Darlo's World

So today marks the end of my time of learning Japanese at Konan Daigaku, Kobe. Yesteday was our kanji and reading comprehension tests, and today we had our listening test followed by grammar. That doesn’t mean I’m completely done though, after Golden Week (literally THE next day) I have my religion exam, and then the next day is my wonderfully anticipated Leeds exam (insert sad crying clown breathing through an iron lung here).

This partially explains where I’ve been for the last few days (presumably revising) with the exception of Wednesday where we were given a day off for a national holiday, and last night when I just plain didn’t feel like studying so stopped up watching Family Guy.

Wednesday was みどりの日 (midori no hi, Greenery Day), and while I could talk about the day’s history, I’d pretty much be repeating what I read somewhere else. So rather than do that, you can find out about Greenery Day right here. Personally the only real difference I noticed were a lot more people that normal out on the streets painting and drawing, which to be honest was still quite nice, and given the awesome weather that day I’m certain their pictures turned out great.

I did use the day to take a quit run (it was neither quick, nor did I run) over to Shinasaibashi (again). As well as buying what I severely intend to be the last Higurashi book I buy, I also bought the first Higurashi DS game at a nice cheap price, as well as an awesome とたけけ (Totakeke) firgure. You might know him as KK Slider from Animal Crossing (or the Japanese 動物の森, doubutsu no mori), and am happy to say I didn’t pay anywhere near the $70 that it seems to be selling for online. Here’s hoping I can get it home!

Sorry it’s kept brief today (though I did try to maintain a sarcastic demeanour) but I have somewhere I gotta be. In the mean time, I’ll be updating the Photos at the weekend, so be sure to check them out!

Some music shall we? Today’s tune is a 1972 recording of School’s Out by Alice Cooper. Why? No idea, it was playing on WinAmp.

Good evening everyone and welcome to 春分の日 (shumbun no hi, Vernal Equinox Day), a national holiday here in Japan where people visit graves of departed family members and holding family reunions. And since I could do neither of the above, how did I spend my day eh?

Well to start with a nice lie-in was had (no food on holidays, you know the drill by now) as well as a day off from Uni. This in itself seems quite rare, as we normally (as exchange students) go in on most national holidays. Some of my Leeds friends at other Uni’s in Japan always seem somewhat shocked that we still have to go in during the Spring break.

Today I’d arranged with a couple of Japanese friends to go down to 日本橋 (Nippombashi) to look at the second hand manga shops and other anime related goodies. Like me, my friends arrived earlier than we agreed to meet so we could head off earlier. I love it when people are punctual ^_^.

After arriving at Nippombashi we headed in the direction of Den Den Town to first grab some food. Suddenly we came face to face with a barrier and a guard directing foot traffic. After crossing a road to where we wanted to go, we noticed a sign over a bridge saying that ’something’ (not being able to read the kanji) was happening that day. According to my friends there was some kind of festival on, but even they weren’t entirely certain, suggesting it could be an Otaku Festival.

Sure enough the moment we turned the corner the street was jam packed with cosplayers, photographers and maids among other people. Voices could be heard over loudspeakers aswell as the excited calls of shop staff as they tried as hard as they could to entice people in to make a sale or two. After having a very brief nose around, we headed to the nearest McDonalds.

After chowing down we headed off down the road to the A-Too Media Recycle Shop, my favourite shop in the area. For my friends, this was the first time they’d gone to Nippombashi, so going in a shop that had manga starting at 10 yen (just over 7p at today’s rate) appeared to be a real treat. I too was astounded by the number of books that had been put down into the 50 yen and 100 yen sales. Picking up 7 books from the 100 yen section and a set of 6 books for 300 yen I headed for the till.

Now, either this shop was having an amazingly generous sale, they undercharged me, or both. Let’s just do a little math shall we? 7 books at 100 yen is 700 yen, plus the 6 book set for 300 yen, totalling 1000 yen (convenient number). Now when I was at the counter I heard one girl (there were two at the counter serving me) mention that the 100 yen books were now at 50 yen. This in itself was pretty sweet, so let’s change the equation. 7 books at 50 yen is 350 yen, plus the 6 book set for 300 yen, totalling 650 yen, right? ブー (buu, wrong (audible noise like a buzzer)).

I paid a total of 410 yen (£2.97) for my 13 books, giving an average price per book at just under 32 yen (23p) each. Get in! Checking the reciept later, they’d charge me just 60 yen instead of 300 for by 6 book set.

Shopping List: The 山田家 (The Yamada-ke, The Yamada House) books 1-6, 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 (Suzumiya Haruhi no yuuutsu, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya) books 1 and 2, and げんしけん The Society For The Study Of Modern Visual Culture (Genshiken (a word made from an acronym of) The Society For The Study Of Modern Visual Culture) books 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8. There is of course one big problem with buying manga at the moment at that has a lot to do with the fact I only have 2 months (ish) left, shipping this stuff home is going to be a heavy and expensive PITA.

After having a nice look around the area and in some other shops, we then headed to nearby Namba for some more nosing. One of the biggest differences between the two places was the vast difference in the kind of people that seemed to be in the area. Sure, both were full to the brim, but whereas Nippombashi was packed with people dressed in outfits of characters from Ace Hono to Zodd The Immortal, Namba had a more “commonly dressed” crowd, the two barely seeming to notice the fact that they’re right next door to one another.

Vistiting Namba Parks again was a nice little experience. We didn’t really go with a set plan or list of things we wanted to see, meaning we could freely wander around. Heading up through the restaurant section we were treated to a display where a chef was showing how cold soba noodles are made from dough. One person from his restaurant was then giving samples out so we could have a taste. Personally I’ve never been a fan of soba, but these were quite nice. I took a video of him cutting it with great care and attention, so that’ll be on the photo and picture blog soon.

After this we headed up to the top floor where there was a garden area. Performing on a staged area was a clown from America (I think he said his name was Dave or something). Don’t get me wrong, when I said clown I don’t mean he was some tosser arsing about, I mean he was actually performing clown-like things (well, we only got to see his finale, juggling knives on an elevated unicycle). Also fair play to the guy, his Japanese was pretty damn good (he slotted in English every now and then, but it seemed to work), so good in fact that it wasn’t until the end that he said he was from the States that I’d have believed it. Good show Dave.

Throughout the rest of the garden were handprints people who had achieved fame in Japan. We had fun comparing different people’s handsizes to our own and I felt a nice sense of acomplishment that my hand could compete with writers and athletes to name a few professions.

Parting ways in Umeda, I headed to Matsuya for my usual holiday meal of Curry-Rice.

Feeling rougher than usual this morning I decided to take the day off and catch up on a bit of rest, after breakfast of course. Waking up for a second time at about half two in the afternoon, I venture out on a search for food. Easily I could have went to Matsuya or McDonalds, but I didn’t feel like a curry or a burger.

Instead I took a walk towards Umeda where under a railway bridge was a very small udon place. From the outside it was really noisy with trains going by every ten seconds or so, traffic blaring (as it was also a busy crossroad), and the very common sound of ambulance and paramedic sirens. I figured that inside wouldn’t be quiet due to these factors but I was shocked to discover how wrong I was.

When I closed the door everything seemed to go quiet, the only real breaking point to the silence was when the woman behind the counter greeted me “いらっしゃいませ”. I ordered 肉うどん (niku udon, beef udon) from the vending machine, handed my ticket to the cashier and took a seat, stopping on the way to pick up a glass for some water. To give you an idea of how small the place was, I was the only customer and was taking up 10% of the occupancy.

My meal was 400 yen (£2.92), which is quite a bit more than I normally spend on lunch, but it was definately worth it for it’s flavour and size. Good grub! Speaking of good grub, here’s a dog trying (and failing) to eat food off his nose on command.

Wow. Friday night was fun. Too much fun. So lets start off with some music eh. Hit play from the youtube link, and carry on reading.

Today’s music comes from L’Arc En Ciel and is called Daybreak’s Bell. It’s a tune I’ve found quite fun to relax to, drive to, do homework to, clean to … honestly, I find it very open. Most listeners might know it as the theme tune from Gundam 00 (don’t worry not all the music I’ll be putting on here will be from anime themes, or always in Japanese).

So starting off at the Torikizoku (the everything 280 yen (£2.01) place), actually no, starting off at a convenience store, two of us bought a can of beer (each) to get the night kicking. In Japan it’s not uncommon for people to drink on the streets, but it still felt quite odd to be, especially as my alcohol wasn’t concealed by a brown paper bag.

Heading out in the direction of Osaka’s Hep 5 building, where we were to meet another buddy, I soon realised I should have worn more as a vicious wind blasted a shot of cold air right down my back. I can’t wait for the days of being able to just wear a t-shirt (and bottoms ¬_¬) again.

After joining our third amigo we then made our way to Torikizoku. Being a Friday night we’d expected for there to be a bit of a wait to get in, though to be honest this didn’t worry us. The central area of Umeda alone has plenty of branches, so if one had a hellova queue, we could have just headed to another. It’s not quite as bad as the number of Starbucks in a city center (in Birmingham’s Bull Ring you can see one easily from sitting within another), but there are a fair few. After endulging in many an over-sized glass of beer and assorted bits of a chicken (my favourite part being the heart), and an alcohol fueled conversation (of which I can remember very little of) we were soon on our way to Sam and Dave, a bar and nightclub in the area.

The rest of the night was filled with dancing to a good variety of music (this is the only place I’ve been to that had Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” followed by 50 Cent’s “In Da Club”), drinking (mainly beer and Malibu & Milk … yum!), and a lot of conversations (shouting to be make sure people could hear me and being shouted at for the reverse reason of course). Sam and Dave is a very international club. The bar staff were from all areas of the world with a mixed knowledge of Japanese, some customers (ourselves included) were also from abroad, and the Japanese customers who go there seem to use this as a good time for English practice as well as me for the other way around. For a while I was talking to one woman in Japanese while she replied to what I was saying in English. It made for a very interesting conversation.

We left at about 4 in the morning on some very wobbly legs and headed into a nearby Matsuya to complete the night. I couldn’t find Curry Rice on the vending machine, so picking a random button I ended up with a random meat-rice dish, of which I found I could only eat half. Matsuya also proved to be a good time to practice speaking as my trio conversed with two girls who had also been at Sam and Dave that night.

Coming back to the dorm, taking care not to wake anyone up, I turned off all alarms on my phone and put my head down to sleep.

I’ll always remember that the strangest hangover I’ve heard about happened to Dave Gorman when he did his Googlewhack Adventure, where his Texan hangover was in his arm (which turned out to be a very badly done tattoo). For me, waking up totally fine at about 4pm, with the exception of being a bit thirsty a hangover was no where in sight. Sitting at my desk, my stomach slowly started to dance on it’s own accord. It was as if a village of Hula Dancers were putting in the extra overtime. Since I had no orange juice and had skipped breakfast, I made my way (very tenderly) to the 99 yen shop to pick up supplies.

To spare you the details, shortly after arriving home and having some OJ, I found myself very thankful to the fact that I had something in my belly. The strangest part about this hangover, is that it wasn’t really much of a hangover. In fact, it was just like I’d caught a bit of the flu that has infected the majority of the dorm. Truth be told I wasn’t feeling too great before Friday night … hmm … yeah, that’s what I’ll put it down to. Trying to rest, I didn’t wake up (get out of bed) until 11 o’clock this morning.

So welcome to March, and for those readers in Wales happy Dydd Gŵyl Dewi (St David’s Day). I’ll be boning up on some kanji today for this week’s midterms, as well as making a start on tidying.

Also thanks to the family back home for the socks, jeans and chocolate I got through!

Today is Valentine’s Day, a day in which couples get sappier and singles get whinier, generally speaking that is. Being one of the latter it did mean that I was free to enjoy my day without the social obligations of meeting the missus. But that doesn’t mean I completely missed out on the tradition.

In Japan the tradition (in a nut-shell) is for girls to give chocolate to boys. There’re two kinds of chocolate depending on who you’re giving it to, and I don’t mean with nuts or without … although reading between the lines it probably does. First is 義理チョコ (girichoko) which you’d give to someone you feel you have a social obligation toward. This might be your boss, teacher, dorm manager, but not only people ’socially higher’ than you, you might choose to give some to your friends and so on.

On the flip side to this is 本命チョコ (honmeichoko) which you’d give to your boyfriend, lover, husband or a boy that you fancy. Don’t worry girls, boys will come to return the favour next month on White Day, and for guys who got no chocolate, we can all get together and celebrate the Korean Black Day in April, but more on those days as they come.

My plan for today involved a trip to 日本橋 (Nippombashi) and Denden Town. If you remember my previous blogs it’s an area that’s known as the 秋葉原 (Akihabara) or Osaka, with plenty of manga and anime related stores, cafes and … stuff. So we headed downstairs (in the lift) and were greeted by the dorm manager. His wife had bought a small piece of chocolate for all the dorm residents (male dorm don’t forget). How kind of her; clearly this was girichoko (especially since it was her husband who gave it to us).

This wasn’t the only chocolate I received this year though. During the week some of my friends who frequent the Ajisai room had brought in their own home-made chocolate and biscuits and shared them around. Delish!

As usual Nippombashi was tons of fun and rumaging around the second hand book shops I found plenty of cheap manga, starting as low as 10 yen (about 8 pence by today’s exchange rate). As per usual DVD’s are expensive, though some stores here were considerably cheaper than the status-quo, and walking past the doujinshi covers you could see the usual ‘dripping’ images. Funnily enough afterwards I was talking with another friend about whether doujins are rated on some sort of ‘drip-scale’ or ‘dripometer’. Don’t get me wrong however, I did spot some of a non-sexual nature, and had I been interested in the series may have considered buying.

After my friend headed off home I stayed around for a walk and a wander. I was actually surprised how close Namba was to the area and ended up eating lunch at a Matsuya near Namba Parks. Though 95% of the time my self-navigatory skills are spot on without the use of a map, the cloudy day and the fact I’d spun in a few circles nosing around and exploring this new area meant I had no direction which way was North, and thus was a bit muddled. However (as all great men say at some point in their lives) I was not lost, I could have turned around and gone back the exact same way I had come from (something I usually find odd that people don’t do when they are ‘lost’), but prefer the fun way of walking and hoping until eventually passing out.

Thankfully I didn’t faint, but instead found a familliar sight in the distance. It was a large arcade (sega arcade I think), that I’d passed on the way. Keeping this to my right hand side I kept on walking and soon found myself on familiar ground.

On my way I found myself drawn to a particular retailer. The small table-top store was selling Monopoly … Osaka Edition! Now I can’t remember if my familly (we’re competitive when it comes to Monopoly) had asked me to buy one in Japan, but me here staring the the Osakan version of Monopoly took my by complete surprise! The only thing stopping me from buying it was the price of 4500 yen (£33.97 by today’s exchange rate). Even now I’m still umming and ahhing about it. I guess I’ve still got some time left here so I don’t need to make a rush decision about it.

To get to Nippombashi it cost me 230 yen (£1.74) on the underground, but me being me, the stubborn money saving twazzerk, thought “nuts to that” and walked home. Quite ironic when you consider my Monopoly incident. The walk (which according to google is just over 3 and a half miles) took somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 hours. Due to complications with a watch and a phone call, I really don’t know.

It was actually on the way home that I made my biggest cock-up of the day, possibly the week (or longer >_<). When things are put ‘on sale’ in Japan, they might be marketed by a number of prices rather than the one you actually pay. To be fair this isn’t something that’s exclusive to Japan, just think of the times in shops you’ve seen £10 in huge letting next to something expensive only to look at the very small ‘off’ next to it. Well todays balls up was quite simple. I saw a sign saying 800 yen (£6.04) and jeans. Due to an unfortunate split in one of my pairs of bottoms I’ve been left juggling between a few pairs as of late.

Anyway, after nosing through the rail which was out the front of the store, I eventually found a pair that matched my size. Smiling like an idiot at the thought of picking up a bargain, I take my new jeans into the store and head for the desk. Something struck me the moment I entered the shop, and it wasn’t the low signage by the door. This was a nice looking shop, the kind where it looks like all they need to do is sell one thing in order to cover all their overheads, the kind of shop I never (like to) enter!

Being served by two very well dressed well mannered young men felt somewhats off-putting, me standing their in an old work-uniform coat, a University club jumper and jeans that … well, they’re almost as holy as the Pope. When it came for me to pay I stuttered and stammered. I had misread the sign outside, and the jeans were 800 yen off, not 800 yen. A total of 2800 yen (£21.14) for the jeans was paid, 2000 yen over what this idiot had thought they were. To be fair (trying to justify stupidity is something that can seldom be done well, but I’ll give it a go) even at 2800 yen, compared to other shops I’ve been here they were pretty cheap. A lot of people may say that Uni-Qlo is Japan’s cheapest clothing store, and about as close to Primark (oh beloved Primark) as you can get, but in my eye it’s still expensive. Perhaps it’s all these years of buying Tesco and Asda jeans that have conditioned my mind.

Oh, and yes Nippombashi has maid cafes … no, I haven’t been in one … yet. ¬_¬