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Thanks for eating my entry, LJ! (sigh.)
Yeah, so today was a really long day. I guess I updated LJ last around midnight Monday night, and now I'm updating around midnight Tuesday night, except 40 hours has passed between those two.
I got up at 9am Tuesday in Japan, finished packing, then DJ and I checked out but left our bags at the Kimi while we went to get lunch and stuff. I was really nervous and freaking out over having to carry bags to the station. We went to get kaiten for lunch, but it was hot and humid and I just felt like crap so I had like 3 plates. However, getting the station turned out not to be as bad as I thought. DJ carried my heavy bag and I carried his lighter bag, so it worked out okay. We took the Yamanote to Nippori, and the Keisei to the airport. A guy from Taiwan sat next to us on the Keisei and talked to DJ for most of the time going there, while I kinda zoned out and took a few last pictures and stuff. Sigh.
Got to the airport; they gave us carts to use. Those carts rock, they have brakes AND you can take them on escalators and everything. How cool. So it was easy getting my stuff to check-in, and we got our tickets and checked in luggage and all. Then I got lunch for real because I was hungry after not eating all morning. Tendon, whee. Bought a t-shirt or two at the little souvenir shops and then we realized we had run out of time to waste before the flight, so we ran to the immigration stands and managed to get through them all fairly quickly and boarded our flight on time.
Flight was reasonably uneventful. There was a Japanese girl next to me who didn't speak very much English and so I talked to her a little. I watched movies, too... saw Bruce Almighty (amusing but suffered from Carrey Syndrome) and Down With Love (I liked it, I thought it was really cute, reminded me a lot of How To Succeed etc). Then I tried to sleep and got like an hour or two maybe. Got off the flight, got through customs (they've upped the duty exemption to $800 from the $400 I remembered, so I was actually okay!) and then... and then Eli picked me up at the airport, we came home for a little while, and then went to work.
Work was just weird because I was so jet lagged. We have a new intern in our group, I'm not really sure what to think of her yet. I did give Yan the traffic safety charm that I got him at Meiji-jingu and he was like "wow, this is weird, but thanks!" I solved a CVS issue that had been plaguing my group for days, and I read like 700 emails or so, and then there was a meeting in the team room and I was falling asleep so I left and took a nap outside and then read email on a computer in the hall and finally at like 4:30 the meeting was over and I came back in... but failed to get a lot of anything done because I was so jetlagged so I left work.
Came home and fell asleep, after hitting my head on the bus falling asleep. Woke at like 9pm, Eli made dinner, I showed him pictures, and I've been goofing off on the computer since. For the record I am uploading a few of my pictures from the trip, you can find them at http://www.dr4b.org/tmp/Japan/ for now. I took like 400-500 pictures total, there's no way I'm putting them all online. Rawr, it's gonna be a huge chore to actually get together a trip page... whee.
Yeah, so today was a really long day. I guess I updated LJ last around midnight Monday night, and now I'm updating around midnight Tuesday night, except 40 hours has passed between those two.
I got up at 9am Tuesday in Japan, finished packing, then DJ and I checked out but left our bags at the Kimi while we went to get lunch and stuff. I was really nervous and freaking out over having to carry bags to the station. We went to get kaiten for lunch, but it was hot and humid and I just felt like crap so I had like 3 plates. However, getting the station turned out not to be as bad as I thought. DJ carried my heavy bag and I carried his lighter bag, so it worked out okay. We took the Yamanote to Nippori, and the Keisei to the airport. A guy from Taiwan sat next to us on the Keisei and talked to DJ for most of the time going there, while I kinda zoned out and took a few last pictures and stuff. Sigh.
Got to the airport; they gave us carts to use. Those carts rock, they have brakes AND you can take them on escalators and everything. How cool. So it was easy getting my stuff to check-in, and we got our tickets and checked in luggage and all. Then I got lunch for real because I was hungry after not eating all morning. Tendon, whee. Bought a t-shirt or two at the little souvenir shops and then we realized we had run out of time to waste before the flight, so we ran to the immigration stands and managed to get through them all fairly quickly and boarded our flight on time.
Flight was reasonably uneventful. There was a Japanese girl next to me who didn't speak very much English and so I talked to her a little. I watched movies, too... saw Bruce Almighty (amusing but suffered from Carrey Syndrome) and Down With Love (I liked it, I thought it was really cute, reminded me a lot of How To Succeed etc). Then I tried to sleep and got like an hour or two maybe. Got off the flight, got through customs (they've upped the duty exemption to $800 from the $400 I remembered, so I was actually okay!) and then... and then Eli picked me up at the airport, we came home for a little while, and then went to work.
Work was just weird because I was so jet lagged. We have a new intern in our group, I'm not really sure what to think of her yet. I did give Yan the traffic safety charm that I got him at Meiji-jingu and he was like "wow, this is weird, but thanks!" I solved a CVS issue that had been plaguing my group for days, and I read like 700 emails or so, and then there was a meeting in the team room and I was falling asleep so I left and took a nap outside and then read email on a computer in the hall and finally at like 4:30 the meeting was over and I came back in... but failed to get a lot of anything done because I was so jetlagged so I left work.
Came home and fell asleep, after hitting my head on the bus falling asleep. Woke at like 9pm, Eli made dinner, I showed him pictures, and I've been goofing off on the computer since. For the record I am uploading a few of my pictures from the trip, you can find them at http://www.dr4b.org/tmp/Japan/ for now. I took like 400-500 pictures total, there's no way I'm putting them all online. Rawr, it's gonna be a huge chore to actually get together a trip page... whee.
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1) Aaron is super-nice and cool, I was really surprised but I totally felt comfortable talking to him, he's just a great guy.
2) Yasu is CRAZY. That's about all you can say about the guy. It's just, he doesn't speak any English at all, so it was hard to hold real conversations with him (I spoke to him in Japanese, but I mostly know general language, I don't know the Japanese words for a lot of DDR-related stuff), but he was a nice guy I think. Just crazy though :)
3) Take didn't show up until much later, I didn't really get to talk to him much. He seems to be a lot saner than his brother.
4) Most of the other people there just drifted in and out, I talked to a few people and saw some other regulars play DDR and other Bemani. K.K. in particular was also really good at DDR, he showed me his cellphone picture of him AAA'ing MAX300 as well. He's particularly impressive because he doesn't use the bar at all and has really good flat foot technique. He AAA'ed Xenon totally cold, and V Oni... yeah.
in all I thought it was really fun, but I wish I spoke Japanese a bit better so I could have real conversations with people besides Aaron and James (and Miyuki). I think they were really nice though. I didn't get any feeling of "OMG, you suck" when I went up and played... I think when you're at their level, you don't expect anyone else to be that good. Or something.