I finally did it!

I managed to kick the wanting to buy a cellphone obsession/habit. And I did it by buying a cellphone. Now if this sounds like an alcoholic kicking his need for alcohol by downing a bottle of vodka then you just aren't looking at it the right way. Anyways, I was able to satisfy my materialist needs for at least another year at least. I'm not sure just how advanced Japanese phones are over their North American cousins or if that is even the case at all. A quick glance at the Futureshop website shows that most cellphones now have Bluetooth (most of ours don't) but they also cost approximately $400 dollars. They all seem to be stuck at 1.3 megapixels for a camera as well. Well mine doesn't have Bluetooth but it only cost 80 bucks, comes with a enormous screen, has a 4 megapixel camera and has video calling (what a ridiculous feature). It's probably a year old as well. Most new cameras over here can play TV and it's all free. The phones just pick up the signal and you don't have to pay a darned thing.


Hopefully I'll be able to put some music on mine once I get the darned Japanese software sorted out. Do people text in Canada? I know I never did when I was home. We Canadians prefer to talk on the phone I think. Texting is huge over here. Actually it's emailing not texting. They've really got it down to an art. Before I used to just send regular text messages-now I send messages that blink, that go by on a ticker, that swing back and forth. Who knew it could be so fun!

U-RA-WA RED-ZU! We Love You!

I went to a soccer game with my friend Peter on Wednesday night. A team from my area (sort of) is playing in the Asian Champions League, a tournament sort of like the regular Champions League but without the pedigree. The game itself wasn't that great. Our team (Urawa Red Diamonds) were playing a team from Shanghai and neither team was all that impressive. And it was raining. Fortunately our seats were covered but it was still a little nippy. The fans, on the other hand, were absolutely fantastic. There was only a crowd of about 28,000 at the game (less than half of capacity) but I think about half of them were sitting behind the Urawa goal and were chanting ALL game long. It was amazing how one little area could fill the entire stadium with noise. And boy was it noisy-loudest thing I've ever heard in my life. Behind the goals is uncovered so you know those fans are hardcore, standing in the rain all game. Here are a few videos I took-unfortunately it was just with my camera so the sound doesn't really come through all that great.

Straight from the horses hoof

Here's some of the kanji that I've been learning . This has been written by myself and I did it on the pain program so it does look a little chicken scratchy. The first kanji picture means "friday" and the other one means "go", "come", "see" and "book".

Oops again!

Thanks to Crazy Conrad for letting me know about the problem with computers not being able to recognize asian languages and displaying only question marks instead. I'm afraid I have to apologize. I'm sorry to tell you that most of your computers are complete ignoramuses!! They know even less kanji than I do and let me tell you, that is pathetic! All joking aside, if I ever post any more kanji I'll try to post a picture of it or something that North American computers should have no problems displaying.

My hat

Yes I have an interesting hat. A couple of them actually. I'm only writing about them because of some inflammatory comments written by a sibling on my new addiction-Facebook. It's like MySpace I suppose. I honestly have no idea as I've never ever checked out MySpace before. Anyways back to fashion in Japan. One of the great things about living in Japan is that you never have to worry about feeling self-conscious. It's has a little to do with the fact that Tokyo has 15 million people that you'll never see twice and a lot to do with the fact that you can dress up as ridiculously as you want and walk out your front door perfectly confident that you'll be the least ridiculous looking person out there. This is a country where men think it's cool to dress in feminine fashions for God sakes. No amount of ridiculous hats will ever top that.

New kanji!

I've been browsing through my new kanji books and I think they've been a success already. I haven't actually learned that much from them but they have changed my attitude from 'kanji is stupid' to 'kanji is cool-sort of'. The neat thing about it is how it combines different kanji to form new words and sometimes gives a lot of insight into Japanese culture.

Take this is an example- the kanji for marriage 姻, is a combination of 女(woman) and 因(depend). I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Here's another one: the kanji for noisy or immoral is 姦, that is, three kanji of woman. And lastly, the kanji for strong or manly is 壮, the left-hand kanji being 'big' and the right-hand kanji being 'samurai'. Interesting as heck, I tell ya.

My own personal kanji has improved slightly. I now know (wait let me try and write it just to make sure I'm not lying).........Yep I remember! Here it is!

日　sun
月 moon
火 fire
水 water
木 wood
金 gold
土 earth
曜日 add this kanji to the above to make the days of the week
川 river

It's still fairly easy, straightforward stuff but it's a little more difficult than the numbers at least! It's interesting to see that some of the Japanese days of the week are similar to our own. For example, 日曜日 (sun+day) is the same as our Sunday and 月曜日 (moon+day) is the same as our Monday.

Oops...

Now I remember why none of my five pairs of work/casual shoes have laces in them. Oh well.
I have been learning Japanese by the way, I just have more trouble doing it on a regular basis than I do reading or playing videogames! But I'm coming along now. I was supposed to get some Kanji books today that I ordered from Amazon but I waited for them until 10:15 this morning and then took a quick trip to the grocery store. Upon my return, I realized that someone had called at approximately 10:17. Whoever it was didn't leave a message but if they had it would probably go something like 'Sorry we couldn't deliver your package today. We'll come again tomorrow morning two minutes after you leave for work.' Gah.

I am learning though. Just yesterday I learned to write my first kanji. Up till now I've taken the stance that I would rather be ignorant than learn that stupid picture language. Now I've had a complete reversal of attitude-I'm gonna learn that stupid picture language but I'm not going to enjoy it.

My first kanji was just the numbers 1-10 and actually it's ridiculously easy compared to some of the stuff out there. Let me see if I can do it for you:

一 1
二 2
三 3
四 4
五 5
六 6
七 7
八 8
九 9
十 10

See that was easy wasn't it! I've decided not to learn 0 partly because it actually isn't really used very often (for example 40 isn't 4-0 but rather 4-10 四十）and mostly because it looks like this: 零

New boots!

Came in the mail this morning. Interesting way of shopping that-I'm not sure if it's done back home or not. "Sorry we don't have any boots in that size right now. If you want to purchase them we can ship you a pair from one of our other stores in less than two days time."
Whaddaya think Emily? They're pretty cool eh? Maybe I'm ahead of the fashion curve instead of behind it!

The new organized me

You may remember last week I mentioned that I had purchased a new organizer/schedule book. Well here it is. As you can see, April is pathetically bare. I guess I'm not the social butterfly you thought I was. The truth is, ever since Grade 9 at least, I've been one huge pathetic failure at keeping a schedule book. Every year, at the beginning of the year, they would hand out a free schedule book and I was would use it and stick to it for about 2 days-maybe 3 days max. I never had one in university and last year I bought a nice Tintin one from Tokyu Hands which I think I got maybe 3 months use of before I completely forgot.

This time I'm determined to keep it going. My strategy is two-pronged. First, I bought one that is small enough to fit in my pocket. Anything bigger is too inconvenient to haul around. This way I can just whip it out of my pocket when I need to and scribble something down. Secondly, I use it as a backup wallet and carry about $80 cash around in it which ensures that I'm not going to just leave it in the bottom of my desk drawer.

Buying a schedule book at a hobby store is actually quite fun. There's a huge selection and then once you've picked out what you want they have all these things that you can buy to put in it, ie. train map, extra pages, calendar, ruler , pens, plastic inserts etc. It's quite fun actually. It's sort of like buying a stock car and then souping (sp?) it up with custom parts. I think the planner itself cost me close to 4000 yen and then I ended up spending another 2000 yen just on supplementary materials!

Still, when you have as spartan a life as mine, it's difficult to find the material to write in your schedule book. I almost cried this morning when my private class told me that there would be no class due to Golden Week on May 2nd because it gave me something to write in my book. Perhaps I should add it to my list of New Years Resolutions-all of which I'm keeping up with by the way (well except for that darned Japanese one).

All I can say is that God does not want me to get a DoCoMo phone. After being confounded twice before, I felt sure that maybe today was the day. To make a long story short, it turned out not to be. Last week they were on for 1 yen and today when I went with a fairly bi-lingual friend, there were none left at the store. Apparently the store in Shibuya had some but I wasn't going to go all that way. Anyways I suppose I should just take the hint and give up.

I did however manage to spend $170 on a new pair of Doc Martin boots! Wow that number looks a lot more shocking in dollars than it does in yen. 17,000 yen. Hmm, that doesn't look much better. Perhaps I was just in denial about spending more than $60 on a pair of boots.

My computer almost died the other day-it's working now but the future doesn't look good. Basically my computer works fine as long as I never turn it off. So basically it's going to stay on for the next year. But it's going to have to be turned off eventually which could cause problems.