How does Canada do without this stuff?!

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So I was finally able to meet up with Yuka-san's friend, Yuuko-san, the other day. It turned out that Yuka-san and Yuuko-san were going to have a cup of coffee in Yokohama, and Yuka-san saw fit to invite me out to meet Yuuko-san, and have some coffee/hang out. So, it was kinda short notice, and I had to get ready to head out (I'd planned on bumming around Yokosuka all day with nothing fancy to do...), then hop on a train (1 minute ride by local train to a major station, then 22 minute ride by limited express. On this particular day, there was a 10 minute wait in between trains), and find which starbucks it was that they were in. Starbucks is WAAAY TOO BIG here in Japan! Around the Yokohama station, there's a minimum of 3 or 4 starbucks. I eventually found out which one, and caught them just as they had paid and were going to wait outside for me. They were both still clad in their work outfits- I'm not sure if it's uniform, or just dress code, but Yuka-san was wearing a female version of a suit, and it looked _REALLY_ good! Maybe it's because I'm from Canada where that sorta thing isn't very standard, so I don't get to see it much. (My virgin eyes!) Unfortunately, Yuuko-san had to leave in about 15 minutes, so I really didn't have much time at all to get to talk to her;; Afterwards tho, Yuka-san and I went out to get me some dinner-- I guess she wasn't exhorbitantly hungry, but I hadn't really eaten much but snacks all day, so I wanted something to eat. So I asked her to take me to a place that I've likely not been to before, (which is my usual request) and she took me to this neat little restaurant in the underground shopping center. It's backwards, seriously. First, you go to the till and pay for whatever you're gonna eat, then you wait to be seated- after you're seated, they bring out your food to your table, you eat, and leave. After dinner, I wanted to go buy myself an ipod. I'd actually wanted to buy one a few days ago, but I can't do this alone, as I KNOW the person behind the counter will ask all sorts of complicated questions about warranty and whatnot, that I just simply will NOT understand. Yuka-san got to be my translator for 5 minutes. (Sorry Yuka-san!) So yay! I have an ipod now! To be more precise, I have an ipod nano 4gb, silver. I was -really- tempted to buy the pink one tho. Then, I wanted to head out to the amusement park again (the one I went to with Mayumi-san earlier), in hopes of catching a lot of the excitement during daylight, since again, I forgot my digicam, and had to rely on my keitai. Unfortunately, it was dark by the time we got there, but at least this time, the Ferris Wheel was open when we were there, so we bought some tickets and went on it^^ It was great fun, but too bad it was so short... maybe 5-10 minutes to go around it. There should be a way to turn off the speaker inside tho, cause the lady rattling on about statistics and such was really annoying. I don't care about how many feet it is between gondolas, and why general whats-his-name fought to preserve this particular piece of land. If that's even what she was talking about- I was trying to block it out>< Afterwards, Yuka-san had to start heading home, since she's working at a fulltime job now (that day was her first), and has to get up early-ish to work in the morning. It was a pretty fun day, all in all. I really like spending time with Yuka-san.

The thing about Japanese restaurants, generally speaking, is that they seem to focus a lot on presentation. Almost every restaurant will have a glass display case with plastic replicas of all the dishes (or at least the major ones...) they serve, typically marked with prices, and quite often marked with calorie-counts. It's kinda cool when you're looking for a place to eat, cause you can quite literally "window-shop" for a restaurant. Many of the small restaurants you'll find on the sides of the road (the kinda that only seats maybe a dozen people or less...), will often have a ticket machine just inside the door. It's basically a vending machine that prints out tickets with the name of whatever food you ordered on them. The idea being that the store workers never have to deal with money, I guess. You walk in, pop some money into the machine, and press the button of the food you want. It prints out a ticket, then you go sit down and hand them the ticket. They then prepare the food for you and hand it over the counter. It would seem that food here is a lot more healthy for you as well, but this is just personal observation. Typically in the springtime, I need to watch what I eat, and work at it when I can, to get my 6pack back by, say... mid may, or thereabouts. Since I've gotten here, my 6pack's already noticable, and I've not being doing anything for it! Actually, I was kinda thinking that I've been eating -too many- sweets.. @_@

So I woke up today to the sound of an election truck driving by. You know it's election season in Japan because these things are driving all around to annoy the piss outta you. All they say, seriously, is "I'm ! Vote for me! Thank you!", on these huge megaphones attached to the top of the truck. The phrase was so short, that from the time I could first make out the words, until the time it had driven past me and I couldn't make them out anymore, I'd heard her say it 23 times. They seriously need to invest in posters or something.

Bathrooms are different here as well, in that the toilet room, and washing room are seperate. The toilet room is considered a dirty place, and you actually are supposed to wear a pair of toilet-room-only slippers while in there (they're left in there for everybody to use), whereas it's the opposite for the washing room. Also, if you're taking a bath, the method of doing so is different here. The idea is that you first wash yourself (hair, body, etc...) outside the tub, rinse off, THEN climb into the tub of hot water to just relax and warm up. You then leave the water in the tub for the next person, as it's still clean. The bathroom floors here are MEANT to get wet, as you're washing/rinsing on them (quite often there's a little stool to sit on whilst doing so), as opposed to North American bathrooms where it's considered bad to get the floor wet. So far, all I've been taking is showers, as that's what I'm used to in Canada, but I'm going to take at least 1 Japanese style bath while I'm here. It looks very relaxing, just usually by the time I'm home at night, I'm so wasted I just want to sleep, not bathe first. The Japanese have a thing for always bathing at night, which was my standard practice in Canada, after work, but now I have no work, and find I'm often showering in the morning/early afternoon, which, I gather, is very much a thing the Japanese do not do. I'm gonna see what I can do about getting into the Japanese timing for bathing, but I dunno about those late nights...

The other day I met up with Mayumi-san again-- this day was intended to be an ohanami event, but unfortunately the weather didn't agree with us, so we had to begrudgingly cancel;; The original idea was that Mayumi-san, and her 2 co-workers who I'd met at the same time (at the english cafe), Miwa-san and Hiroshi-san, were all supposed to meet me in Yokohama, and the 4 of us would go somewhere to get dru- I mean, celebrate ohanami. Unfortunately, Hiroshi-san couldn't make it (this is because sometime since the 3 of them met, Hiroshi-san was transferred to a different location, so it's more difficult for him to hook up with them now). But Miwa-san and Mayumi-san made it, and the 3 of us went out to an izakaya (the best translation I can come up with for this is "Beer Restaurant"), and ate all sorts of interesting foods. I love this Japan place, yummy foodstuffs! (And anybody who knows me KNOWS that I'm all about trying new foods!) So, we got some chicken wings, which is different than Canadian chicken wings in that they're ... baked (?) or something... They have a drier finish to them, and then they season them with some sorta powder-seasoning to make them seem even drier.. Odd, but still yummy. We also ordered some house salad, that was basically a garden salad on the bottom, with a big blob of potato salad on top. And some weird mish-mash of bean sprouts/cabbage/various greens all stir-fried and soaked in some creamy colored sauce. We all agreed it looked really weird, but it tasted alright. We also ordered a dish that we figured looked more like a dessert than a dinner dish, cheam cheese with icing sugar on top, served with dry bread and ultra-thin crackers to spread it on. We also go various other things, but my memory doesn't serve me currently. An interesting thing tho, is that before our meals, we were given these little rectangular boxes that housed 3 dishes in each one. Each dish was only about 2 inches diameter, and they each had a different ... appetizer-esque thing in it. The left one had some kinda ... something. I have no clue, but it tasted good! The middle one had some Japanese version of calamari, which was really good, and the right one had some green veggie thing in it, that seems to be a staple of izakayas.. at least, both that I've been to have served it to me at the beginning. After looking at the menu there (this is the 3 or 4th menu where I really paid attention to the alcohol section), I've come to the conclusion that "Sours" are a type of alcoholic beverage in Japan. You can basically think of them as "chick-drinks" from Canada tho, they tend to be all fruity and dangerous (since they go down so easily). Our table favorite for the night was Lime-sours^^

Today was -going- to be a relaxing video game day but I woke up late (as usual- I guess it would help if I went to bed before the sun came up!), so I had a -little bit- of time to play some games before heading out to meet Toshi. I justify the video game playing in that it's a free video game that was made by some Japanese video game programmer by himself (as I understand it), much in the same way I'm doing my video game creation. "Market Research".. yes, that's what I'll call it. Anyways, I met up with Toshi in Tokyo, and we went out to the boating school. I wanted to see Kikumoto-san again, to ask her if she was actually serious about meeting up with me sometimes so she could keep up her English practice, and if so, find some way we can be in contact. When we arrived, we almost thought it was closed, since there was virtually nobody there (but I guess it being like 8pm might have something to do with it... but then again, why are they open until 10pm?). So, I spoke with her, and she wrote down my keitai email address, and told me she'd email me about getting together, but warned me that she's busy for most of this month since the company just opened and all, she then promptly asked me how long I was here, and seemed relieved to know I'd be here longer than that. But I know what girls are like in Canada when they take a guy's phone number instead of giving out theirs, so I'd assume the same basically applies here in Japan about keitai addresses. I won't get my hopes up, but I'll still make sure I can accommodate her if she does decide to contact me.

I've come to the conclusion that corner stores (combini - comes from the english name$ "convenience store") are CHEAP here. Tonite, I stopped at the Family Mart by the kenritsu daigaku train station (the station closest to my house), on the way home, and picked up a package of sours, a chocolate bar, some sorta bun thing with filling (think Dim Sum buns!), a ham/cheese/egg salad sandwich, some strange coffee jelly thing, and a can of cold coffee for under 8 bucks. In Canada, the sandwich alone would've been like 4 or 5 bucks! I'm looking at the package right now, 210 yen. That's almost exactly $2 CDN after exchange. I've been pretty proud of myself recently, going to the stores and hearing the person tell me the price, and I can actually understand it (albeit a touch slowly), so I don't have to rely on looking for wherever the digital readout is anymore (read: Yay!). Also, just listening to people having regular conversations, I'm sometimes getting a vague idea of what they're talking about. If nothing else, I'd get the overall idea (such as this girl's talking about her trip to the shopping center last weekend... and something about boys. Who pays attention to that anyways?) On the topic of language proudness (is that a word?), I impressed Miwa-san and Mayumi-san at dinner the other night when I told them, in Japanese, that I wanted to eat foods that I've never eaten before. (tabeta koto nai mono wo tabetai dayo) They were super impressed and immediately wanted to know how to say that in English. When I told them, they sat there and tried like 4 or 5 times before they virtually gave up. I guess English is even more difficult, heh.

The next day I had planned out to meet Eriko again, and we were going to go to Akihabara to be otakus together^^ Pleasant surprise, she came with Markus as well! So the 3 of us were set loose on Akiba (short for Akihabara) district-- unfortunately, since Eriko had to work that day (Friday), we only got going at about 6pm, and didn't have much time before places started to close... Our initial plans for the visit were to cover at least a couple of bases:
Go have coffee at a "Maid Cafe". These cafes' claim to fame is that all the girls who work there (and there's ONLY girls that work there) are dressed up as maids. The type of maid depends on the specific cafe, but you get the idea.
Go have coffee at some other theme cafe, not much unlike a maid cafe. This would include the idea of a "Manga Cafe", where the girls are dressed up in cosplay (costume play- dressing up like well known, or sometimes not-so-well-known anime/manga characters) while they serve you. Also included is "Butler Cafes", where the girls are dressed up in boy-like attire, typically drawing a lot of it's influence from Japanese rock stars. The girls at these cafes look very kakkou ii (Rough translation: "Cool", sorta...)
Do some various otaku shopping. This could be shopping for manga (Japanese comics), anime, electronics, etc..

The way the night ACTUALLY went was pretty much right on par with our plans. We hit a maid cafe, where the theme color was a pastel green, and the girls were not only dressed as maids, but were everybody's "cute little sister who wears glasses". If the girls didn't need glasses, they got a pair anyways with just glass in them. They would refer to all the female customers as Onee-chan (Oh NAY chahn: Big sister, said in a cute way), and all the male customers as Onii-chan (Oh NEE chahn: Big brother, said in a cute way). Eriko got a HUGE kick out of this. She kept asking the various girls to come to our table and call me and Markus Oniichan. They were very cute, and I had an incredible time, but I think Eriko actually managed to have more fun there than me and Markus combined! I found out, at this particular cafe, that Eriko had been planning out this night for the whole week- obsessing over it, looking up maps of Akihabara on the internet, printing out directions to various popular places, and researching all the various places so we could hit the best ones.. 'course, she didn't bring anything with her, so we kinda went from memory- but holy crap, she was REALLY looking forward to this! After the maid cafe, we went to a butler cafe called "Checkmate" (the guys' washroom was called the King's room, and the girls' was the Queen's room. cute). I'd have to say that the girls at this cafe looked AMAZING. Kinda humorous too, as soon as we were seated, we were directed to read the first page in the menu, which was a disclaimer stating various rules and whatnot, the first of which was NO TOUCHING. Heh- good rule to have, but wow- that's gotta say something ;p Apparently, also, this cafe had just recently opened-- maybe in the last week or so, so we were some of the first customers for it. Cool! Everything was really fancy there too, the teacups and saucers were like nothing I've ever seen before- kinda wavy and just generally cool looking^^ Eriko also got a real kick outta when she paid, the girl behind the counter run her finger down Eriko's hand. She apparently really loved that and demanded that next time we go to a cafe that she gets to hand the money over again haha! After our cafe fix, we headed out to the nearest large Manga-ya (manga store) to browse/buy some manga. I picked up the first half of the Death Note manga that I have the translation for on my computer. Of course, the copy I bought is all in Japanese- luckily, it all has furigana (basically, it makes it like a kid's book to make it easier to read), from what I can see. MANGA IS FSCKING CHEAP HERE! As of this writing I know own the entire 12 volumes of Death Note, and the total cost to me was less than $50CDN. Each manga costs literally between $3 and $5. w00t! The manga store was about 7 or 8 floors tall (EVERY store is really tall here!), and each floor had a different category for what type you'll find there. I'm sure we can all guess what was in the basement *grin* When we got to the floor for "boy love" (sorta like... what we know as romance novels, but with pictures, and only with male characters, who, thusly, fall in love with each other, typically in a "forbidden" sense), Eriko was like a little school girl- squealing and bouncing back and forth from comic stand to comic stand. She's so cute, almost like a little kid^^

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Photos

Liquor Store in a Box!
Yay for Japanese vending machines! As you can see, not only can you buy alcohol here, but you can also buy mix! Now all they need to do is make it mix your drinks for you ;p
These machines also accept credit/debit cards, it seems, as there's a card slot...

Landmarks with original names!
A view from the top of the world's tallest Ferris Wheel (or so I've heard...), in Yokohama. We happened to be facing "Landmark Tower", so I took a picture of it.

Consumer whore!
I get to be a consumer whore while out here under the guise of "They have cool/weird stuff here!".
On the left is a can of "chu-hi", which is basically like a vodka cooler. I bought it with 1 express purpose in mind: Purchase it in a liquor vending machine, and drinking it outside, on the way home. Why? BECAUSE I _CAN_!
On the left, a package of "coffee and cream jelly". They like coffee a little too much over here. They have coffee jello... blech>< But actually, it didn't taste too bad- I'm glad it had the "cream" part.

Surprise!
This was shot rather spontaneously by Toshi's best friend's girlfriend, when we had all gone out for Yakiniku. As you can see, both Toshi and I didn't even have a chance to take off our yakiniku bibs haha

Clock Ferris Wheel
Here's a nighttime shot of the big clock ferris wheel (it's called the Cosmo Clock 21)
There's 60 gondolas, representing the seconds locations, and as you can see, portions of it light up to represent the current time.
There's no way to know the current hour/minutes without the digital clock in the middle, but to know the seconds, you have to look at the lit up portions around the outside- in this picture, it's at about 16 seconds (0 is a little off center because the ferris wheel is spinning..)

Cool special effects
This was in the amusement park surrounding the clock ferris wheel. It's a sphere of LEDs that is programmed to change their colors in a way to provide animations on it. Being a sphere, they can do pretty cool things. When I first saw it, there was some flames on the bottom half of it, all animated to look like real fire. I was waiting for that to come on again, but after a couple of minutes of it not doing it again, I decided to just take any old picture of it. Unfortunately, I just couldn't get a photo to turn out great;;

Traffic Mirrors
These things are littered all over residential areas, and pretty much just anywhere there's low visibility around corners. We need some of these in Canada. Just conveniently placed mirrors, so you can see if somebody's coming or not.

Retaining the landscape
The Japanese seem to have a fetish for holding back all natural landscapes.. Every hillside/mountain there is, it seems they have these grid-like concrete walls holding them back. I'd assume it's to prevent landslides, but there's a LOT of these. Either it's a common problem, or Japanese are paranoid..

Photo Radar
Screw paying vans to drive around and hide, these fancy photo radar setups are permanently placed above many hiways- I'll bet they could be completely non-operational, but because they're so visible, all the traffic slows down for them. Of course, they won't take your photo unless you're going about 30kph above the speed limit, but still.