Before I write anything else - thank you for writing in my guest book! I must say I´m a bit surprised people actually fill in the field about their imaginary pets... If you haven´t already signed it, please do so. It is really nice to know who reads what I write. By the way, you don´t have to write in English. Swedish and Japanese is also fine.

When I looked out through my window on Monday morning I saw the most beautiful thing. Hundreds of falling sakura petals were slowly blowing by, dancing in the wind. I opened the window and was met by sunlight and birdsong. It was really soothing. I stood and watched the petals dance around for a halfhour or something. 

On Tuesday there was a school excursion. Unfortunately I haven´t slept well lately, and the night before the excursion was no exception so I was pretty tired all day. Everyone lined up on the sidewalk in front of the school and then we stuffed ourselves in a couple of buses and went to the nearby Sapporo Winter Sports Museum and olympic ski jump. The museum was pretty amusing. There were a lot of different simulators for different winter sports like ski jumping, cross country skiing, bobsleigh, icehockey goalkeeping, and perhaps the funniest of them all - the speed skating. To simulate speed skating you put on a pair of slippery socks and slid from side to side on a little slippery floor. The goal is to hit the sides of the floor as many times as possible within 30 seconds. I didn´t try any simulators but it was quite funny to watch others play with them. Another funny thing was that a lot of people came up and talked to me. The quesion I was asked over and over again was "You don´t like talking, do you?". Those of you who know me personally probably won´t be very surprised by this and I know I´m not very talkative myself, but I´ve never before been asked straight out why I don´t talk so much (or rather why I "don´t like talking"...). I didn´t know what to say and ended up saying things like "it´s because I´m Swedish" to keep it short. People ask me about that all the time and really seem to expect an explanation. I guess it is because they are Chinese... The Chinese people at school (not just in my class and not just at the lessons) talk all the time and so I´ll take a wild guess that it is a characteristic for Chinese people. Another possibility is that Swedes are quieter than usual and that I´m just not used to anything other than that. This is the first time I´m in a class with (almost) only non-Swedish classmates. Well however that may be, I talk a lot less than any of the Chinese at school and my silence seem to be a mystery to them.

Next, we went for yakiniku in a large hall nearby. It was tasty but there wasn´t enough meat. I sat at a table with Kaku and the people from the hanami and gyoza day. To my left was a Japanese woman who studies at the same school to be a Japanese language teacher. Before the meal there was of course a couple of words from the principal (completely unhearable at our table) and then a unison kanpaaai (cheers!). It was quite enjoyable except for when they started passing around a megaphone in which I had to make a jikoshokai (self-presentation - something you almost always do when you meet a group of people you haven´t met before). Jikoshokai is known and feared by all students of Japanese who have been to Japan. Anyway, when most people had left I ended up with he other Nordic and Australian people at a table, finishing off the left-over beer bottles before we went home. When I came home I was so beat I fell asleep as soon as I hit the bed and woke up in the middle of the night and undressed and got down between the sheets again to get some more sleep before the following day at school.

For you who haven´t been following sumo lately I can tell you that Akebono announced his retirement from the game in January. Akebono is a Hawaiian sumo wrestler in the yokozuna rank (the highest rank in sumo) and by far the tallest of them all, measuring over 2 meters and weighing 1,5 tons. A head-to-head run-in with him must be like being hit by a car. Since he quit there is only two yokozuna left - Takanohana and Musashimaru, another Hawaiian. In fact, Akebono was the first foreigner to attain the yokozuna rank. One of Akebono´s famous features (except his giant body) was his fierce face before and after fights. When I see him in various shows now he is very held back and polite and smiling and it is difficult to imagine it is the same person as the guy in the sumo ring. In one show where they talked about how he started his sumo career they showed a clip of the fight he himself consider his happiest victory - when he was 19 and fought and beat the then 15 year old Takanohana. They were really tiny! And Akebono had short curly hair.

There is a quite amusing program on tv where they list the most popular singles and various artists other than the original performers perform those songs. For example, there has been at least two different famous enka singers performing Ryûichi Kawamura´s (the former singer of the popular rock group Luna Sea) new hit Nê. I also saw a clip from an earlier show where the Swedish singer Meja performed Hitomi Yaida´s  I´m Here Saying Nothing. By the way, the lead singer in the group Ulfuls (who I mentioned earlier with the hit cover Ashita ga aru sa) looks a lot like Thomas Öberg (the singer in the Swedish group Bob Hund/Bergman Rock) both in hairstyle and sideburns and the way he moves and holds the mike when he sings. He doesn´t jump around and play with the mike as much though, and his voice isn´t similar at all.

Tomorrow Emma is coming to Sapporo! I have looked forward to this since I left Fukuoka...