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)

I ate raw shrimp

Last night was the End-of-Year Party for my department at a traditional Japanese restaurant.  It was also a welcome party for those of us who were new to the department in the last few months.  It was my first traditional Japanese meal, complete with many interesting dishes.

Here is a picture of Maiko, Tanya and I happily full at the end of the meal.

This is what my place looked like when I arrived.  The small little salad thing was made of seaweed, squid, fish eggs and okra.  It was very slimy, but also a little spicy.  Actually, now that I think about it, this dish has been the only spicy Japanese food I've had since I got here.

 The next dish was an assortment of sashimi, including salmon, tuna, scallops, shrimp, and a white fish (halibut?).  This was my first time ever eating raw shrimp.  At sushi restaurants in the U.S., shrimp is always served cooked.  I'm not sure why, because it was pretty tasty raw.  Sort of creamy and sweet.

I didn't eat the head or tail.

After sashimi, we had a soup that included crab legs, clams, fish of some kind, meatballs, tofu, leeks, mushrooms and bok choi.  It was delicious.  We heated it ourselves at the table using a portable gas stove.

Maiko served everybody using a small ladle into tiny little bowls.  Most of us had seconds.

Here is my bowl with only the crab leg and tofu piece left.  Don't worry- I ate them next!

I missed photographing a little fish dish with a mayonnaise sauce, but don't worry, it was my least favorite anyway.
Next came a very strange decorative dish of cooked salmon with some sort of sauce, covered by an oyster mushroom, served on a big leaf.  The yellow thing is a seed from a ginko tree (it had no flavor, but was pretty to look at). The pink and white thing was a pickle young ginger shoot.  It was extremely tasty.  But mushrooms and ginger are two of my favorite foods...

The second to last dish I ate was the most familiar tasting of all the dishes to my American pallet.  Think of something like potato gratin, but with crab meat instead of potato pieces.  This was put inside a crab shell, then deep fried.  It was great, although admittedly greasy.

 There was one more dish I didn't photograph.  It was basically like sushi (individual servings of fish on rice) but the fish was cooked.  I was too full at that point to partake, so I don't know what it tasted like.

Finally, we ended with dessert.  This is a sponge cake with some sort of yellow cream on the inside.  The sponge cake was matcha (green tea) flavored.  It was excellent.  I'm never too full for dessert!

And that, plus two beers, was my first traditional Japanese meal.

Very tasty.

That's all for now

-Bre 

Kokusai Ski Adventure

Bre and I went on a ski adventure with Adit and Tanya.  Tanya and I worked together to teach Bre and Adit how to ski.  I made a video of the adventure.  In the video Adit crashes.  I feel bad about laughing at Adit when he crashes, especially once I realized that I cut him off, causing the crash.  Sorry about that Adit!

Here is Bre in the blowing snow.

 And here is Adit pretending to make a phone call.

 And these are other random photos of the Kokusai ski area.

Kokusai ski area is a great bargain.  The bus ticket, ski rental, and lift ticket comes to an amazing 5800 Yen = $74.50 package when purchased in advance.  I look forward to skiing again once my legs have recovered.

That's all for now.

Kyle (and Bre)