Yosakoi

The beginning of June marks the beginning of the summer festival season in Sapporo. The first major festival (that I attended anyways) of the summer is the Sapporo Yosakoi festival. Basically it’s a dancing festival where teams from all over the country come and compete via choreographed dance routines. The size of the group seems to vary from about 40 to about 150 people with ages anywhere from 6 to 60. Some good fun all around. Naturally I've got a bunch of pics and whatnot, and I even caved any bought myself a commemorative T-shirt.

(白い恋人）Shiroi Koibito

There's a company in Hokkaido that makes chocolate sandwich cookies (kinda like Golden Oreos except square). The name of the company is Shiroi Koibito, which roughly translates as "white boyfriend/girlfriend", which I personally think is a little odd, but might be explained by the fact that the original flavour of this snack was white chocolate and mabye the cookie is the BF/GF.. I dunno.. Anyways.. they have a factory that apparantly is run by Willie Wonka and is open for tours by the public.
The actual assembly line is hardly spectacular, but the main courtyard has a massive animatronic clockwork display on all sides that comes to live every hour. From hippos, to bakers, to chocolate animals, to (la creme de la creme) bubbles. The other highlight was the wall of popular character based stampy knick-knacky things.
###J-popular culture quiz###
How many of these can you identify?








They may be just bubbles, but watching them, I still felt like Eddie Murphy in "Trading Places"

A long awaited update

Well I don't know about anyone reading this, but I've been long awaiting publishing this post, so there.

At any rate, it seems like its been forever and a day since my last post and that's simply because I haven't had an internet connection. So after being in Osaka for almost a month and a full 3 weeks after I applied (I had to send a copy of my ID 5 times to the internet company), I am now the proud subscriber to the Weeb.

So lemme get on with the show..

Paddy

My friend, Felicity, had a buddy in town for business, so we all went out for a drink. So many of these nice little places to go and fill your face in Japan, that its a wonder that I do anything else. This one's a yakiniku place, where of course you can also knock back a beer or two. Later in the evening, I bumped in to a dude on the street playing drums that reminded me an awful lot of the dude from in front of the SkyDome (Rogers Center) in TO. Same guy? Next time I'll ask him...

 
 
 
  

About town

You know how the say not to trust people who say things like "Trust me" and "I'm not a liar".. well, I don't think that I'll be staying here any time soon..

School Trip

No schooling would be complete without a class trip, right? So our school took us to the zoo. Now, I haven't been to a zoo since I was like 12, and since they closed the monorail in TO, I never really thought of going back, but this one was fairly fun..
Here's the pics, comme d'habitude..

Memorable moments: A classmate kicking a soccer ball into the monkey pen and disrupting the entire social hirearchy of the group. Who needs expensive big black monoliths when a simple soccer ball will do.

Backtrack to Golden Week

Ok, So this post is a little late, of course, what else is new. So just to let everyone know that its not all bicycles and subways over here in Japan, here's the skinny on the road trip that I took last month.
So we hit Hakodate, Furano, and Kushiro over a period of about 4 days. Some good fun was had by all, and some definately breathtaking views were there to be seen.
You'll be able to see from the pics something that looks a little out of place for the beginning of May... snow.. and lots of it.
Despite that the weather was great and actually quite warm.
We stayed in several Youth Hostels, almost all of which were really great, with one exception. I figure you know there's gonna be trouble when you're greeted with the question, "Which one of you [dirty goodfornothing dogs] is Damian?" and are then lectured for several minutes about how they were trying to contact you all day and blah blah blah, and then you find out that "lights out is at 10pm" and then are rushed to bed so they can turn off the main circuit breaker lest the light attract the attention of any 40 foot radioactive lizards that happen to have wandered north from Tokyo Bay or something.
In any case, it was a good little trip..