what do you see?

I think the trailing edge of the big typhoon is over us at the moment - it's got incredibly windy - and very dark to the North only. The clouds to the West are swaying - I've never seen that before. As you look at them they move a little left, then towards us, then stop, then back a little. These are huge banks of cloud I'm talking about. It's crazy. I think doom is upon us.

This site shows the last earthquake point in Japan, and how strong it was etc. (All in Japanese)

Nakajima park last week sometime 

ah yes, I almost forgot (I don't know how I possibly could) - the car registration goes ON. After teaching a lesson this morning, I came home, had lunch and picked up the finished parking space certificate from the police today. Then I had some tea and headed for the other office to get it all finished. But, lo, I apparently need another document (proof of address I think) that they forgot to mention last time. So, back to the Ward Office in fact to get that. So I've got it. By this time it was 5.30 so no point going back to the original (nameless because I can't be bothered to work out the kanji) place. It took most of the afternoon. Probably a total of almost 2 days working days so far. Just to re-register a car after moving?!

We went to Otaru (the real one this time, not Otaru Chikko, a newly created station/shopping mall/ferris wheel that we met friends at last time) on Saturday, again skirting the "beaches" of rocks and concrete on the way. It's a nice town, with actually quite a lot of apparently genuine old buildings around the place, a canal, lots of Venetian glass shops and a steam clock which hoots the correct time every fifteen minutes although the hands are inexplicably very wrong. But maybe we're learning to blank out the industry, busy roads and other developments like we suspect most people do here, in order to appreciate the "famous" attraction of a place. I'm not sure if we see things as we used to any more. Anyway, we had lunch at a Venetian restaurant (see the Venetian theme? maybe it's because of the canal), and dinner at one of the converted warehouses, now a kind of beer hall - Otaru beer is pretty good, and the interior was interesting, with the brewing equipment on view and a kind of German theme, except for the huge amount of crabs, fish eggs and other fishy things on the menu.

I tried to make coconut rice last night, following the advice of many recipes which said you could simply cook the rice in the rice cooker using coconut milk instead of water.
So I tried. And failed.
Even after a couple of full cooking cycles, the rice remained, well, crunchy. So, added water, cooked more. Still a little on the hard side. More water. Crunchy. More water. Incredibly dense sweet rice paste.

Blimey, it seems that my web-cam page comes up first in a Yahoo search for "sapporo webcam...I'd better start showing more of Sapporo then, not just my grim face. At least Google has the sense to rank it lower! And unsurprisingly, Ask Jeeves came up with nothing at all.
Well, I finally finished a major stage of sorting the car reg. out, getting the police to accept the paperwork, after getting my apartment owners stamp on a particular part of it. This entailed going to my apartment owner's agency who actually deal with the public and shelling out three and a half thousand. Now I just wait until next Tuesday to pick up my certificate, then re-go (is this English?) to the other place (I can't even be bothered to work out its name) and change my license plates. All this, and I think I'm going to sell the car soon anyway! Oh well.
It's still sunny here, very nice actually. We're both seeing some getting progress with finding students and work in general now which is handy!
I'm feeling pretty relaxed at last. My apparent ranting about car registration tedium and so on is really only for the benefit of an interesting blog, honest!

Sorry about the gap again. Let me see, excuse, excuse...ah yes, I had to...go to...the...samurai shop...and...register my sword. That's it, yes! You know, Japanese bureaucracy and all that.

There's an interesting video on this BBC page at the moment about Japanese women rejecting traditional duties and motherhood, very true. Although you should see how popular wedding related stuff is though!

I've just switched on commenting on my posts as you can see, so please feel free everyone!
Also I've changed the archives to monthly, so they are a bit more sensible to look at.
I'll be doing bits and pieces here and there with navigation and stuff on the blog and our main site too, I realise there are lots of messy things to sort out still. Night!

We went and dumped our loose change in the ATM earlier, found out we had almost 2000 yen. Then bought a few provisions.
It's suddenly got very dark...another thunderstorm's just starting, this must be the fourth one we've had so far in Sapporo! Better shut down for a while, and settle down with some vodka tonics.

What else? Well we bought some lemons and plums from a little fruit shop in our area, and then went up to Odori park earlier this evening to see the last event of this year's summer festival - the bon dancing (and competition - called koncouru, after "concours" in French apparently) as it turned out. Interesting, a lot of people in a mixture of traditional costumes, wooden geta, straw hats, and some in fancy dress. The sight of well spaced-apart large peaches, crabs, anime characters and Spiderman dancing slowly round trafficless streets, as other people sometimes dodged across in front of them, and officials using megaphones asked people only inches in front of them to move back in incredibly polite language, all to the accompaniment of impossibly rhythmed music was certainly memorable! (see here for a sample of the music (BTW, the other new sample, "Enka", was recorded on the top of Bihoro pass near Kitami sometime last year, you can vaguely hear a lady singing along with it, as well as the blustering wind)).
It's suddenly cooler, a few leaves are falling, and supermarkets have their "Autumn festa" posters up already. I think summer is ending for real now.

I got a book out from the library called "Japanese for Busy People". Had to renew it this week, cos I was too busy to use it.

Well it went and got sunny and warm again :-) the summer's not over yet. We got a table! Also from our friendly local furniture shop, although we brought it home ourselves this time. Yatta, at last! Now we have somewhere to sit and teach, as well as eat, rather than using a pile of bamboo cushions. That sounds very bohemian, it wasn't, believe me.
The beer gardens are all closed up now, we never got around to going to the Odori ones, aargh. At least we went to the Park Hotel one anyway.

Well we bought an iron yesterday, and went to Freshness Burger (it used to be our favourite cafe in Kamakura, back when we lived in Tokyo) in Susukino. I met a student too.
Today has consisted of eating and going to the library so far. And me filling in that parking space paperwork as much as I can. I think I have to measure our parking space and draw a diagram of it too. SO tedious!
Fighting lethargy! Must keep going!

it's thundering eerily over the hills, there are church bells in the distance, and a dog is whining somewhere in the neighbourhood.

bureaucracy! I spent most of my afternoon driving all over Sapporo (NB - the north and south outskirts are both quite bleak). I need to re-register my car here, get a new license plate and register my parking space. You know. So I go to the office for it, get told I first need to get a certificate from the main ward police station (deja vu, I should have known from last time I did this about a year ago...) - which is apparently in north 11, but I can't find one on the map. So I phone the helpful info line and they say it's in north 2...so I hightail off there, park round the corner on a meter (cos I can't easily get to the police station due to a one-way system which I don't feel like using after driving around other ones for half an hour up to this point), go in to the station and get redirected to another building two blocks away...at this one they tell me I have to go to a sub-police station because of where I live (although the main one is a lot nearer to our place, but nevermind). At least I got my driving license address changed here though - although I had to get a new picture taken for their records as it seems the two halves of Hokkaido's police force don't have a connecting computer system - same prefecture, but again, nevermind......
anyway, I head for the south police station (via home for lunch - this is how long it's all taking!) and make the great achievement of getting some paperwork to go away with, fill in and return later anyway because I need a stamp from my apartment owner on it!! Flipping heck.
And you know I'm annoyed cos I never resort to such strong language usually.
OK, we're out to try and buy some stuff to bake as it seems to be a good day for it.

Blimey, we're starting to get popular, the web cam hits are almost up to 30 now (don't larf, I'm serious, this is big time for me). Keep it up everyone.
Cheers to Georgie from Cardiff for the email - BTW, I'm half-Welsh, nothing wrong with that ;0) I'll reply to you later!
I suppose it's some kind of risk publishing my email address, but I like living on the edge...why else would I choose to live on the 11th floor in Japan...anyway, no weirdos so far, but that sounds too much like an open invitation, so to change the subject, I'm planning a big overhaul of the pics site v. soon, ie. moving them to a proper page not a photo hosting service. hopefully it will rain this weekend so I have an excuse to stay in and do it.
Oh well, off to change my driving license address in a bit, the excitement eh?! maybe go up to the top of Moiwayama (nearby hill and city-view spot) later.

bliss! I taught a lesson this morning, and I have more work later this afternoon and this evening, but I've just had lunch, had a nap and now I have time for a cup of tea and a bit of telly! it's like being back at university again. to make things even better, it's a cloudy breezy afternoon now. perfect.

Well a few of you have been looking at our web-cam page, thanks! Keep coming back. I hope you've seen something interesting anyway - I've been pointing it out the window and at our TV a bit too, but we don't have the computer on all the time you know, and it's not Big Brother!
It's finally cooled off a little bit, that was good last night because we went out to have yakiniku to a tiny little shop somewhere in susukino (the entertainment district) with a friend from Kitami. really good, I'll take you there sometime!

The good thing about this weather is it's perfect for going to the beer gardens - there are loads here, only open for a few weeks every summer. We went to the Park Hotel one last night for a bit. They all have a very Japanese system for buying stuff - first you buy tickets at a kiosk for whatever you want, then when you want something you give the tickets to a waitress, who brings you the things to your table. We only saw one person fall off his chair last night anyway.

Well there seems to be some kind of local festival going on in a street nearby this evening, involving some "open mike" style singing...you don't want to hear it though, believe me!

There are a lot of underground shopping malls in Sapporo, good in winter when it's too darned cold outside, and good at the moment in the "one off" hot and humid summer that we're having. It's still about 30 degrees every day.

Obon is coming up soon, and there was some drumming and dancing in the middle of the city earlier today. We're looking forward to seeing the big stuff in a week or so.

Waiting for a shop to call about some curtains that we ordered a week or so ago. And there are some more possibilities on the private student front at the moment too...

I've done a few updates: now that I've got some proper free webspace with FTP access, I'm hosting our webcam myself now on a different page. It's not live anymore, and it will only update if anything changes (motion detection!) but at least there's always an image to see up there, even if the computer's off. This should keep you all a bit more happy!! Click the webcam link above to see the page. OK, I know it's boring at the mo, but now I have more time I'll work on it more, I promise! I'll probably move my other sites to the new webspace too, Geocities is too slow really.

Also the header on this page works now too, doesn't it? Let me know...

the heat the heat...we're fighting valiantly not to end up sitting at home all day watching cable and drinking cold tea. managed to go to the ward office and update our foreigner cards, and also do a lot more tidying and sorting out. the place is basically done now.