day 31 - Saiyuki_LiveAction_07_(CHN)_(JPN SUBS).zip

04/07/07 23:28
i caught a cold. it started yesterday and it got worse today so it`s official. this sucks. so i went into the day feeling pretty shitty. i`m not even really that sick yet, but it usually gets worse over 4 or 5 days so the prospect of how i`m probably gonna be tomorrow was enough to make me feel depressed. we started the day by going to a tokyo ymca. in the last month i`ve seen more ymca buildings from the inside than most people have ever seen at all, i guess. it was not really different from any of the others. we had lunch. then we went to akihabara. akihabara is tokyo`s nerd quarter. when you see images of tokyo with thousands of people and big shiny ads all over the place, blinking and being generally noisy, that`s most likely akihabara. being there lifted my spirits a little bit, since it`s a fun place. a lot of useless crap, of course, but many interesting electronics and game shops. in the evening we were supposed to go to some theater performance of saiyuki. saiyuki is one of the most popular chinese stories and it`s really famous in japan (the main character is named son goku, i guess most people know that name ;P). before that we met with some more people, among them the norwegian boy from yesterday and had dinner. he didn`t use the chopsticks but asked for a fork instead. i`m not sure if he`ll get by with that attitude for five weeks. i mean, even if you`ve never done it before, it`s not that hard to learn how to eat with chopsticks. and the japanese love you for it, seriously. the theater performance was fun. the whole show is from china and only in japan for two weeks, so it was sold out (with tickets a 8500 yen = 50 euro). the play itself was in chinese with japanese subtitles shwon right and left from the stage. yeah, subtitles in a theatre...
the japanese subtitles were not such a great help to me, since i know maybe 300 of the 2000 letters you need to read stuff like that. but we got an english summary beforehand which made following the story pretty easy. there wasn`t that much talking anyway. most of the time the actors were dancing and jumping and doing all kinds of choreographic stuff, like an artistic circus performance. the entire time, there was something which one could call background music, though music was not always a part of it. most of the time there was just this weird ass noisy percussion. whenever an actor moved it went BOOM-CHING-CHING RATATTATA CHING!! you could record the stuff and call yourself an avant-garde percussion project, i suppose. anyway, i`m feeling better than i did this morning and i hope the condition will not worsen at least...