Monday -- random stuff and a movie

(omfg! found an open wireless, sporadic though it might be! i didn't REALLY want to walk down the hill in the cold to an internet cafe...)

Monday... I didn't have an actual plan for the day...

I woke up and went down to the post office and sent my old internet machinery back to KDDI. It was easier than I thought -- I just kinda told them "I want to send this", showed them the "send back to this address" forms, and the lady was like "Oh, this is easy", took the papers, stamped some stuff, put it on the box, and said "ok, that's it". Yay.

Then I ate katsudon for lunch. I'd wanted sushi from Heiroku but I forgot my coupons.

Then... I went to Karaoke-kan and sang stuff by myself for two hours. It was surprisingly more fun than I thought it'd be, because I could just kind of choose whatever the hell I wanted and skip it and whatnot. And unlike when I'm singing in my house and I feel bad and quiet down, I could just yell and sing loudly and not worry about it. Also, during the afternoon, the karaoke cost 160 yen for two hours and most of the cost was that I had to buy a drink for 380 yen. Seriously. But I do think it'd be more fun with someone else just so my throat didn't hurt so much afterwards.

I went shopping at Uniqlo for a bit and got some more longsleeve shirts since I keep running out of them in the winter.

I did some laundry after that too -- washed all the sheets and towels from when Brian stayed here. What was wacky was that I needed to go down to the laundromat to use the dryers (I've been hanging up stuff to dry either inside or outside the house, but sheets are BIG). Turns out it's not really so bad, only takes me 5 minutes to/from the laundromat walking from here, the only thing that sucks is carrying the laundry basket back UP the stairs :)

Then I went to Saitama Shintoshin and watched the movie "Handsome Suit". I saw it because I like Shosuke Tanihara, though I recognized a lot of other people in the movie. The plot of this one is that there's this really fat ugly guy named Takuro (since the first kanji of his name is "pig", people always call him that as a joke). Takuro is 33 and a great cook and has a restaurant and very dedicated customers who love him, BUT since he's completely awkward and ugly and whatnot, he basically has never had a girl have any reaction to him besides "ewwww!" One day, these guys scout him as the perfect candidate for their "handsome suit", which is this weird cartoonish thing that if they put it on they become another person essentially. So he puts on the suit and becomes... well... Shosuke Tanihara. And everyone loves him. So he's suddenly scouted to be a model... so by day he's still ugly Takuro cooking at the shop, and by night he's Hikariyama Annin, Japan's next supermodel. In the meantime, having been turned down by the former beautiful part-time worker at his shop, he ends up kind of falling in love with the new UGLY part-time waitress at his shop... and his model alterego finds himself being chased after by all of these other top model women... and it's just bizarre. I don't want to really ruin the rest of the plot, not that I think anyone reading this will ever see the movie, but let's just say that I predicted SOMEONE else in the movie had to be wearing one of these appearance-altering suits and it was totally NOT the right person. And it does end happily.

Came back home, watched Ainori, it was a "special" where they were analyzing what they call a "red line", or why people fall in love at first sight. They even did an MRI on crazy Yamaji to analyze why she got so excited over the new guy on the show, and decided "it's because of dopamine". Whaaaaatever.

Met up with the2belo after that since he's in town, we went to Denny's, where I had the weirdest sundae I've ever eaten in my life. Really.

Tuesday -- re-done shopping and dinner

I woke up really late, like noon, since I'd been up till 4am or so going through pictures and random other things on my hard drive. I really should be packing, but...

I went to Akihabara. Or more like I went to the gigantic Yodobashi Camera on the Showa-dori side, to use my point card there. It was mostly to get things for other people. I think of all the stuff that I bought, maybe 2 things were actually for me, and they're camera-related. I MEANT to get an external hard drive to back stuff up onto, BUT what happened is I started talking to the store clerk about it and he was like, "well... I actually don't know whether this will work with your computer since you have a non-Japanese OS in it. or more like, the DRIVE should probably work BUT the software with it won't. But we honestly don't know. So if you buy it and it doesn't work, that's not our fault."

Thinking about it now... I'm not sure whether it's a better idea to wait until I go to the US and get a hard drive there, or whether I should just go ahead and get one in Japan. The stupid part is, I think if I get one wherever and it fails I'm just kind of screwed anyway. I dunno, I want one of those non-"portable" ones since I think it will be more stable, though I kind of intend to transport it to another country so hm.

Oh, also, while I'm at it, I had another experience of being gaijinned in an annoying way. I was hungry when I got there so I went to the foodcourt on the 8th floor. Stopped in the kaiten sushi place. First thing was them asking me in broken English, "you need English menu?" and I'm like "iranai," and she's like "really?" and I'm like "hai, daijoubu." She's even in half-English half-Japanese like "if you want something and it's not there please order it", and I'm like "yeah yeah, I know." So I sit down, watch the belt go by, and don't take anything for the first time, so she comes back again like "are you okay?" and I'm like, fairly angrily, in Japanese, "I'M FINE, I JUST HAVEN'T DECIDED." I didn't even get to the "PLEASE STOP BOTHERING ME" that was coming next because she got all shocked and ran off. After that I started eating a few plates of sushi, even ordered one at one point, etc. They actually had some really interesting-looking stuff that I wanted to try, but decided I wasn't spending more than 800-900 yen there, so ran off after 5 plates.

I wanted to say something more like "Would you be trying to be so HELPFUL if I didn't have white skin?" but decided it wasn't worth it. Seriously, I know a lot of tourists come through Akihabara but goddamnit I never even said a single word of English in there so it pissed me off.

Came home to drop off everything -- I ran into Haruyuki in the station. But he was on the phone at the time, so we recognized each other, waved a REALLY enthusiastic hello, and I ran off. I wasn't sure whether I should have actually tried to wait to talk to him, so I emailed while walking home in Japanese. He doesn't seem to have been offended (and was like "I was surprised you are still here! We'll play Catan again next year right?")

And then I met up with two of my former students, Michie and Satsuki, so we could go get dinner. Satsuki had made a reservation at an Italian restaurant a little bit north of the station called "&jeu", which is pronounced like "And you". The food was actually fairly good, we had salads and pasta and pizza and desserts, and part of my dessert was strawberry-flavored coffee. Which was weird. The place is very new and actually reminds me a lot of some cafes in Ballard, to be honest. I guess it felt comfortable enough to be there talking in mostly English. We hung out for about 3 hours and they were really funny to talk to. They weren't able to make it to my actual going-away party, so this was like our own little going-away party... and they paid for dinner, telling me that's what people do in Japan when someone is going away for a while. ("But I'm coming back!" I said.) Oh, and Satsuki brought me a going-away present from another former student of mine, Yoichi, who works at the same cosmetics company she does. He sent me nail polish. It was neat on two levels because 1) it was nail polish that he actually invented the formulas for, and 2) it was the colors he used to have on his own nails when he came to class in the past. (He'd often test his new products on himself, basically.)

Unfortunately we ended up all talking until 10:30pm so there was no time for karaoke :( Oh well... maybe in the spring when I come back...

Now I'm home, though I think I'm gonna go down to an internet cafe in a bit. (or not! go random wireless!)
I don't really have a plan for tomorrow at all. Well, I'm going to go to the science museum, I think, but other than that, not sure. I suppose there are many things I should get done though, like packing...

Oh, on another note I forgot: I woke up at noon when my father called me to tell me that I'm an aunt. My brother's wife Emily had their baby this morning, it's a girl, her name's Lily Alice, I think. Wow. I guess I'll get to see her in a few weeks.

I am a vagrant, wandering the streets of Tokyo

Today, the only plan I had was to go look at fungus. No, really. The current exhibit at the science museum is on Moyashimon and his friends, and is basically a big exhibit about fungus.

After eating quick lunch at Heiroku finally (no Kanno -- wonder if he left...) I went down to Ueno and got there a bit late to actually hang out with my former student Mitsuko who works there, only like 20 minutes, since she had a meeting. But she showed me the Theater 360, which was interesting, and then where they have an Akita dog which is basically Hachiko. I gave her the fungus-character plushies I got from UFO catchers... and then I wandered around the museum on my own. It was interesting for a while but I think it'd be more fun with someone else.

I wandered the streets of Tokyo for a bit -- walked from Ueno to Okachimachi via Ameyayokocho, stopped in some arcades to play UFO catchers and Pop'n, and also ate some melon slices from a street vendor, yum. From Okachimachi I took the train to Kanda, where I ended up in an internet cafe called Popeye for a while. It was nice but overpriced, and the drink bar was just a drink machine that served very small amounts. I drank a LOT of cold milk cocoa and some coke and some lemon tea. The desk was comfortable though. Kanda's Manboo doesn't have no-smoking rooms so I decided not to go there. But Popeye's no-smoking area still smelled of smoke.

Oh yeah, AND I got a Doala box out of a UFO catcher finally in Ameyayokocho. Unfortunately the box is the cool part, inside is just little bags of mixed nuts. Oh well.

Then I walked from Kanda to Ochanomizu, via Jimbocho. I thought about just walking from Kanda to Shinjuku but gave up about halfway, you could say. Plus I like walking past Meiji University. Though everything was closed at 8pm, oddly.

Took the train to Shinjuku and now I'm at one of the Kabukicho Manboo cafes, which is another GOOD one, because the rooms are comfy, the staff are nice, AND they have strawberry slurpees in the drink bar, and the first hour is 200 yen again. I already drank three slurpees. I know, it's not good, but... it'll be useful to know which of these places is good to go to in a pinch, anyway.

Oh yeah, and outside Kanda station I bought 16 mini-taiyaki, which I ate here. Yummmmm. But I don't feel like eating dinner because I have been snacking or drinking sweet stuff all day! Oops.

I actually logged in and updated labor on all my Puzzle Pirates characters today. That is the kind of thing I have not been doing with no internet at home. I really wish I had an offline version of the alchemistry puzzle (I have this vague feeling it was available in the standalone PP game but alas)

Now, it is late, and I am going to wander back home. Debating getting off at Jujo and walking back from there instead, just to continue with today's theme...