My laptop broke :(

Bit of a rubbish time, really, what with the most expensive time of year coming up (and because I'm part-time I'm not getting paid at all during the holiday period). I'm trying to get a new one, but find myself stuck in the middle of a few imperfect options - buy a laptop with a Japanese keyboard (workable, but the delete key is so tiny), import a laptop from abroad (posting anything to Japan containing lithium-ion batteries is illegal) or type everything on my phone forever. Being temporarily cut off from the world of tabbed browsing is useful in a way, I suppose, opening my senses to the Earth and enabling me to hear birdsong and rat feet and shit like that. Nonetheless, I want my computer back. Waaahhh.

In good news, I will be going to Taiwan for New Year, which will be my first trip out of Japan (apart from my one visit home in May). In neutral news, I still don't know what I'm doing for Christmas. There might be an attempt at a traditional roast dinner done in my tiny impractical toaster oven. I found Brussels sprouts here for the first time recently, so maybe I'll have some of them, even though I don't really like them. Could set up Netflix and put The Great Escape on loop. Who knows. Merry Christmas.

It's a New Find! - Imaike Cinematheque

I found a new cinema!

Nagoya has a few cinemas that screen films in English, including a few little ones with a tendency to screen interesting smaller films (there are often foreign films in non-English too; unfortunately I can't really go to them since the subtitles would be in Japanese and my reading skills aren't quite that tip-top yet). The Fushimi Million Theater is a favourite - they've a really cool selection of films and hot jasmine tea at the drinks counter. It's also super-easy to reach from my house, and next door there's a really fancy cocktail bar, if you like pretending you're the sort of person who goes to cocktail bars. It's on the second floor; when you leave, the waiter takes you to the lift, says goodbye to you, and then runs down the stairs to say goodbye to you again when you come out.

But until last month I'd never heard of Imaike Cinematheque, even though it was about two minutes' walk away from Saizeriya. (You know how I feel about Saizeriya.) To be fair, it wasn't easy to find - down a murky side-street and up the stairs of a very questionable building. Even though I had it perfectly pinpointed on Google Maps, it took me a while to find it, and when I did it looked like some sort of Acme trap from a cartoon, designed to lure foreigners into nets with the promises of independent films.

Once I was up the stairs, the corridor didn't make me feel any better.

But once I was inside...

Hey, actually all right! Definitely a cinema, albeit one that seems to be run by a man in a room held together by sellotape.

If you're curious, I saw Starred Up, a British prison drama which was very good, and made me feel very smug as I looked around at the eight or nine other customers and thought about what chumps they were for having to read the film. I also got amused at some of the attempts at translating British swearing and prison slang - Japanese doesn't really have 'swearing' in quite the same way as English, so a line like "**** *** you *****ing ***** ********" ends up translated as "sore wa dame yo", which is the kind of thing an incompetent parent might tut at their child to try and get them to stop throwing cereal boxes at supermarket staff. Made me wonder what kind of nuances I miss whenever I watch foreign-language films though.

Nagoya Cinematheque's website is here.

Photo Diary: I Went to A Derelict North Korean School Mate Come Have A Look

Recently I've got very excited about haikyo - abandoned places. Due to factors such as the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble in the 90s, and a declining population in many rural areas, there are lots of abandoned theme parks, hotels, train stations and businesses to be found in Japan. There's lots of interesting stuff to be found if you poke around in these hidden derelict treasurehouses, and you probably won't get crushed to death by unsafe building structures (I hope). I've a few places on my list that I want to nose around in, but last week was my first. Getting there was a little tricky - we had a location on a map but not exact directions, and there was a small element of treasure hunting in working out how exactly to reach our destination - but to be honest this made it all the more fun when we finally made it.

Welcome to Gifu's abandoned Chongryon school for North Koreans!

A brief history lesson (provided by a thoroughly unqualified teacher) may be necessary here. After Korea - previously known as Joseon - split into two independent countries in 1948, the roughly half-a-million ethnic Koreans living in Japan were given the option of registering as citizens of South Korea. Those who didn't became de facto citizens of North Korea, and because Japanese citizenship is not automatically given to Japanese-born children of foreign nationals, there is still a big community of North Korean nationals here today. A pro-North Korean organisation known as Chongryon provides services such as education to the Korean community, and although its influence appears to be dwindling, there are still a few dozen schools in the country providing North Korean-style education in Japan. The one we went to was abandoned in the 80s, but the shell of the building still remains, glowering at Japan from a hilltop.

More Body and Less Person: On Yoro

Handpainted train warnings - a true sign of a good rural station.

Choo-choo. I love tiny train lines in rural Japan, rattling and chucketing through grass fields. I also love Gifu, so what better way to spend a Friday than taking a train through Gifu? This week I got to experience something I'd wanted to see for a while - the Site of Reversible Destiny in the small town of Yoro. Best described as a surrealist park-slash-art-exhibition, the Site of Reversible Destiny promises an Alice in Wonderland-type experience, which toys with your perceptions and aims to leave you disoriented. Did it succeed? We shall see.

We set off from Nagoya station, with the aim of taking the JR line to Ogaki (30 minutes), then changing to the Yoro line, which trundles alongside the Yoro mountain rage through Gifu and down to Mie at a maximum speed of a whopping 40 miles per hour; however we got a little delayed when we decided to stop at Ogaki station for some lunch. I actually used to work in Ogaki, so I felt like I was going to be the big authority on all things Ogaki-related, but when I got there I was shocked to find that everything had changed. There's a Pizza Hut now. Once you leave a place you can never really go back again. (We didn't go to Pizza Hut by the way, we got misokatsu instead. Not because we're all culturally superior and only eat Japanese food, Pizza Hut is just really expensive here.)

Timing ourselves terribly, we got onto the train platform and then had to wait for half an hour for the tiny adorable train to come. It was worth it though. I love trains.

At Yoro station we were greeted by the national animal of Mie which is giant spiders everywhere making webs that are bigger than your house. Staying safely away from all nooks, we strolled down the middle of peaceful roads. Even if we weren't going to a surrealist art park, the trip would have been lovely. These small towns have a lot going for them - calm winding roads, lovely scenery in the distance, and of course the local thing. Every town in Japan has a local thing, if the population is three old men and a dog. In Yoro, it appears the local thing is gourds. I didn't know why, but a quick Google suggests there's a local story about a boy who used a gourd to fetch magical sake from a spring, to comfort his sick father. See, even the uncomfortable familial dynamics of alcoholism is charming in Yoro.

Onto the Site of Reversible Destiny: at the ticket counter we were asked where we were from, and then given quite a nice pair of chopsticks each. I swear to you, the actual phrase used by the smiley woman at the counter was "gaijin present desu". Entering the park we found a series of mind-bending buildings and recreational areas with passages that lead into oddball corners, furniture sticking out of walls and angles designed to play with perceptions. As well as the chopsticks, we got an advisory pamphlet in English, which might actually be one of my favourite pieces of writing I've seen in a while. Though at first it could be mistaken for vague, poorly-translated English, after a few sentences of reading you realise the abstract style is very deliberate and precise, slightly wry in its absurdities, and really quite enjoyable. A few highlights:

"If thrown off balance when entering the house, call out your name or, if you prefer, someone else's."

"Strive to find a marked resemblance between yourself and the house. If by chance you fail to do so, proceed even so as though the house were your identical twin."


"Should an unexpected even occur, freeze in place for as long as you see fit. Then adopt a more suitable (for being more thought out) position for an additional twenty seconds or so."

"Always question where you are in relation to visible and invisible chains of islands known as Japan."

"Move in slow measured steps through the Cleaving Hall and, with each arm at a distinctly different height, hold both arms out in front of you as sleepwalkers purportedly do."

"It may take several days to find everywhere in the house that the dining room is."

"Inside the Geographical Ghost, renege on all geographically related pledges of allegiance."

"Within the Zone of the Clearest Confusion, always try to be more body and less person."


***

This park/exhibition (parxibition?) was definitely nothing like anything I'd seen before, and the surroundings were gorgeous too .There were a few people around but the park opened quite a few years ago now and you could tell it wasn't a big attraction any more, if it ever was, and was looking a bit run-down. Mostly this added to its charm, but it did have its downsides - for all the playful geometrics, the biggest surprise I actually got was a dead bat in one of the corridors. I don't think it was meant to be there. I also bumped my head on a tunnel roof twice in five minutes, which was a bit painful.

Still, I had a great day out. I really want to make more use of my time and take more day trips like this, not necessarily to big tourist destinations but to nice everyday places with their own quirks. Hopefully fewer spiders though. And dead bats. And tunnels.

Being Healthy in Japan

Yes, I recognise the irony of doing this post right after my tribute to Saizeriya.

I think people's image of Japanese cuisine is generally very healthy. Little slivers of fish accompanied by a tiny bowl of fluffy white rice and maybe some kind of perfectly placed leaf. That kind of thing. A lot of foreigners here have a hard time convincing their parents that they don't just eat sushi every day. But to be honest, I'm not sure Japanese cuisine is as healthy as its reputation suggests. Some elements are healthy, sure: a lot of seafood, tofu, soybeans, and the portions are generally small (except with ramen for some reason, which generally comes in massive bowls which I literally never finish). However, there's also a lot of convenience food, which a lot of busy workers and students seem to rely on almost entirely: convenience store fried chicken, canned coffee full of sugar, cup noodles, sweet pastries. There are tonnes of small restaurants on every corner that cater cheaply to hordes of tired people. Even in traditional cuisine, there's a fair amount of fried food (Nagoya's specialty is crispy chicken wings), fatty cuts of meat, and sticky glutinous rice. (At this point the entire world screams at me either for suggesting carbs are bad and I'm missing out the real culprit of fat, or for suggesting fats are bad and I'm missing out the real culprit of carbs. All of these people yelling I presume have photocopies of their PhDs in nutrition ready to send to me.)

I feel like I meet a lot more people here than back home who simply don't know how to cook. Back home I think cooking is considered an important life skill for every adult, even if many people can only knock up the same few basic recipes. On the other hand, I feel like in Japan lots of people within certain demographics never feel much pressure to learn how to cook and can just rely on families, noodle bars and 7-11 to meet all their nutritional needs. Young people often live with their parents throughout university and beyond, and still have their meals cooked by their mothers. Office workers often have cafeterias and the aforementioned junk-food infrastructure to fall back on, since they don't have much time to cook and many live in small company-provided apartments that may not even have proper kitchens. And men often move from eating their mother's meals to their wife's meals, with any time in between probably not being worth the effort to learn.

For English teachers, too, it can be hard to convince yourself to cook unless you get into good habits. It's easy to get 'skinny-fat' in the eikaiwa lifestyle - not eating until late and living off snacks while working, running around after kids and then slurping up a bowl of ramen with the rest of the miserable worker bees, not gaining weight but not feeling very healthy either. I'm pretty familiar with 'skinny-fat' - the genetic lottery has awarded me a petite frame and I don't gain weight easily, which is easy to confuse with good health until you realise you need a water break and a nap after crambling up a set of stairs. ("Crambling" is a word I invented. I'm going for a portmanteau of scrambling and crumbling.) I'm trying to take better care of my health, Saizeriya aside, as well as trying to consume a lot less meat for various reasons.

But it can be harder in Japan than at home:

•  My working times are awkward, which means I eat dinner late, and I don't have a proper lunchbreak at work where I can get a proper meal out. I really should be better packing lunches for myself rather than allowing myself to get hungry and buying sugary energy bars on my breaks. 
• A lot of ingredients I might buy to cook healthy meals at home (pulses, cheeses, some vegetables) aren't available here, or are only available from expensive import stores which aren't close to my house. A lot of healthy/vegetarian/vegan recipes I see knocking around often rely on fancy stuff that hasn't made it to Japan yet. Quinoa, agave nectar, decaffeinated boobly flour and so on.
• I don't have a proper oven or much cooking equipment/space.
• The meat thing is also hard when you go out, as despite the aforementioned image of peaceful Buddhist simplicity many people get when they picture Japanese cuisine, vegetarianism is still very fringe in Japan and even vegetable-based dishes will generally use meat stock or just go the whole hog (ahem) and stick big chunks of meat in there without telling anyone. I recently saw an online article about eating vegan in Japan, which basically ended up telling people in desperately hopeful terms that you can do it perfectly easily so long as you just stick to eating bits of cabbage leaves and lotus roots that arrive as the side dish to everyone else's meal.

Nonetheless, I'm trying. I've realised the key is good meal planning, so I'm trying to work out my meals every weekend. I might take to doing all my meal prep in advance on one day a week and store lots of pre-prepared meals in Tupperware in the fridge, though I'm a bit worried it'll turn me into one of these wide-eyed nutrition-obsessed ladies in a tank top who eats the same slice of salmon with cucumber every day but always uploads it to Instagram anyway. I'm still basically eating what I want, but I just try to make sure I have things in the house I can actually prepare quickly and eat, or else I tend to get lazy, wait until I'm way too hungry to cook and just get something from Lawson instead. In terms of exercise, I'm enjoying doing pilates at home most days, though the mat I do it on seems to pick up loads of hair and dust which then get all over me, creating a kind of mini-Yeti effect. I'm not sure it's the most intense or effective exercise but I enjoy the way it feels and I already feel like I'm getting a bit more toned and defined.

Hopefully I can update you all on my progress soon! I might even stick up some recipes. And eventually, I'd like to put up a picture of me lifting up a big truck with my muscles. Might have to keep training for a few more weeks though.

100 Yen Wonders/Japanese Poundshop Haul

Every country has their equivalent of a pound store/dollar store. Actually I have no idea if that's true, I just made it up. But Japan definitely does. Whilst poundshops in the UK usually just sell out-of-date chocolate bars and weird deodorant, hyakuen (100 yen) shops are genuinely nice, like some kind of Paperchase-type fancy shop you might spend ages looking in but feel guilty about actually buying anything from. Except every item costs just 108 yen (100 yen plus tax), which equates to about 50p, which is very hard to feel guilty about. There are a few different big chains of hyakuen shops - Daiso is the biggest, and feels slightly more vibrant and eccentric, like a cross between a Wilkinsons and your grandparents' attic; whilst its main rivals, Seria and Can-Do, are light, airy and colourful. In fact, Seria's slogan is "color the days".

One of the only English slogans in Japan that actually works quite well.

As a Westerner it's extremely weird to go into a discount shop and see loads of genuinely really nice things that I could actually buy and use, many of which would easily reach ten times the price in the UK. When we first came to Japan we used Seria - the hyakuen shop I most commonly use in Nagoya - to purchase pretty much all of our stationery, cooking and cleaning equipment, decorations and storage, and the lightness of the bill was very much appreciated when we'd yet to receive our first payslip. I'm not sure there's much you can't buy at a hyakuen shop - makeup, whistles, chargers, slippers, spatulas, maracas.

Recently I've been trying to make myself more efficient by writing to-do lists in a cute notebook with multicoloured pens, and giving myself a sticker if I complete all my tasks for the day, because apparently I am five. (Surprisingly, the atavistic lure of primary colours turn out to be a pretty good motivator and I am definitely getting more done in the last few weeks.) I wanted to get some stationery to help me out with this, and I also needed some general bits and bobs for the flat, so the other week I took a big trip to Seria and got:

If my counting is correct, all of this cost me Y2268 (£12.38), which I believe is about the cost of half a panini in London. This included:

• some general cute stationery, such as mini-envelopes with parakeets on them which I wanted just because;
• some little foldup storage units for my wardrobe, because Nick and I have to share quite a small space for our clothing; I only have half a coatrack and the bottom of the wardrobe, which I have to crawl into like a goblin if I want to find anything. These units have helped enormously - all my stuff is now separated neatly, so when I do my goblin-crawling I can do it with the minimum of effort.
• A soap dish (because just leaving the soap on the sink leads to scum.)
• A toothbrush-holder (keeping your toothbrush in a normal cup leads to scum.)
• Socks (I needed socks)
• Two battery-operated candles, which turned out to look a lot tackier than I imagined and I'm not sure I'll ever use them. Bit of a damp squib, but not a problem at 100 yen each
• And my personal favourite, these stickers for when I've done well at clearing my to-do lists:

"Taihen yoku dekimashita" = "you did so well at doing stuff".

***

I hope I've proved to you how good 100 yen shops are. If you aren't quite convinced, let me present to you Exhibit B, from which I'm currently drinking my tea:

In case you can't read the text in the second picture, the dancing frog is saying "I am excited very much!" You and me both, my friend. You and me both.

A Tribute to Saizeriya.

Oh, Saizeriya. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Saizeriya is a chain of cheap, casual Italian restaurants. But you must understand, it is more than that. It feeds both our body and our souls.

The first time I went was perhaps a couple of months after I moved here. I only ordered one pizza, which was nice but quite small. I came away feeling vaguely happy with my meal, and amused at the ostentatious Renaissance-style decor; still I was unaware of the depth of this beautiful relationship I had just begun. A few months passed and I realised that there was a Saizeriya just above one of the schools I work at, where I happened to have a few troublesome students and generally found my shifts quite stressful. Hell, why not drop in after work for a glass of wine and some pasta? Unwind for a bit.

Saizeriya is designed to comfort. Everything is painted in warm tones. The seats are like little sofas. Everyone is happy to see you. A glass of wine is 100 yen (50p). When you order a pizza, the server always double-checks to see if you only want one. Thus, I learned the mistake I'd made during that blundering first visit: you don't order just one thing. Even if you're not that hungry, the prices demand that you get at least two more dishes than you really need. Saizeriya wants you well-fed. Saizeriya is like a cuddle.

It is astonishing to see how much you can eat and not break 1000 yen. To start with, for 150 yen you can get access to the drink bar and load up on juice, fizzy drinks, coffee and teas. If you're feeling cavalier you can even grab one of the nice teabags to take back home with you. (I feel a little guilty about this, but then I remember that for the first six months or so of going to Saizeriya, I didn't realise you had to pay for the drink bar at all and was simply stealing loads of drinks from them. In light of this more serious crime, for which I have thoroughly repented, the teabag thing doesn't seem like a big deal). Along with drinks you could get pizza, pasta, salad, soup, bread, cheese and dessert and have it cost less than eight quid in English money. Every time you look at your final bill it's a little bit of magic. At such prices you can afford to get creative. I usually order two salads, the spinach sautee and the caprese, and mix them together in a big bowl of hedonism. Last week I got two pizzas, one after the other, and thought nothing of it. At Saizeriya you are your own god. There's even paintings of cherubs on the walls. Sometimes I close my eyes and think I hear them singing to me sweetly.

Saizeriya would never work in the UK. It's open until 2am, for Christ's sake, and you can get a carafe of wine for the price of a pack of Fruit Pastilles. Imagine the nightmares. The drunks. The aggression. Staff dodging pools of vomit and they bring yet another lasagne to the table of rowdy students. Never work. Only in Japan can Saizeriya exist, beckoning you in with its matronly glow, where you are always welcome.

Saizeriya is love.

Wednesday, 9th September: A Walk Round Chikusa

Summer was mercifully short this year, and I've been taking the opportunity to go for walks. The Nagoya International Centre offers walking guides for those who want to wander around our pleasant but slightly mousy city. Even though Nagoya is one of the biggest cities in Japan, we can't really compete with Tokyo's edge, Kyoto's history, Osaka's gregarious people or Sapporo's novelty bear magnets. We're mainly a city of business and industry (and chicken restaurants, lots of famous chicken restaurants). When I ask my students to name some famous places or recommended things to do, I usually get the sound of sucked-in-teeth and prevarication in response. Nagoya Castle, a couple of shrines and the aquarium are the main responses I get, not a lot else. Still, the International Centre does its best to offer a few routes you could take around the city to check out some history and walk off all that chicken you ate. And even if it's not the most jaw-dropping city in the world, I've come to think of it as my home and I have a great deal of affection for Nagoya.

Most recently, I took the International Centre's recommended route around Chikusa ward, a reasonably central area near my house containing a couple of universities, the baseball stadium and the pachinko district. However the route shied away from these more showy elements and instead took me mostly down leafy residential roads. I actually saw very little of the attractions I was supposed to be paying attention to - one of the shrines was down some weird side-road I couldn't find and some of the others I just somehow missed completely. The maps aren't very detailed and Japanese roads can be very hard to navigate due to most of them not having any names. I was also relying on my phone, but constant switching between the International Centre's map and Google Maps to cross-reference my location drained my battery pretty quickly and I basically made up the second half of the route myself, sneaking through a university campus (partly out of nosiness) and finding my way back to the station. All in all it took about two hours and I covered about half the district. As I said, I didn't actually see much in the way of major sites, but I actually sort of prefer it that way. It's nice to just explore a region of my city that I have no real reason to be in, and pass through ordinary streets looking at mildly interesting things like these:

I'd especially like to draw your attention to "Snafkins Music Academy".

What I Did On My Summer Holidays

When God closes a door, he opens a window. (A window is still way more annoying to go through than a door though.) When me, Nick and our friend Lydia decided to go on holiday together, we picked Taiwan as our destination of choice, mainly (at least from my point of view) off the back of a couple of nice pictures and the promise of steamed buns. Tickets bought, we happily went round telling everyone we were off to Taipei; sure, we'd checked the weather forecast and seen that there'd be a lot of rain, but we'd still have lots of fun splashing around in a new country, right? We even spent a few hours in a weird labyrinthine hospital waiting to get jabs.

The day before our departure, I woke up in the living room (the only room with air conditioning, I slept on a futon there the whole month of July). Nick was prodding my head with an expectant finger, telling me there was a 'super-typhoon' on the way to Taiwan. A lot of stressful discussion and phone calls followed. We all eventually decided our best option was to cut our losses and cancel the trip. It's easy to get complacent about typhoons when you live in Nagoya; it's in central Japan and typhoons usually come up from the south, vent their rage on Okinawa and Kyushu and then peter out to a brisk wind by the time they've reached us. However, this typhoon seemed particularly strong, and we didn't feel comfortable with the risks of being in a foreign country where we don't speak the language. (Is it interesting that I didn't think of Japan as a 'foreign country' when I wrote that? No? Okay.) Instead we booked a flight and a bunch of different hotels here in Japan, and planned an itinerary, all in the same morning. Phew. (Oh, and when we came back no-one seemed to have been worried, even though they thought we were in Taiwan when the typhoon hit. DON'T WORRY, I'M FINE YOU GUYS.)

We went to Hokkaido, which was a touch unimaginative since Nick and I went at the exact same time last year, but we still had lots we wanted to do and it was easier to go somewhere vaguely familiar at such short notice. Plus, I really cannot describe to you how nasty the summer heat is in Nagoya. Escaping to the north is the only true relief.

Anyway, here are some highlights:

• Takikawa. This rural town of around 20,000 people was where we stopped over for about half an hour to change trains, but it easily makes it into the highlights. I believe it exists somewhere outside the bounds of time and space, and might possibly act as some sort of purgatory like that island on Lost (if you still haven't watched Lost and are angry at spoilers, don't worry, it's shit and you would have wasted your time). An eerie breeze tickled our ears and swept softly over businesses that must have been closed for twenty years. We saw a lone man selling balloons outside a deserted-looking shopping centre, and when we turned round for a few seconds and then turned back - I promise you this really happened - he had vanished. Through dirty windows we saw that the second floor of an abandoned dance studio had collapsed and left a big hole with wires and Polyfilla hanging out, dangling over the vegetation that was quite happily growing through the foundations. On the stairs of another shop there was a massive mural of a prawn, painted to look like it had tripped and was in the process of rolling down to the basement. Everything in this town was magical.

• When we said goodbye to Takikawa and went to our actual destination, Furano, we felt music booming through the ground just outside the station. A hundred yards down the road some kind of mini-music festival was happening, with a 90s punk cover band, food stalls and everyone having a good time. A couple apprehended us, pointed to a stall selling venison and chortled "it is the meat of a deer?!". One of the things I love most about Japan is the spirit you feel at festivals and other events - everyone's just drinking, laughing and enjoying themselves, and you never get the feeling that someone's going to start threatening a glassing. After a drink and an amble down to the hotel, I made use of the open-air bath, which was empty seeing as it was almost midnight. I enjoyed the freedom of bathing under the stars with all the town spread out in front of me, at least until a massive cranefly came along and forced me to beat a hasty retreat.
  
  

• Sheep.
  
  

• Asparagus ice cream. 6/10, would recommend to a mildly tolerable acquaintance. I had this at a cheese factory in Furano, where we all failed miserably on a dairy-themed quiz aimed at children. The only way to relieve the shame was to have a delicious pizza in the sun at their restaurant, followed by novelty ice cream (other flavours included pumpkin, corn and - of course - cheese). I asked if I could sample before I bought and was told no, which makes sense since no-one would buy a full scoop of these flavours if they could just try them all for a laugh instead. In this particular game of Russian Roulette I think I did all right - I wouldn't eat it again but the taste was fresh, grassy and creamy. Also there was a tractor on the lawn in front of the factory, but I didn't get a go on it because there were bloody children on it the whole time.
  
  

•  Lavender ice cream! Near Furano is a well-known lavender farm, which I think I've even seen cropping up on some Buzzfeed '23 Amazing Things That You Just Can't Even' type of list. My camera didn't quite do justice to the scenery, but it made me very happy (for all I'd like to think of myself as some brilliant underappreciated genius, there aren't many things that make me quite so fundamentally happy as seeing lots of pretty primary colours). One interesting thing about Hokkaido is that it reminds me a lot of Europe - maybe because of the milder climate, or the dairy farms, or the Western influence in its architecture - and I find that strangely comforting. It's almost like it's the closest thing I can get to coming home.
  
  

• This place is unremarkable but I want to put it here because this is where I smelled the worst thing I have ever smelled. It coincided with Nick opening and eating a dried pepperoni stick, so at first I thought it was that. Only when I moved away from his affronted person and found myself still smelling it did I realise it must have been something else. It was like cowshit and dog food, but much more sour and bitter and pungent, making me feel physically sick. I can still remember it now.
  
  

• Another stalwart of Buzzfeed's 'These Gifs of Hamsters Reacting to Jaw-Dropping Sites of Natural Beauty Will Totally Make Your Day'. Aoike (Blue Pond) is actually not a natural pond (I know, I know, Buzzfeed lied to you, it's okay), but is a fortunate side-effect from when a levee was built nearby. It is believed that traces of aluminium in the water create the vivid turquoise colour. Sadly, despite being very popular with tourists it is almost completely inaccessible without a car. We only had about fifteen minutes there before having to catch the bus, since another one wouldn't come for about four hours. Also I hate buses in Japan because I don't take them very much and every time I do, I mess up because I don't understand the payment system and the driver can barely mask his contempt for me.
  
  

• The Sapporo TV Tower. TV towers in themselves are only mildly interesting, but the real gem here is the souvenir shop. How do you feel about fridge magnets which take Hokkaido-themed things and superimpose the faces of angry bears on them? Or shirts featuring a giant bear tearing up the tower as they fight the Sapporo Self-Defense Force? (We bought seven of them, enough to make the cashier feel pressured to give us a free gift.) Sweets with the rather inadvisable brand name of "Yukky"? How about a loincloth with "My Tower" written on it? All of these bounties and more are available at Sapporo TV Tower's souvenir shop.
  
  

A notebook with Sapporo's clock tower on the left, the TV Tower on the right. The TV Tower is asking "What are you writing?". The clock tower replies "It's a secret" 

Maybe see you next year, Hokkaido?