Halloween and Christmas

JIMTOF, the tooling exhibition is finally over. It's been 6 stressful but fun days. My work mostly consisted of explaining the ice sculpture in our booth to curious Japanese visitors. I've been practicing my Japanese a lot and I’ve also met many interesting people. Some people came in the morning to watch the sculpture, and then returned in the afternoon when it was finished. Our booth was popular. Another of my missions was to be in charge of our Yellow bag competition. At the exhibition we handed out yellow bags, and 5 times a day I went to find someone with one of those bags, present him or her with an iPod Shuffle and then take a picture in front of the ice sculpture with the happy winner. It was fun, since many winners got really happy. But some though, just said "I don't want no iPod" and fled. Weird. I've also been told, like 235 times that I'm fluent in Japanese. By some, when I've been having longer conversations, and by some when I've only said "Konnichiwa", which is the word for hello. It sort of makes the compliment pointless in the end, and I'm not sure if I'm really good at Japanese or if it's just a way for the Japanese to be polite. Anyhow. The work alone hasn't been the only nice part. I've also met a lot of nice Swedes who came to Japan only for this event. The Swedes from the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi were really nice, and I got a long particularly well with Tjåsa, the ice sculptress. I took her to a sky bar in Shinbashi one night, were we had dinner while watching Tokyo from above. One funny tradition about Japanese exhibitions it that every company has its own presentation girls. We had ours aswell, ofcourse. They were dressed in Yellow and were wearing white boots with high heels. Once in an hour they held a presentation about some of our tools, something that they of course knew nothing about, but they had somehow managed to learn the texts and presented it perfectly. Interesting. Some other companies had ladies that must have been Russian or so. Miniskirts and 20 cm high heels on a 2 meter tall, fake blond girl. And this is a tooling exhibition, not even cars or motor cycles. Well. This is Japan. Last week was Halloween, by the way. There have been preparations everywhere; cookies in orange in the bakeries, decorations in the shopping windows and pumpkin costumes in the stores since over a month ago. But, the day of Halloween, the 31st, the only thing that happened was that the orange changed into red. I was in a shopping mall at that very day, and there were Christmas trees everywhere. I think Japan is the most extreme country in the world when it comes to commercialism. It was the same thing with Christmas last year, and it will be the same this year as well. The good part though, is that this year I'm spending Christmas in Sweden. All the built-up Christmas spirit will come in handy when I get home to a probably rainy Sweden in the middle of December. The Christmas spirit actually got me the day before yesterday, when I had my first Gingerbread Latte at Starbucks. It tasted exactly as it did last year, and since the time around Christmas in Japan might have been the funniest time in my life, it made me feeling quite sentimental. I'm planning on going to Starbucks today as well. They even play Christmas music, but it makes me quite happy and confident about returning to Sweden quite soon. So, today I'm having a Starbucks date with Haruka, a girl from the university I went to. Tonight we are probably going somewhere to celebrate Tomoya’s birthday that was yesterday. I had bought a lot of presents and a nice cake, but since he was out on a forced drinking party until 3 A.M. the night before, he didn't manage to eat any. Well, maybe next year.