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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 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.
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a) make sure East Asian language files are installed under the Language tab, and
b) make sure the locale is set to Japanese.
You should then be able to run just about everything that uses UTF-8 (which is just about everything, nowadays).
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Hard drives are really tricky with customs back and forth, especially if they think you might re-sell it. If you aren't 100% sure you need it before you leave, I'd probably buy it in the US and just have to deal with the headaches going back one way rather than two.
no subject