Proper update

Phew, it sure is busy here on some days. Bit annoyingly, daily activities have been spread around on all days meaning I haven't had much time to actually rest. And on same time there are still fairly large waiting times, like coming to school on morning and doing something for couple hours and then having to wait till 4 pm for another thing. Before you know, it's evening again and time to hit the sack.

But anyway, let me just unwind this little backlog I developed...

First off, weekend trip to Tomari area on 15th day:

Tomari is area in southern part of Hokkaido, next to sea at west. It has the only nuclear plant in Hokkaido, so I was naturally interested about it.

It turned out there are some other interesting things in there as well. We went to a small local space exploration museum first. Mamoru Mohri is famous astronaut from town of Yoichi where this museum is located.

Best thing we did there was attending little planetarium show, was quite enchanting really. And for some reason I was able to understand quite a bit of that japanese narration. Maybe because I already know quite a bit about astronomy? :) I also bought myself a hat (finally!) and I took few pictures. They even had a 3/4 sized model of Hubble telescope but picture I took from it failed. Oh well, it was still pretty cool.


Me and Mr. Horuichis' seminar group as fake astronauts...


Part of a big memorial stamp collection, there was tons of different kinds. ^^

After that we went for a lunch. On a hunch we selected restaurant that sounded like a modern chicken place but it turned out it was a barbecue place with wood/coal self-service frying. Local area produces alot of vegetables so they served lots of onions, potatoes, pumpkins and more as well. It was good but since day was pretty hot is was bit hard to sit inside for a whole hour. ;)


One of the barbecue tables inside this old building. And yes, there is a lot of smoke but building is well ventilated so no problem.

We also stopped at "road station" to get a stamp for Mr. Horuichis collection book. There is some kind of reward if you collect enough of them but I don't remember what it was.

From there we continued to Tomari and specifically to building called "Tomarinkan". It is a large museum/performance hall hybrid building. Inside there are some archeological exhibitions about the original settlers of this area, educational area for children and adults about nuclear power plants and concert hall and meeting rooms.

Before the concert we went to local seafood restaurant. I ate steamed fish, bamboo stalks and rice. It was delicious, steamed macarel was especially good.

Live concert performer was artist called EPO. She has been performing for about 30 years already. Her music style is japanese pop music, I suppose she reminded me a little about our local artists like Paula Koivuniemi. Her voice is strong and beautiful on live, unlike many modern performers... So it was a good show to watch. Obviously it was not allowed to take pictures, and this restriction is taken quite seriously by guards. ;)

After the show it was already pretty late. Sun was down and nighttime view was very nice. You could hear frogs croaking everywhere from the surrounding mountains and air was cool and bit moist. We drank some coffee in small restaurant and headed home finally.

This week I've done quite a few short trips.

I've visited tea seremony house and tasted chinese green tea (it's really good by the way).

Few days ago I went Hokkaido university agricultural research department and today I also went to another institute researching envinromental and agricultural issues. I've seen quite a few interesting measurement instruments in these laboratories that I haven't ran into yet in Finland.


Yes, that is Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer (NMR). Resolution of this one is 500 MHZ if I remember correctly.

Other instruments I saw included TGAs (Thermographic Analyzer), ICP-OESes, lots of different kinds of electron microscopes and even one laser microscope. And, I also visited sound and vibration isolation chamber, which was pretty cool. Given how rare true silence is these days, it felt really weird.

And finally this afternoon I visited this really nice small cafeteria,:



It is called "Monte Rosa" and they serve excellent coffee and sweet cakes. Strawberry cake was yummy! Building is what we call "Hirsitalo" back in Finland.

And finally I decided to try what pizza is like here in japan. There is this nice little place next to Sapporo railway station which server italian food. Pastas, pizzas, you name it. Also they seemed to have very nice selection of wines.


View from outside, restaurant is on second floor.


Crispy vegetable pizza I ordered. It was good, although it definitely is bit smaller than what I'm used to. :)

This week and next week are fairly booked so I will just try to keep up my strength and rest when I can. Cya soon!