Part 6 - Lighting up the cold

As I was discussing with the other intern the other day, this is not an experience that an inflexible person could handle. If you are a picky eater or have to sleep at certain times or have to correspond to people everyday, or just are not good at going with the flow, THIS IS NOT THE TRIP FOR YOU. Even I who consider myself quite flexible am finding it quite frustrating at times.

Tuesday

The staff at the firm are not very comfortable with english, and as a result they don't always keep us informed about what we will be doing, or not doing. In the office we usually don't do a whole lot, so on Tuesday when I came to the office expecting to do not a whole lot and was informed half an hour after getting to there that I was going to a fancy lunch party thing that I had to dress up for, I was quite annoyed. I ran home and changed into a dress, hopped in Takano-san's car, and off we went to a hotel in downtown Obihiro for a New Years Party hosted by one of the owner of one of the largest banks in Japan, who also owns a newspaper company in Hokkaido. We parked the car and headed for the entrance when we were met with a wall of people from the press awaiting the arrival of the bank man and his son, who was taking over the newspaper. After pushing our way through the cameras we had entered what seemed like a sea of Japanese business men in black suits. Needless to say I stuck out like a sore thumb being a blonde girl in a bright turquoise dress. As we climbed the stairs to the main hall, Takano-san as usual started introducing us to all his friends, which are plentiful. At this particular event I met about 35, including the leader of the slow food movement in Japan, and the owner of the bank. We entered the main hall where there were about 2000 business men assembled . . . and me. The room was filled with beautiful food, 20 kinds of pastries, fruits, sashimi, every kind of tempura, roast beef, potatoes, chicken, fish, rice, seaweed, cheese, and Takano insisted that we try everything, as well as every drink! After filling up and feeling pretty light headed from the 5 varieties of sake he made me try, we piled in the car and headed to what I thought was going to be the office.

Little did I know that we were actually going to help out at the light festival the firm was designing in the tourist town of Tokachi Gawa (Tokachi is the region and Gawa means river). Luckily I brought a pair of pants to put over my tights which made working outside in -15 possible. The main light display was already set up and consists of large triangular and globular paper like lanterns on about 3 football fields worth of hill and field. The light festival which was designed completely by the firm includes the main display as well as a little log house to sell local products from Tokachi, a te-u (hot tub for your hands) a tobogan slide, rides on a big rubber raft pulled by a snowmobile and a clear vinyl house, basically a plastic greenhouse to house a restaurant cafe and the ashi-u (hot tub for feet). It's put on by the surrounding hotel owners and is free for everyone, and I guess attracts lots of tourists to the area mostly from southern Japan, Taiwan and china, who have never or seldom experienced the comparatively wild north. The designers and the hotel owners and chief staff were also responsible for setting a lot of it up, and in effect us the designer interns. The landscape architect not only designed the light displays outside, but the interiors, the menus, the signs and whatever else needed designing.

we spend Tuesday forming 300 giant snowballs with the other hotel owners for later construction of giant lighting cones to go at the entrance of the vinyl house. It was very cold and wet. The sun goes down at around 4:30 and then it gets really cold. We figured we would be leaving when it was dark outside, but the kindly brought us a light so we could keep working until the meeting with the electricians was over at 6:30. We finally headed back to our house, which takes about half an hour, but stopped for an hour to pick some things up that we needed from the store, to get home at around 8:30, I'm glad I had a big lunch!

The next day we left the house at 7:30 am, to arrive for a breakfast meeting with the hotel owners at 8. I have eaten many strange things since arriving but none as strange as the beans I had for breakfast that morning. Strange and stringy and very strong tasting I couldn't help but gag very loudly while they were discussing the menu. It started a wave of laughter that rolled down the table and it was then that they decided to eliminate the beans from the menu. The hotel owners are really nice and although I can't understand them most of the time, they are still really hilarious and are obviously way to comfortable with each other. The next two nights were late and cold as well, running out the door early and munching my breakfast of rice crackers, almonds and apples in the car. The highlights of my day running in to the heater in the vinyl house every half hour or so to defrost my hands, and laughing at the hilarious hotel men. 

On Friday was the grand opening of the festival and with half an hour to go we finally finished setting everything up. One of the hotel owners announced that I should be the bartender/barista of the vinyl restaurant because the way he saw it people would be impressed by a foreigner who has come so far just for the festival. Bad idea. I had no idea how popular the event was, I was bartender with two others Friday, Saturday and Sunday with crowds of a few hundred every night at least. Getting people drinks in a busy restaurant is one thing, but when you can't understand the people you are serving it makes is a great deal more difficult. I understood the obvious things but often they would just start talking to me, or talking about me or asking me questions, at these times I smiled and said yes. If this failed I would look confused until they asked someone else. Eventually I got moved on to production of drinks as people slowly realized that maybe I wasn't cut out for the job. I did however get on local television twice while working! Both times consisted of me handing the TV person a hot chocolate and saying "tastes good!" 

I knew by now that it was good to fill up on food while I could because I didn't know when the next feeding would be. Naturally I filled up at the opening with Japanese style hamburgers and rice burgers. Only after the opening did I realize my mistake, when Naka-San let us know that we were off to the after party at a restaurant in downtown Obihiro, and one of the hotel owners told me that we were sleeping over at his hotel because we would be too full of "drink" to go home. 

We arrived at the restaurant and we had our own little room, and a large table already filled with sashimi, 2 big hot pots, and skewers of meat and veggies. we were not there two minutes before they started ordering sake and beer and almost everything on the menu. After a few drinks the hotel guys were getting even more hilarious and asking Kat and I which one of them was 'our type,' this was followed by a group palm reading session, a game to get the canadians try as much strange food as possible, and an english lessons to give them street cred in Canada. words such as comeback and dis were particularity popular. That night I managed to get down sashimi octopus, boiled lamb brain and some kind of fish gill. Much of this has been documented on film which I promise I'll put up soon!

We ended our night at the hotel at around 1am, but before we went to bed we went to the onsen at the hotel for a late night dip in the extremely hot water.

warm at last.