...and A Happy New Year!

Ah yes, one of my least favourite holidays approaches. I never got the big deal about New Years. Seems like a rather pointless day to me. Is there really that much difference between Dec. 31st and Jan 1st? Despite my dislike of the holiday, for once I will not be staying home on New Years Eve-curse my socially in demand self. New Years is actually the biggest holiday of the year here, but at least they know how to celebrate it properly by turning into a 3 or 4 day extended holiday.

Somehow I managed to spend almost as much money as I usually do around Christmas time, even though I actually had very few people (one not including myself) to buy presents for. The biggest purchase involved a videogame item. I won't tell you what I got, only that it's initials are PSP. That cost me about 19,000 yen and the very next day I changed my mind and decided to return it. The only hitch was that they wouldn't let me. Yes I had opened it but it was barely 24 hours later. I'm sure in Canada, Futureshop will take returns up to 30 days after purchase. Anyways that had me seething at the general Japanese populace for the next couple of days. It's their fault after all that that the store wouldn't allow me to return my purchase. It's their weak, aquiescing personality that allows things like this to happen. That's why my phone company is able to charge me an entire month for a phone that I only used for a week of that particular month. It's disgusting. No wonder this country isn't a world power.

Speaking of my phone bill, I think I must really be Turnin' Japanese (both the good along with the bad) because I never could be bothered to walk into the shop and give the staff a piece of my mind. The language barrier really is that-a barrier. If I was fluent then I would really let them have it. Then again maybe I wouldn't. They would probably just look at me and think "Ohh look at the funny talking monkey that actually has a spine-I've never seen one of those before." Don't get me wrong I still love Japan. It's just a lot of fun to curse the Japanese-something I seem to be doing with increasing frequency, whether it be the idiot pedestrians or the idiots on their bikes or that idiot girl in the store today who would not stop shouting in her highpitched nasal voice.

I'm not leaving Tokyo for the holidays (something that a lot of teachers do) but I am doing some sightseeing. Yesterday we went to an aquarium in Shinagawa which was really quite interesting. Here are a few pics:

I purposely made these pictures small for those who use 56k. If you want to see a much larger version then just click on the pictures! And also if you're interested, I have a short clip of Shibuya. This is a short clip of the Hachiko pedestrian crossing, the WORLD'S BUSIEST CROSSING. Basically all the traffic lights turn red and people cross the street from about 8 different directions. I would love to get up high to be able to see it. Anyways here it is.

http://www.geocities.com/brendansparling/Harajuku.wmv

And finally, to reward those people who actually read through the entire contents of the blog and not just look at the pictures (ANDREW!) here is a picture of a gender non-specific person called Fumiko.

*edit* My Geocities data transfer limit is very low so you might find that you get an error when you click on the links. The limit gets reset every hour so just keep trying!