day 33 - is it just me or are these thread titles getting longer?

06/07/07 23:34
today i basically spent the rest of my money. we started the day with another tourist trip into tokyo. it took about one hour riding on various subway lines (the system is pretty good and not so hard to understand, but it still takes time to get from a to b in this moloch of a city). today`s place of choice was a part of the city called odaiba. some years ago, instead of odaiba there was the sea, tokyo bay to be exact. i suppose you`ve heard about these expansions. the district is full with big office buildings and such stuff. we visited two museums, the first being on japanese maritime history (with models of boats) and the museum itself being in the shape of a boat. the second museum was japan`s innovation and science museum or whatever (miraikan), and it was quite interesting. they had a lot of experiments etc. which one could watch and they had some cool robot who could catch balls that were shot in his direction at fast speed. we went for lunch to a chinese buffet restaurant. this was once more a confirmation of how tightly japanese are bound to their schedules. they need a schedule for everything. i`ve got several schedules for my entire stay, schedules for the visits to the single families, schedules for days during these visits, train schedules so that i will get out at the right station and so on. today they obviously made the schedule "go to museum one. go to museum two. eat at restaurant x." the facts that noone had ever been at that restaurant, that i had no expressed any wish to particularly go there, that it was quite a bit away from our location and that we passed like 20 other fine restaurants to get there didn`t seem to matter. the schedule must be kept.
another nice example for this was during my first week. i had my schedule for the week sent to me while i was still in germany and it was pretty tight. they had written that i could answer them with any wish to "change" the schedule. so i asked them if i could visit the family where i had been two years ago. when i came, the schedule had not really changed at all. it was the same, just with an additional point "visit family, stay over night", which added even more stress.
to get back to the buffet restaurant, and this is just a fun fact: the japanese name for these kind of restaurants is "baikingu", meaning: "viking". don`t ask me why (ask wikipedia)... well, in germany those places are also known as all-you-can-eat-restaurants and a horde of people really trying to eat all they can might give off an awesome viking impression...
in the evening i had asked to walk around the area near the house for like 2 hours and i think that this was the first time that i have been walking anywhere alone in over a month! i took the train to shinjuku (oh, what a rebel i am!) and paid my last yen (well, there are about 900 left) for yet another cd at the awesome tower records store they had there (sure enough i had planned my act of civil disobedience by obtaining the store location on the internet, bwahaha). because going to shinjuku takes like half an hour i didn`t have too much time there, but it looked really nice and crowded and busy.
here i repacked my baggage, leaving all the stuff outside that i`m gonna throw away on my last night (i don`t want to seem ungrateful, but i got so many presents from all kind of people that i just don`t need) and it was 24.9 kg. the restriction is 20, but airlines are known for allowing up to 5 kg over that, so i think i`m gonna take my chances with that. all my books and manga are in the hand luggage, which only amounts to 7kg in total. i`m disappointed at myself. (i think i had 26 and 13 kg respectively, two years ago). 29076.

day 32 - anniversary... mensiversary? (oh latin, where art thou)

05/07/07 24:23
one month ago i arrived in japan (has it really been that long?). today when i woke up the cold wasn`t any better. on the contrary, as i had feared, it had worsened and my throat really pained. so i gave in when they offered me some medicine (normally i try to avoid pills and such stuff whenever possible) and went back to sleep for some hours. i guess the medicine did help more or less, at least i didn`t really feel any pain throughout the day. as a replacement, i had a constant dizziness, nothing serious, but some kind of uneasy feeling. it reminded me of taking coffeine pills when you`re tired. you can`t sleep, but you`re not exactly awake...
anyway, we went for a bus tour through tokyo. the trip went to many of the places where i was two years ago on the one-day-trip to tokyo. first, the imperial palace and the park surrounding it, very nice. afterwards asakusa, a big temple with a huge shopping area around it. they sell all kind of merchandise including cool samurai swords, but i`m afraid i don`t have that much money left and getting the thing on the plane must be a bitch. apart from that we went to the television studios of nhk, one of japan`s biggest broadcasting companies. they had some nice exhibits and fake tv shows where you could be the actor etc. in the end we went on a boat ride on some river through tokyo (no idea what it`s called) and got back here. then we had dinner and right now i`m listening to the new bad religion album since i discovered that they have it on their myspace page in its entirety.
i`m actually looking forward to returning home, since the whole routine here is pretty tiresome. i think three and a half or four weeks would have been perfect, but maybe my spirits are just down because of the cold...
anyway, i`ll try to enjoy the final days here as all of this feels pretty much like a closing point to a big part of my life and once i get back i`ll have to start from the beginning, and i intend to change a few things. (dun-dun-dun)

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...

day 30 - why go to paris if you can travel round half the goddamn world (and who wants to hear donald speak french anyway)

03/07/07 25:42
today i went to disneyland tokyo. i`ve never been to any other disnyland. well, it turned out to be a pretty ormal kid-friendly amusement park, but so what, it was fun. i went with some ymca members of my age. to get there we drove around tokyo on the subway. because it was a tuesday outside the holiday season it was empty for disneyland standards and we never had to wait for more than 20 minutes, even on the most popular rides. the day went by quickly and we met the youth chief hosokawa-san at 6pm inside disneyland at a restaurant. there was another group of 4 with a boy from norway. he arrived last week and is doing pretty much the same thing as me, staying until august. the difference: he doesn`t speak a word of japanese. that`s got to be tough. on the other hand he might not experience so many "oh he can speak japanese so i`ll just talk and talk and talk and talk abouth whatever the hell i`m talking about at this breakneck speed not noticing the look of incomprehension on his face, surely he must understand me, so why don`t i use some complicated words like nuclear vortex on the vertebrae of the sacrosanct conscious equilibrium. income taxes. declaration of independence. huh, are you tired?" - "no i`m not tired, i don`t understand a SINGLE GODDAMN WORD SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!!!111oneone" moments. those are always very... precious to me. btw., when japanese pay for the day they stay for the day, so i got home by 11. and the disney parade music is frighteningly close to final fantasy vii`s golden saucer theme. 27301.

day 29 - last station

i have arrived in tokyo. as of about 4 o clock this afternoon, i am at my last host family`s house. i didn`t do very much in the morning, most of the time i packed my stuff and lay around listening to music. we left the house at 3 pm and i didn`t have the chance toay goodbye to the mother or any of the kids since they weren`t around. meh. i slept during the ride, so i haven`t realy seen anything of tokyo so far. but i think that setagaya-ku, the district where i am now, is on the outskirts of tokyo or we couldn`t have made it in under an hour. some y`smen from the tokyo club came by, and we had dinner. i ate another japanese specialty, known by the obscure name of shabu shabu which is basically some twisted form of fondue, but not that good... the house of the yoshioka family is new and big and very pretty. 26301/34.

intermission - more photos

any other picture requests? i`ll see what i can do.


welcome in japan. please observe the rules!

walking japan in style.

diving equipment. heavy shit.

the slopes of mount fuji.

a nice day at the coast.

a view of atami.

kiyomizudera, the best place in the world.

me enjoys the university life.

the skyline of yokohama.

do you speak engrish?

day 28 - taking a last breath

01/07/07 22:56
today i didn`t really do much. they told me yersterday that i could relax and sleep as long as i want. "as long as i want" being another term for "10 a.m.", cause that`s when they woke me up. yay. anyway, i told them i`d go for a little trip of yokohama because i hadn`t seen too much of the city so far. so we drove around the harbour area a little, saw impressive skycrapers and stuff, among them the landmarq tower (sp?), japan`s highest building. then we got back here. i`ve slept a little (but i hate falling asleep during the day), listened to my music and did stuff on the internet. that`s it, basically. but one thing that i forgot to mention yersterday. at that kaitenzushi place, we didn`t get to eat directly, because all the tables were taken. we didn`t get to eat when the next guests left, either, because there were like fifty people in line before us. and "like fifty" is not an overstatement in this case, but rather the sad truth. we arrived at 17:50 and got to the table at 19:10. and when we got out of there at half past 8, there were still at least 30 people waiting. the parking lot of the place was the same, every place was taken and the waiting cars were queued up way into the street. at the busiest time we counted 12 cars in line. and not one of the drivers got angry or outraged, noone shouting at the guy in care of the parking lot. i don`t think that`s something you would ever see in germany.