, and they look murderous.  Get it?  A group of crows is a murder, and these Jungle Crows look like they could take you out, especially in a large group.  Bre and I tried eating lunch in a park downtown on one of our first days in Sapporo.  We were mobbed by crows and barely managed to fend them off long enough to eat our lunch.

This crow could tell that I was taking his photo and he didn't trust me one bit.

I like the way the light looks coming through the clouds to the West of Sapporo.  I took this photo about an hour before sunset, so the angle of the sun is quite low.

The wires here are held together with this wire coil.

That's all for now.

-Kyle (and Bre)