This Saturday I went with Kyeong and her visiting sisters and nieces for some ramen and then we went to a place called Hitsujigaoka. It is like a park with relatively vast gras fields and some birch wood which made me feel like I was home in Sweden. There were some newly shaved sheep there too. And a statue which was supposed to be famous, with the words "Boys, Be Ambitious!" written on it. There was also a wedding chapel with comfy couches and, most interesting next to the green fields, a Sapporo Snow Festival Museum. You have probably heard about the Snow Festival. In winter they put up a lot of giant beautifully sculptured snow statues in the Odori park. This museum featured posters and pictures from the first festival some 50 years ago to last years festival. Talking of last years festival, when I talked to Nicke I asked him if he had went to see it. Apparently he was really sick throughout the festival and missed the whole thing. Bummer. Anyway, at the museum there were photos and miniature models of some of the sculptures and you can really tell that the sculptures have gotten a lot better since the beginning. Before we went back to central Sapporo I just had to take a picture of the birchs. Here in Sapporo they crop the birches heavily. We crop trees in Sweden too but I´ve never seen a swedish cropped birch. Anyway I don´t really like cropping. I like the natural look the best, both when it comes to nature and people. 

When we got back to central Sapporo we went for some kaiten-sushi. Kaiten means rotation and at a kaiten-sushi restaurant you sit by a small conveyor belt with plates, in different colours according to price, with sushi on passes by. If you are lucky you can get a seat near where the sushi chefs put out the newly made sushi, but if you get a seat at the end of the belt you have to wait until the plates have passed the others and by then the sushi you want may already be taken. And there is always the worry that the sushi may have spun around on the conveyor belt longer than is healthy. The sushi that have spun around too long is thrown away (I guess...), and you can order sushi o they bring it to you directly when it is made, so there should be no worry but that is such a waste. But as with the garbage problem I ranted about earlier - in Japan a lot of times convenience is regarded higher than enviroment. Anyway, after that we thought we should go to some relatively quiet place (since the kids were along) and have a beer, but of course it was crowded everywhere, being a Saturday. So we went home.

The next day I decided to go to the movie Metropolis which had it´s premier on Saturday. It is an anime (animation) set in a classic future city with giant skyscrapers. It is based on a manga (comic) from 1949 by the legendary Osamu Tezuka (the most famous manga artist in Japan) and uses extraordinary computer animation combined with top class traditional animation. I have written a review which is under the Movie Review page. Going to the movies by myself is kind of boring so I phoned Kaku and asked if he would come along. He would. But first I went to his apartment. I was a bit early (?) so I had to wait outside until his sister had gotten dressed, but then I could come up and look at Kaku´s new computer. He bought it at a new big department store at their opening sale a couple of weeks ago. It is a 800 Mhz Pentium III and he only payed 10,000 yen (about 900 skr) for it!!! He had to wait in a line outside the department store from the night before to get it. After looking at the computer for a while we went to the cinema and bought our tickets. It is extremely expensive to go to the movies in Japan. A standard ticket costs 1800 yen (about 160 skr) and for students it costs 1500 yen (about 130 skr). There are discount days when you can buy a ticket for 1000 yen but that´s still more expensive than a full price swedish ticket. After the movie they sold all kinds of Metropolis merchandise like t-shirts, stickers, folders and watches.

On Monday I had a really bad cold so I just stayed home and rested all day. I was completely beat. Today I am a bit better but I´m still feeling a bit fevery and dizzy so I stayed home today too. Ooh, it´ll be tough catching up just these two days but it will be even worse before the big test coming up in a couple of weeks. So far we have gone through chapters 19-25 of our main textbook this term, but the test covers chapter 13-25 so these of us who started this term will have to study all the earlier chapters by ourselves. I think it is really weird. And since I haven´t gotten too good results at the biweekly tests (70% at most) I am more than a little bit worried...