New friends and more karaoke

In March there are four major intake days to the school. First was last Monday, when I did my test, second was yesterday, third will be Monday next week and the fourth will be on Tuesday the week after that. So today two new students started our class. German Caro and Thai Gan (he had a completely unsayable name for everyone not Thai so he became Gan). I connected with Caro immediately. For some reason she seems to be into the same things like me AND she lives in Harajuku. I think I'll spend a lot of time in Harajuku this coming month (she's only staying a month :/).

After school we went out to have lunch together again. Since we were so many once again we all ended up at the Italian/Japanese mash-up all-you-can-eat buffé place again. But it was nice. They had some new stuff. And I got to eat real meat! \o/ We stayed for too long at that restaurant and were actually asked to leave by the staff xD

We all went separate ways after lunch. My plan originally was to go to Shibuya and check out the Disney store and the Hello Kitty store (and maybe the Hello Project store) again. I need to find a calendar. I didn't bring the other one since I thought it would just become a big obstacle, but I could really use one. And I want a Japanese one so I know when all their random holidays are ;) But when asked about where I was headed and I said Shibuya, they said let's go together and we ended up at some wonderful little café, at which they served delicious strawberry milk (and I also had a strawberry cake). Being able to eat strawberries all the time like this... Wonderful. In Sweden it's just during summer, but strawberries are always delicious ;P

Around 4pm we decided to leave the café. Caro had some things to do, but Yuki and Melanie had two hours to kill and Gan had nothing special to do. So I came up with the idea to go to karaoke for an hour and that Caro could fix her things after that. They all agreed so we went. It was more fun this time than last time :) Caro and I sang Morning Musume and Otsuka Ai together. Just because we both knew the songs and because we both had really bad singing voices, mine even more so since I'm still dealing with that cold. Yuki and Melanie were awesome as usual and Gan's voice was ok. But for some reason Gan and Caro were better company to bring to karaoke. They are random and I like it ;)
When our karaoke time was over we decided to split. And by then it had started to snow. SNOW! IN MARCH?! IN TOKYO?! And it's just not snowing, it's piling up! Why did I leave my boots at home? :( One thing is for sure. Tonight I'm gonna sleep in a sweater and with socks, knee high, because when I wake up tomorrow, my room's temperature is probably gonna be about 1 degree. When I get home I'm really gonna treasure that wall isolation and the radiators and the central heating system... Those things do not exist in Japan.

Another good thing happened today, though. I got my mobile :) So now I can text with all my friends and call my host mother without borrowing a friend's phone :) Yay! Anyone (I know) who wants my number can give me a shout at msn or Facebook :P

Guitars

Today ended up being quite a short day. Maybe because Jennifer had left and Chappie didn't turn up. Jennifer used to be the one to drag us (willingly) around all of town. Hopefully it will be easier to stay in touch with the people even after we have separated after I get my phone. And hopefully that will happen this week.

After school today we went out for lunch and after that Ebu needed a thing for his guitar so we went to a whole block filled with guitar stores. I, Yuki and Ebu suddenly turned into music nerds, especially guitar nerds. There were incredible ones. Some shaped like angels, some with metal on the front etc etc. These two, however, were the ones to catch my eyes the most:

When we were kind of finished with the guitars, Laura wanted to go to a shop in Akihabara so we all went there. I need to go there again to buy an electronic dictionary. Found a nice one today for 31,800 yen, which isn't that expensive. It's about what my iPod costed me.

I've also managed to catch a cold, which makes everything a little less fun. Hopefully it's a three-day-thing. My throat hurt yesterday and it doesn't today so that's always a plus. If I'm lucky it will be the same way with everything else :)

Asakusa and Karaoke

Have two days to catch up on, so expect a looooong post ;)

Friday I had the best lunch ever. Lots of us (I, Chappie, Melanie, Jennifer, Yuki, Martin, Ebu, Julian, German Karolina, Korean Ken, Italian Erika and Laura) went out to eat at a Japanese restaurant just across the street from the school. It was a traditional Japanese restaurant, which meant we had to remove our shoes and sit on our knees on the floor by the table. This turned out to be pretty difficult for the taller guys Martin, Ebu and Julian. Yuki had some troubles too, though not as much as the others :P Those guys are now officially called Trees. xD Left picture (from left to right): Chappie, me, Karolina. Right picture (from left to right): Jennifer, Yuki, Melanie. Friday was also the last school day for Jennifer. She's going back to Hong Kong and then in the end of March she's coming back to Japan to start university in Nagoya :) However she needed to find souvenirs for her family and friends back in Hong Kong so we went to Asakusa. In Asakusa there are a lot of temples and pagods and also two long streets full of small shops, almost like market stands, where they sell basically everything to a much cheaper price than in a real store. One street and a pagod.

I was more fascinated by the temples and the pagods, but I feel like buying a Japanese lucky charm. There are ones for "Safe Driving", maybe something to think about when going home so I can pass that drivers exam the next time :P However, to enter the temples you had to cleanse yourself. Either by washing your hands in the well or breathe the smoke of inscence. Since the well was crowded I chose the inscence and then we entered. It was dark in there so I couldn't really get a good picture, without flash it was bad and with flash it turned even darker :/ However, to compensate I took a picture of the ceiling. Unfortunately I couldn't get a picture of the temple itself either since it was being restored and repaired :/ But according to the others, Asakusa isn't even half as great as Ueno, since the temples in Asakusa are from the 1950's and 1970's. They were just rebuilt back then, but the temples in Ueno go way way back :) The ceiling and the worksite temple.
After the temples and the souvenir market we decided to go to Asakusa Sky Light. It's a huge sky scraper in the middle of Asakusa. The top floor hosts a café in which the walls are all windows so you can see the city from above. We spent hours there just talking and hanging out :) So I was able to get pictures of the city both by daylight and in nighttime :)Later on we went to an Italian restaurant in Shinjuku, it was kind of expensive but I really liked my pasta with seafood :D

Saturday was a school festival so I went to school on that day too. When I got there Yuki was the only one I knew so I hanged out with him. They had put up pictures on collages with long-time students and their host families. I could find Audray, Yuki and Julian on them :) Yuki and I started out going to a play about a Japanese historically important person. I couldn't understand everything, but they used simple Japanese so most of the time I understood what they meant. It was brilliant. Especially in the end when a Swedish person from the audicence (obviously part of the play) went up an started threatening the main character. He was later shot and his last words were "fan vad det ska göra ont hela tiden". Yuki and I almost died with laughter.

Then Ebu had turned up and we went to another classroom, which had been transformed into a sweets shop :P Lots of delicious things. We ran into Chappie too and then it was time for Swedish class. Ebu, Yuki and I, being Swedish, really didn't need it, but we had nothing better to do so we went and sat in the back listening. That was the most fun part of the festival xD It was a Swedish long-time student holding the class and she did it kind of well. Afterwards we went to another classroom, now with Chappie as well, to watch Totoro. Unfortunately it was without subtitles (but since I have seen it so many times with Swedish subtitles, I understood everything :P) but the others couldn't understand much so after a while we went to another classroom where we could try Italian and Taiwanese food. I managed to get both the last teramizu and the last Taiwanese pancake xD Both really delicious :3

By then we were all kind of hungry so we went to a restaurant to have lunch. By then Jennifer and Laura (an Italian girl) and one of Jennifer's Japanese friends had caught up too. During the lunch I talked a lot with Ebu and it was really nice. (His real name is Evgenij and he's Russian but brought up in Sweden). Then some of us went with Jennifer to buy more souvenirs. When she was finished we went to Shinjuku and to the huge department store called Tokyu Hands. At one of the floors we spent a lot of time playing around in the masquerade area xD I was too busy having fun to remember to take any pictures, unfortunately :/ Today I also discovered Haribo. They have Haribo gummibears in Japan! If I ever feel home sick I can buy some sweets from home xD

After Tokyu Hands (by then it was only I, Jennifer, Chappie and Yuki left) we went to karaoke. It was my first time to a Japanese karaoke, and ofc I forgot to take pictures :P But compared to the Swedish karaoke bar I went to... this was so much better. You book a reservation of how many people you are. You then get a room that matches the amount of people. In that room you have a TV with the song lyrics on. You can choose Japanese and Chinese songs in the chooser but you have to ask for the English ones. They are all in a book and it comes with a special machine that tells the TV what English song to play. However in that room there's also disco lights and CGs in the room. You can order drinks and snacks and you reserve the room per hour. We had only one hour and that gave us time to sing 2 or 3 songs each. It was me with a bad singing voice and the other three with really awesome voices :P

After that Jennifer left to meet her roommate who was upset after one of her aqcuaintances had disappeared. Yuki, I and Melanie went to eat at small place. Then Yuki and Melanie wanted to go to a big place with all the sports and games you can imagine, but I couldn't go. By then it was already 10.30pm and I had no idea when my last train went. Now I do :P

Today have been a really relaxed day. I've been going nowhere. Went up around noon and been studying and doing laundry.

Hello Project Store

After an ordinary school day the oldest guy in our class (Massimo from Italy, he's like 32) took us to a place he knew of to eat lunch. Turned out it was an all-you-can-eat-buffé for 950 yen. It was an Italian/Japanese restaurant so there was a lot of pasta and stuff but I also got to taste Japanse curry for the first time :) It also felt really nice using a fork. Felt like I hadn't used a fork for ages and actually it's been barely a week.

After lunch we all separated, Massimo to go to work, the other Italians somewhere else, the rest of my friends to Shinjuku and I went to Shibuya to finally find that Hello Project Store. I looked it up on Hello Project's official website yesterday before I went to sleep. Turned out I had walked past it several times without knowing since it was in the bottom of a department store xD Really nice the store on the floor above was a Hello Kitty store xD Anyway I bought a hell of a lot of photos and I was going to buy some merchandise too, but they didn't have what I wanted, sold out. When I was going to pay the guy behind the counter asked the girl behind the counter if she knew English, when I heard that I said that Japanese was fine and he looked relieved.
While looking for Hello Project Store and walking around in Shibuya, two Japanese girls suddenly started walking beside me and started talking to me. Right out of nowhere xD I was really baffled but I thought it was a lot of fun too :)

After Hello Project Store I went to try and buy that mobile phone I need. First store I went to I asked for advice and price etc and discussed if and where I was going to be able to buy a phone without Alien registration. Seemed like nowhere, so I took the tube home and looked around on the net for somewhere I could apply for Alien registration. I also looked in the compendium we got from the school the first day and found that you could buy a pre-paid or post-paid mobile at the school, only passport was necessary. So I'm gonna look into that tomorrow :P Hopefully that means I will have enough money for an electronic dictionary :)

This turned out not to be a very long post. So I'm gonna write about some few fun anecdotes of Japan. For example, Japanese people have a whole culture around taking a bath. I've never felt this clean in my entire life. They have one room with just a bathtub and floor next to it in it. When you take a shower (has become more popular than taking a bath since it's faster) you don't stand in the bathtub, but on the floor next to it :P There's a drain on the floor so all the water goes directly out of the room and you don't have to dry off the water afterwards.

Japanese toilets are also interesting. For instance they have both Japanese styled and western styled toilets, and even the western styled ones have been made Japanified. On the western toilets there are a whole mechanism on the side where you can choose if you want to make it into a bidé, if you want it to wash your butt and how hard you want it to do it :P The Japanese toilets are funny. You squat down over them instead of sitting. I've never used one, but one time I walked into the toilets at the tube station and they were Japanese ones. At that time I didn't know how to use them so I went somewhere else :P

Daikanyama and Sweets Forest

We had a test today, which felt kind of stupid. It was for them. Apparantly we're going to have those every now and then to check up on past things, but I just started yesterday so I hadn't done all their things. Some answers were just guess work from what I could remember that the teachers had mentioned sometimes back in Sweden. Hopefully it went well :)

For lunch today we went to a Chinese restaurant. But according to the Chinese (generalising again) girls it was more of a Chinese/Japanese mash-up. Anyway I liked my food :) After lunch we went to Daikanyama to go shop in all the cute little stores there. I found one shop that I really liked but I didn't buy anything, mostly because I think maybe I should get a Japanese mobile or an electronic dictionary. I can't decide. And those cost a lot of money, so until I get one of those I might not be buying too much stuff :) In Daikanyama there was one shop which I almost couldn't stand to enter, the pinkness and all the kawaii was so overwhelming that I felt depressed going in there :/ Here's a picture of it. Don't know if you get the feeling but still...
After Daikanyama, Yuki and Melanie left and Julien (German boy, you remember?), Jennifer, Chappie and I went even further on the Touyoko tube line to go to a place they knew of called Sweets Forest. It was the best place ever! Totally kawaii but really great, not overwhelming like the shop :) However Sweets Forest is as big as one floor in a shopping mall, but this area is filled with cafés that sell cakes and such. We got one each and I also decided on a choco/banana smoothie, which was better than I expected. Strawberries are extremely popular in Japan, or so it seems. Every convenience store you go to they have strawberries, even on the streets they sell them and all those cakes at Sweets Forest, most of them had whole strawberries inside of them! Anyway here's a picture of what I chose to eat and the entrence to Sweets Forest :)Not much happened after that. I went back to my homestay to study and eat and I don't know what happened to the rest :P Oh and remember that I promised you a picture of my pink tube station, Sakura-shinmachi? Well, here it is, in today's morning rush (it was horrible and fun at the same time. So much people pressed together that you could hardly breathe...)



Basically, today has just been very pink ;P

New friends

The first real school day was today and to make sure that I was going to be on time I ended up being half an hour too early ^^; Hopefully I will be better tomorrow. The lesson was OK, not too hard, not too easy and after the lesson almost all of us went out to have lunch (lesson ended at 12.40pm). So it was me, three other Swedish guys (Jocke (aka Yuki), Martin and Evgeniij), a German guy and girl (Julien and Karolina), a Chinese girl (Melanie), a Taiwanese girl (Chao Pei), a Hong Kong girl (Jennifer) and an Italian girl (Laura). All of us didn't go to the same level of conversation course but since they all ended at the same time we went together :) In my class there's some other people too.

After lunch some of us (Yuki, Martin, Jennifer, Chao Pei (Chappie) and Melanie) went out to go shopping. After a while Martin had to go and just after that we bought a deep fried meatball each (just because Jennifer had heard they were really good and the place that sold them kind of famous). We walked around trying to find somewhere to sit to eat our meatballs and ended up in front of the elevators on the 8th floor in the Tokyu-building. People looked a lot on us when they walked by and we couldn't stop laughing about it.
After that we continued to shop. Yuki was kind of bored after a while and so was I since the Chinese (yes I'm generalising here) girls only wanted to go to shops with cute stuff in them. Although it was kind of fun to smell on different kinds of teas in the cutest tea shop you could imagine. Then we ended up at Hanjiro, where I found a year's supply of T-shirts for me :P I only bought two, though. Since it was cheaper if you bought two ;) Hanjiro had the most amazing stairway and I took a picture of it. I love it!Then Chappie had to leave and we started to think about dinner. In the end we decided to go to Ikebukuro to eat tonkatsu. Yuki loves tonkatsu and Jennifer knew about a good place in Ikebukuro :) I forgot to take a picture since I was too busy hanging out xD

Around 9.15pm I decided it was time to start to head back to Setagaya (the area where I live), so we payed and they kept on hanging out while I took the tube home on my own. It all went well all the way to Shibuya, where I was going to change. In Shibuya I only looked at the name of the train and not what type of train it was. It ended up being an express train and those don't stop at Sakura-shinmachi :P I ended up in a nowhere place called Futaka-tamagawa. But there I changed to the train going back and this time I made sure it was a local one :P So in the end I got home.

Shibuya and Akihabara

Today I had my first school day. I ended up being an hour late since the train did multiple long stops. Apparantly it's very popular to kill yourself in front of the tube train so there were lots of policemen at the tube. But luckily there's some kind of note you take from the station staff and show it to the teacher and they don't complain about you being late since you have evidence for the train being late :) So that all went well. Then I did my placement test and it feels like it went really bad. There was one verb form I didn't even know what it was for and during the interview I felt really stupid. I know it's speaking I need to practice but that was just ridiculous. Anyway he asked me if I wanted to be placed in a little higher level or a little lower level and I said a little higher since I brought my school books from university and I plan on studying!

After the placement test school was over for the day and I went out to have some fun and do some sightseeing. After successfully have withdrawn some money at the post office \o/ I took the tube to Shibuya to go shopping and look for the Hello! Project store. I didn't find the store but I did find some other fun stuff. For example have you seen these sights before?

I wanted to go shopping but every store I looked into had clothes that really didn't fit my style so I ended up at H&M. But that was an incredible H&M, nothing like Sweden! Four floors. Three of them with ladies' fashion. Heaven. I bought two sweaters and a bag :P After that I found the Disney store. Well, the way it looked it was kind of hard to miss ;) Had a great time in there and I will be back.
I also went to HMV, but instead of buying all those CDs I'd like to have, like Morning Musume, Buono! and Otsuka Ai, I bought Tsuji Nozomi's two books :P I know I'm a geek. But it's been pretty fun looking through them and hopefully it won't be as much work to read them later on.At 5 I met up with Audray at school (she has afternoon classes) and her French friend. He couldn't speak much English so they spoke in French all the time and Audray translated to me. But sometimes when they didn't speak as fast I could understand pretty much everything they said and that made me kind of proud :) We went to Akihabara, the electric town, to find a new camera for Audray. She lost her bag last week with her camera, passport and house key in it. She looked around a lot and grabbed a lot of magazines, so I expect we'll be back soon ;)
After walking around for ages, we finally decided to have sushi for dinner. I had forgotten that they were French and French people eat around 8-9pm, while in Sweden we eat around 6-7pm :P But it turned out to be worth waiting for. I had my first meal at a sushi bar tonight. After copying them I figured out how it all worked and all the sushi was really good :)

Arriving and Ueno

So I arrived in Japan yesterday after the longest flight of my life. Not kidding, I haven't been outside of Europe before! And try to find a comfortable position to sleep in on an airplane - fantastically impossible. So after just a few hours of sleep I landed at Narita an hour later than planned. Then it was the HUGE queue to get accepted into Japan (because it is only the people with Japanese passports or re-entry permits who get to be accepted without further notice). But I finally got there, got my picture and fingerprints taken and got that stamp in my passport. Then I went to get my luggage, which was easy enough. Then I went through the customs, which is compulsory here, and was asked some questions by the police standing there. How long was I going to stay? Whose address was it that I had written? Did I have any official document of the host family? (Yes, Japanese airports are military states) Then I was free to go, about an hour after the plane had landed I got to the woman holding "my" yellow sign. She made a few quick calls, since the schedule had changed due to the plane being late. Then she paid my bus ticket and put me on the airport bus towards Tokyo.

When I arrived at Tokyo Central Air Terminal I had to wait another 30 minutes before my host mother and my room mate arrived to pick me up. So we got on the tube and I got my school pass and then we finally arrived Sakura-shinmachi and Setagaya, where I'm going to live. I'll take a picture of Sakura-shinmachi later - it's all pink (!), due to its name being Sakura (cherry).

I got my own room and started to unpack, but was then called down for lunch - sushi ^^ For the first time I got to taste inari, nattou and real tamagoyaki - all yummy :) After lunch I was supposed to just take a power nap and then go out with my French room mate Audray and her friends, but I ended up sleeping for 10½ hours. At midnight I woke up and stayed up for an hour then I went back to bed and slept for another eight hours - jet lag is really something xD

So when I got up today I started to unpack and didn't go down to take a shower until I was finished. After shower it was time for breakfast - yoghurt, toast and Japanese sweet potatoes (Satsuma). At breakfast I gave my host mother, Yoshiko, the scrapbook I had prepared as a present for her. It was all about Sweden and she really liked it. All throughout breakfast we had a conversation about Sweden and it was really funny :) After breakfast I spent some time on the internet and waited for Audray to wake up. When she did she asked me if I wanted to go to Ueno park with her later and I said yes. Around 2 we got on the tube and went to Ueno, which is on the other side of Tokyo so it was quite some trip! When we got there we first waited for Audray's friend who was going to meet us there but we couldn't find her so we went to buy some onigiri for lunch. Before lunch we went to the tent where they sell food and china/porcelain and such things, I didn't take a picture since I was too busy watching to remember ^^; Maybe I'll go back there, they had some really cute chopsticks :P Then we had lunch and it was all good, but the last onigiri had some really weird salty/sour taste so we went to buy something sweet and ended up with crêpes :P While eating those crêpes we then went around looking at the temples and taking pictures.

After going round to many temples, we decided to go down on the main street (I think) and ended up looking for shoes. Audray came in December and originally she was only going to stay for three months, but she changed her mind and is now going to stay for three more months, thus she has no spring shoes. Japanese shoes have sizes from S-L and it's gonna be hard finding shoes. Audray is smaller than me and she's having problems finding shoes in size L that fits, the same goes for me. I actually found a pair that I liked and kind of fitted if i removed my socks, too bad I didn't have any cash at that time. I've never felt limited not having cash before, but here hardly anyone accepts a card so if you have no cash you're doomed and most ATMs don't accept foreign issued cards. Tomorrow I'll go to the post office opposite the school and withdraw some money :)

Pokémon addict

I started reading this web comic about a week ago and since then I've been stuck on my DS playing Pokémon Pearl every free moment. Breaks at school, bus trips, before sleeping. Maybe I should try doing something constructive like reading those books I started on months ago... Or writing on that story that I never seem to get started on... But playing Pokémon is my addiction right now, not even the fact that I bought the original Rayman on GBA and Quack Attack on PS2 that I've been dying to have for years could change this. Go Pokémon! xD

Well...

I wrote this from the top of my head about an hour ago...

You're my daydream

You're always on my mind

Your face is always visible

If not direct, then indirect

I can see you

And when I'm with you

All I want is to keep looking at you

Never lose sight of you

Look into those eyes

Drown in crushed glass

Blue glass

I never thought one could feel so safe

in someone else's arms

But I know that in your arms

I'm safe

I can't be hurt

Because you won't let them

And I love you for it