Darlo's World

Before you start watching, click play and listen to the music.

I’d just writen a long blog entry, but somehow I’d clicked the back button and now it’s all sodding gone! I’m not going to write it all out again, I really can’t be arsed so here’s a summary of what I did write, and will continue normally at the bottom.

• You’re listening to Life is Like a Beach by Rie Fu – I’ve come to think of it as my theme song.
• On Wednesday realised was just wasting time by coming home and not doing anything nightly.
• Went out drinking.
• Went to darts bar in Umeda where I (and a friend) played darts and spoke in Japanese constantly.
• Came home at 4 am instead of studying for big religion exam.
• Bombed Japanese kanji quiz (that’s bad).
• With a loss of motivation, I didn’t study for the religion exam and slept instead.
• Finished writing exam 15 minutes into it.
• Came home and slept.

So today we had our weekly Japanese language test and I’m almost certain of failing that also. My lack of motivation to study hasn’t just limited itself to religion. Afterward I went and hung out in the Ajisai room where a friend and I made a little game out of flicking 1 yen (0.8p) coins into a box. Sounds boring but it actually became quite interesting, with me kicking buttock left, right and … hmm … three buttocks … ok, not centre.

On the way home a few of us stopped by an arcade where we spent (blew) some money on some games of DDR (Dance Dance Revolution), Time Crisis 3, some guitar game (not Guitar Hero T_T) and UFO Grabbers. I left the arcade with a new 3 inch tall Winnie The Pooh, dressed as James P. “Sulley” Sullivan (Monsters Inc), after spending … not too much money on it. Oh! And we 太鼓の達人 (taiko no tatsujin, Taiko Master), an awesomely cute drumming game.

The plan for the night is to go out and have some fun. We’ve got mid-terms next week and since I can’t go out and have fun on Sunday night, we’ll do it tonight instead. Finally a hello to Lauren, a fellow Osakan, who’s looking for the Osaka Monopoly.

It turns out more people than I realised read this journal about life in Japan. One of those people must control my sense of “oh really, we’ll see about that” because since writing about how I’d managed to get into a better sleeping routine yesterday, that theory has gone what is scientifically referred to as Tits-Up. Instead of sleeping last night I once again had a night where I just didn’t feel the need to. That is until about 10 o’clock this morning when I crashed onto the bed, not emerging until about half past 8 tonight. I’m back at uni this week, hopefully that can sort me back out.

With this being the case, my new discovery of the day was limited to another walk around my local area and the Tenjimbashisuji Shotengai, the world largest covered shopping street. As it was late most of the stores had already closed for the day, though many still remained open. Cutting in and out of side entrances and back-alleys meant that I could see a lot of the smaller shops, restaurants, fetish bars and pet shops, though I didn’t go into most of them. I did stop by a couple of UFO Catcher (arm-grabber) arcades, including one that seemed incredibly posh. It was so fancy not only were it’s prizes things like gourmet cakes and chocolates, it had a dance floor on a mezanine!

To be honest that’s where this entry ends, for today, but I do want to ask you to open your minds to the fact that although Japan is probably very different to the country you live in, don’t believe in all that you hear from movies and so on. Not only is the number of people who have asked me if “every Japanese person is tiny” getting pretty bad, but one person even asked me if the monks I saw were awesome because they “knew thousands of kinds of martial arts”. Now, I don’t even know if 1000 kinds of martial arts exist, that’s not my specialist field (like I even have one), but they had watched Bulletproof Monk and succombed to that idea.

For the record, the “Nameless Monk” was not even Japanese, but a Tibetan Buddhist.