Quite possibly the penultimate Japan post

So, Christmas and New Year’s, eh?

On Christmas Eve (when Proper People celebrate Christmas), I had Christmas lunch with my Swedish boss, meatballs, potatoes, gravy, knäckebröd, caviar (the non-fancy Swedish one you put on bread) and julmust. It took 20 minutes to heat everything, but it impressed our Japanese co-workers, and was hella good. After work I ran home to change clothes, and then went to Roppongi with my Norwegian room mate and her boyfriend, where we met up with a bunch of Scandinavians (and a Dutch person). We then went to an Irish pub, where we had American/Irish/British/something Christmas dinner. I can’t quite remember what we had, but it was pretty delish. After that, we went to the club next doors and drank and danced for a bit. Took a cab home with the people I live with, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone trying to offer people in cars going the other way candy before.

Christmas Day, our landlady had a Christmas party/Bounenkai to which we were invited, and it was amazing, to tell the truth. Great food, amazing cakes and at least a few of the Japanese people could speak English. Although the guy that said you had to mix the (not exactly cheap) Korean munbaeju (distilled pear wine) I had bought when I went to Korea with tea didn’t exactly win me over. It was perfectly fine as a snaps straight out of the bottle, damn it. After sitting around until late talking to our landlady over a bottle of Umeshu, we thanked the powers that be that we didn’t have further home than down the stairs.

Now, to take a break from my regular way of just telling you about my weekends, I’m going to tell you about Tuesday. Although it was a rather special Tuesday. You see, Tuesday was the last working day of 2010. This apparently meant that the company bought us all food, in the form of pizzas, sushi, fried balls of mashed potato, curry bread (why haven’t I eaten it before? Why don’t more people bake food into the bread?), deep-fried chicken and, most importantly, champagne. At half past twelve. And much unlike our regular, strictly 1 hour lunches, this went on for 2½. All in all, it was a nice surprise and a hell of a way to end the working year that was 2010.

On Wednesday, I went to Asakusa, simply because a lot of the Japanese people I talked to on Christmas Day were terribly surprised that I hadn’t been there yet, and it was really great. It mostly reminded me of an older version of Okachimachi, but with a pretty neat Buddhist temple at the end of the market street. It was quite awesome, in that it inspired awe. But nothing like what I’ll be telling you later in this post.

Thursday and Friday-day were something else entirely. You see, dear reader (and there is about one of you), winter comiket was going on. Now, for those of you who’re not massive geeks, comiket is the biggest convention for cartoons and comics pretty much anywhere, with over 500 000 visitors over 3 days. Now, if you put things in their perspective, 500 000 visitors is barely anything, considering the greater Tokyo metropolitan area has around 37 million and Japan on a whole has… lots more. Comiket has some pretty cool things going for it, especially the numerous artists putting out remixes or reinterpretations of both video game/cartoon music and their own work and the really talented people who dress up as people from video games/cartoons/comics. But that’s not what comiket is about. Comiket is, by and large, about porn. Now, if you read back to my first Japan-post, when I went to Akihabara I was SHOCKED and APPALLED by the amount of nakidity present. If my current me met the me of that post, I would slap him in the face and tell him to grow up. I don’t know how many times my mind went “Oh hey, it’s that girl from that pretty coo…. wait are those… and are they… yes. yes, they are.”. Japan constantly finds ways of crushing any remaining sense of innocence I have. I also discovered that so-called crossplaying (dressing up as a character of the opposite sex) is way more common than I ever suspected. In the end, I managed to get my hands on a pretty cool card case from a pretty neat cartoon I like, as well as a CD that someone from a place on the internet I frequent had a hand in making.

Then, Friday night, New Year’s Eve. I suited up and we went to an Izakaya (Japanese pub, basically) in Shibuya with the normal Scandinavia-Dutch gang, plus some friends of people. We ordered nomihoudai and a bunch of food, and I drank my normal 5 or 6 glasses of umeshu. Around half past ten-eleven o’clock I went to Zojoji (a temple really close to Tokyo Tower) with a Swedish girl and the Finnish couple, we got into the temple grounds fairly easily, and once the clock struck 12 and everyone released their wish-balloons, well, it was quite magical. And the following, huge, amount of people heading into the temple to make their new year’s wish was even more impressive. There’s just something about going into a large golden hall with over 100 other people to ask the Buddha for forgiveness or a good new year or whatever you’re supposed to do (I did both, to be on the safe side). I’m not a religious man, but some things just make you speechless in a very… profound way.

After the temple, we planned to go to Shibuya, because someone knew of a party or a club or something. We were told to “go to Shibuya Nichome”. The thing is, all the -chomes are just a way of narrowing down a district, and since Japan decided that 95% of all roads don’t deserve a name, that makes finding other people kind of hard. Especially when their way of giving you directions is “we’re at the seven-eleven by the big crossing in Shibuya nichome”. For the record, there are at least three big crossings in Shibuya nichome, and at least two of them have 7-11s at them. After walking for 20 minutes, ending up by the station and then taking a second cab ride to where they were, we finally rendezvoused and went to the club. The club was a room. Not a big hall or anything, just a room. 50 square metres, tops. Well there, we danced the night away, I had at least two dance battles and got to act as a wall against the… Neanderthal-looking man from This is England. (Not the actor, he just looked, well, like they do in that movie.) Around half past four we decided to call it a night, some of us went to McDonalds while others went home. Now, let me tell you something. When you’ve felt nauseous from overeating for the entire night, eating a cheeseburger and a bigmac is not a Good Idea. I did my part, though, and ate my share.

Oh, and since I couldn’t find the place to insert this in the story itself, I also ran into one of my American friends on New Year’s Eve. And by ran into, I mean he ran into me. And by ran into me, I mean he basically tackle-hugged me. Still, nice to feel appreciated.

Today, I’ve mostly watched people from the Internet play videogames. Oh, and I had some curry for breakfast/lunch/dinner. All in all, a good start of 2011.

Also, I’m going home in 9 days. It’s going to be weird. I’ve even begun to miss snow, something that I’ll be able to keep up for approximately 20 minutes after exiting Arlanda airport.

My year in lists

I should write about when my mother visited and we went to Nikko and Mount Fuji, and when I went to the Ninja restaurant with two of my American friends, but I don’t have the time to do that now, so instead I’m going to make lists. Quite a few of them, even.

List #1, Top five songs of 2010

5. Sleigh Bells – Infinity Guitars, because it’s energetic and really catchy.

4. LCD Soundsystem – You Wanted a Hit, a fairly unremarkable song from the best live band ever, but the tempo and everything just works.

3. Los Campesinos! – The Sea Is A Good Place To Think About The Future, a song that really only Los Campesinos! could write, filled to the brim with metaphors, sadness and with some of the best story telling I’ve ever heard in a song.

2. Moonface – Marimba and Shit-drums, it’s 20 minutes long and most people will probably hate it, but it’s 20 minutes of brilliance from one of the greatest musicians of my generation.

1. The National – Terrible Love (Alternate Version), I really want to just put the entire High Violet album up here, but I decided to go with the song that had the best video, enjoy.

List #2: Top five movies I saw for the first time in 2010 because I really need to watch more movies:

5. Rebuild of Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance. It’s anime, and it’s a remake of a 15-year-old series because the maker can’t think of anything new. That doesn’t chance that it has some of the most beautiful animation I’ve seen and a fairly decent story.

4. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It’s 20 years old, and has Keanu Reeves in it. It is endearingly 90’s, extremely entertaining and excellently, well, excellent. Every time I try to air-guitar and it doesn’t make a sound, I’m get a little bit more disappointed.

3. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. It’s also anime and I might be a huge fanboy for inluding it, but it’s got even prettier animation than 4, the story is very solid and rather heartwarming and let’s face it, Kyon is one of the best narrators ever.

2. Låt Den Rätte Komma In. Swedish, actually frightening vampires, all in all a great movie.

1. Lost in Translation. I watched it a few months after coming to Tokyo, and it completely blew me away. It manages to capture so many true things about the cosmopolis and everything is so magnificent, a truly great movie.

List #3: Top five things about living in Tokyo.

5. The connection you get with other foreigners. When you live in a city where over 99% of the people have another skin colour, you get a very peculiar, instantaneous connection to that person. You don’t have to talk to each other or anything, but you’re both baka gaijin and that’s enough, the two of you are friends.

4. The crowds. Now, I’m a city boy, and therefore prefer to be surrounded by tall buildings and lots of people, I can trust them. In a forest you can get attacked by bears and shit. That’s why I find it strangely soothing to walk in a huge crowd while listening to music, just slowly drifting towards where I’m heading.

3. Akihabara. Probably one, if not the, most famous areas of Tokyo, it’s the electronics and geek Mecca of Japan, and possibly the world. There is a lot of… unsavoury things here, most notably the maid cafés and the insurmountable heaps of cartoon breasts in all shapes, sized and dimensions. The first time I went there, I was shocked and appalled, now I don’t even raise an eyebrow any more. Akihabara has won, ladies and gentlemen.

2. The fashion. Now, I’m far from a fashionable man, I’ve barely even stepped foot inside a clothing store since I got here. The thing is, though, as homogeneous and suppressed as Japan is, with most everyone wearing a suit every single day, that makes the girls in exquisite princess dresses with accompanying umbrellas and bags, the men with impossibly point mullets and anyone else dressed in anything but a uniform of some kind stand out that much more. And no one even looks at them twice.

1. Umeshu. Now, I thought long and hard while writing this what number 1 should be, and this is really the only thing I can think of. Umeshu is what you get if you let some Japanese plums soak in sake for a couple of months, it tastes nothing like Sake at all, but is instead a rather sweet drink, and if I had to choose one drink to stick with for the rest of my life, I think I’d choose it, because it just is so incredibly good.

List #4: Things I must do before I go home:

1. Visit Tsukiji fish market. I have heard rumors about the tuna market being closed to visitors, but I at least want to eat some of the best and freshest sushi in the entire world.

2. Eat Fugu. I might not have a death wish, but just being able to say that I’ve eaten a dish that, if not cooked just right, will kill you feels worth it.

3. Visit Comic Market. I am a huge nerd, and since I will be here for it, I feel like it’s my duty to visit it, if not for the heaps and heaps of porn so for the awesome cosplay.

4. Go to an Onsen. While not as cold as Sweden, I could still use a good warm-up, and what better way than to visit some hot springs? With a bit of luck, it’s sulphuric enough to allow me to fart as much as I want to without anyone being able to tell, for that added sense of sneakiness.

5. Go to Akihabara, and ignore the value of money. This will likely be done the weekend before I go home. The simple reason being that Akihabara has a lot of awesomely cool stuff, and since I’d get fucked over with the exchance rate anyway, I might as well spend some money.

6. Go to a Buddhist temple. I’ve been to a bunch of Shinto shrines, but not a single Buddhist temple for some stupid reason. I don’t even know why I haven’t.

7. See the sunrise on January 1st. I will probably not manage this, but I’m in the land of the rising sun, and seeing the first sunrise of what is technically the new decade just feels like the right (extremely hipster) thing to do.

So yes, that was this [time unit]’s special list edition! I hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll tune in the next time, same* blog-time, same blog-channel.

* will probably not be the same time as this

In other, list-related news, my good friend André has been making a list of his 24 best songs from 2010, go listen to them, they are quite good.

Yes! I am a long way from home

I went to South Korea a few weeks back, and as I’ve been asked by people to write about it, my fragile ego can do nothing but agree.

South Korea is an interesting place, and my first impression of the country was that it looked, well, Soviet-y. Kind of dreary, mostly brown, all that stuff. Then the bus dropped me off at the station closest to my hotel and I re-evaluated my impression. I’d say it felt monolithic, but that’d be lying, because mono is singular, and there was a lot of very impressive buildings where I got off. So the word is polylithic, if that’s a thing. (is now!) Actually, saying that my first impression was Soviet-y is a lie, the first thing that hit my mind when I got off the aeroplane was that I’m in a nation that is at war. Now, I’ve been in the US twice, both times post-9/11, so this isn’t a new thing per se, but the whole thing feels a lot more tangible when the last front line of the cold war is within driving distance.

After filling out my forms, I was let into the country (on a related note, I now know my passport number by heart). As the food we got on the aeroplane was nothing short of suspicious, I decided to get some food, Korean food. I find a place that served it, and ordered a “meat kimchi bibimbap”, because kimchi is the essence of Korea, and a friend from my Japanese studies always ordered bibimbap when we ate at our Japanese restaurant of choice. Plus, it’s really fun to say. I order my food, and is very close to paying 10 times more than the food cost, since the Korean won is to the Japanese yen what the yen is to the Swedish krona. The bibimbap cost 8000, and I pulled out two bills that had a fine and a bunch of zeroes on them. When I got my food, I realised that I have no idea what bibimbap is or how to eat it, I got a big bowl with a bunch of things in, vegetables, dried nori flakes, all kinds of strange things, and the meat kimchi in the middle. I also got a bowl of soup, which is where things got complicated. Do I drink the soup á la miso soup? Do I pour the soup into the bowl of things? Do I clean my hands in the soup? This is also when I realised how much more bad-ass Korean chopsticks are compared to Japanese ones. Korean chopsticks are made out of metal, which makes the whole experience more… serious. After eating the bibimbap, feeling kind of ambivalent about the whole ordeal, I took the airport bus into Seoul.

The first night was fairly uneventful, I checked the TV for any Starcraft games that might’ve been on, took a long bath in the fancy bath tub my room had, and had a minor religious experience involving 4 slices of garlic bread and a grilled piece of meat. I haven’t had either since before I left Sweden, and as nice as gyuunabedon or yakiniku is, it just can’t compare to a good, old-fashioned steak. After dinner I went up to my room and watched something, a movie or a tv-series, on my computer, while wearing nothing but my underpants. Because when you usually have to sleep fully clothed, a warm room has to be taken advantage of.

The next day, I decided to take a walk around Yeouido, I think it was called, the island in the centre of Seoul that housed both my hotel and the National Assembly. This is when I got another new impression of South Korea, authoritarian. The reason being that there were several buses parked along the street, with several riot shields leaning against at least half of these buses. I had noticed them the day before, but at that time I was more concerned with finding my hotel than changing my view of South Korea for a third time in a day. Authoritarian tendencies aside, I have to praise the police, as they helped me find my hotel after walking around the block three times. I ended up asking one policeman, who then waved two more over, one of which spoke English. I asked him, he talked with his colleagues for a bit, walked down the street to an officer who had an iphone, he looked the hotel up on the phone while the other one talked over radio with a fifth policeman. After going down two streets to where it was supposed to be, the policeman asked a street vendor, and he pointed around a corner, where my hotel, believe it or not, actually was. But I ramble, again.

I haven’t looked it up or anything, but Yeoido appeared to be the business district of Seoul, it had a lot of fancy-looking scyscrapers, after all. That was really the first thing that properly impressed me about Seoul, but considering I’m from Sweden and get impressed by anything taller than 15 stories it’s not that big an accomplishment. I walked around for an hour or two, mostly photographing buildings. Went back to the hotel, did nothing for a while, went out to dinner, which was the second time I got impressed by Korea. First of all, most food is extremely cheap, especially compared to Japan, but what surprised me was that you always, always get at least a salad and some pickled things (and the ubiquitous kimchi, of course). The first night, I figured it was part of the fanciness of the hotel restaurant, as the thing did cost 400 000 won, or maybe 40 000? It was relatively expensive anyway. But when even the restaurant around the corner that pretty much only served deep fried chicken and beer gave me a salad and pickled things before my main course of deep fried chicken, and nothing but, I was seriously impressed.

On the way home I went into a 7-11 next to my hotel and looked for some unique Korean candy, all I found was something called “Lucky”, which was exactly like Pocky, and a largely disappointing candy bar called “Mr. Big”. Went up to my room, and discovered that my room had free internet, only it was the slowest internet in Korea on the slowest computer in Korea. But internet is internet.

Day three, I decided to do something, so I took the subway (that cost 1500, which contributed to my view of the won as a currency you can’t take seriously) into town. I was planning on going to one of the royal palaces, but I ended up finding the royal shrine instead. The next tour in English wasn’t for another 40 minutes, though, so I walked around the park a bit and found an area where well over 100 old men either played or watched board games, mainly Xiangqi and some weird thing that mostly reminded me of Othello.

The tour finally started, and I have to say it was a lot more interesting than I thought it would be, and I learned a lot both about Confucianism and Korean history. The two most amusing things being that the Shrine had two temples where the spirit tablets of old kings were kept, one for the good ones and one for the less good ones, to be decided by the next king and that no one were allowed to wear yellow in ancient Korea, because yellow is the colour of the middle, and China is the middle. I also learned that the shrine is one of the few royal buildings that has only been burnt to the ground by Japanese invaders once (during the invasian by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, if I recall correctly). I also learned that the third king of Korea invented their system of writing, which felt like a great contrast to the current king of Sweden.

On the way home, I passed by an Indian restaurant and subsequently had Indian food for the first time in months, and it was lovely, although whatever I ordered for dessert was disgustingly sweet. Everything else was great, though, so I’m happy. After dinner I went to the hotel and procrastinated until I fell asleep.

Monday, my last full day in Korea. I was planning on going to one of the proper palaces, but it turned out nothing touristy is open on Mondays. I decided to take a chance on the Ntower, a tower on a fairly steep hill in the middle of Seoul. After battling stairs for a good hour, I reached the top, got a ticket and went up to the observatory. Luckily, it was a lot less foggy than it had been earlier days, and I managed to get a few decent pictures. I also managed to find a store that sold post cards, which was great as it meant I didn’t have to go back on my promise to send post cards to 20 friends and/or family members.

As I got down to ground level, the sun had started setting, and after treating myself to a plate of spaghetti carbonara I took a bunch of crappy pictures of the beautiful full moon. After going down in the cable car I stubbornly refused on the way up I went looking for a subway station. When I finally found one, I had a profound experience. I had too much money to ride it, you see. I had 51300 won, one 50 000 bill, a 1000 bill and 3 100 coins. Taking the subway home cost 1500, and the machine refused my 50 000 bill. So I had to walk a good ten minutes until I found a convenience store, where I bought a bottle of water and some candy, just to get change on my 50 000. I was still unable to take Korean money seriously. I spent the night writing post cards and then went to bed early, since I didn’t want to miss my flight.

Tuesday morning consisted of me going to a post office and sending the post cards, followed by me going out to the airport early. I could’ve spent an extra hour or two in Seoul, but I had nothing I really wanted to do, so there. I bought a bottle of Korean alcohol for my landlady, because sucking up never hurts, and two boxes of chocolate for my room mates and the people at the office. Then I took the tram (they have a tram at the Incheon airport, it was pretty neat) to my gate and sat there for two hours and crocheted on my infinity scarf.

I get on the plane and and I feel the judgement coming closer, it was now that I’d find out if I’d be let back into Japan or not. The immigration guy just stamped my passport and let me in, so I thought it was smooth sailing from thereon out. I go up to the customs guy, and he starts questioning me. Taken by surprise, I answer truthfully. Even though I openly tell him that the only reason I went to Korea was to renew my tourist visa to Japan, he lets me back into the land of the rising sun. All’s well that ends well, I suppose.

The up and coming week has promises of being interesting, as I will be visiting both Fuji and Nikko, and I will turn 20 and go to a ninja restaurant. Aw, I’m 100 words shy of 2000 words, what a shame.

Sickness

Today, we’re going to talk about sickness, but not any normal kind of sickness, but homesickness!

Three days ago, my second… monthiversary in Japan passed by, not celebrated but noticed nevertheless. With that in mind, I decided to really think about what I miss, and don’t miss, about my native Sweden, and I’ll start with the most important thing. Food.

Now, I’m sure my nationality makes you think I am more or less addicted to meatballs, which is not quite true. Although they are my go-to food for Christmas, Easter and midsummer dinners, since I’m not a big fan of herring. What I miss, however, is the equally Swedish falukorv, the not-especially-Swedish large oven-fried fish fingers, the decidedly unswedish chili I used to eat at least once  week, and that’d eradicate the taste buds of anyone else daring to taste it. I miss going down to the Greek restaurant around the corner and ordering “the usual”, even though I’m almost at that point with the curry store near where I work. I miss making Tacos by my lonesome every Friday night. I miss being able to read labels in the store, and I miss being able to throw some food together without worrying about what I’m actually eating. And, lastly, and this is a big lastly, I miss fucking Knäckebröd. I did find a store that sold it a month ago, but then the bread I bought turned out to have some extra, unwanted, protein in them, so I kind of got turned off that store. And not even the eternal carrier of Swedish food internationally, IKEA, failed to supply me with knäckebröd. I did buy some whole grain mustard, though, now I just need something to put it on.

Socially, I miss being able to take the tube home no matter what time it is. Having to either go home at midnight or commit to an entire evening of drinking makes choosing hard. I miss being on the same timezone as the majority of my friends, as it makes communication that much harder. I miss not knowing the dominant language, although what little Japanese I do know makes getting around a lot easier than if I didn’t know anything at all. I miss eavesdropping. I miss feeling like a part of the crowd, even though I’d most likely feel even more like a sore thumb outside of Tokyo.

Functionally, I miss being able to read street signs. I miss street lights that don’t take forever to change. I miss going into any kind of slightly geeky store without feeling like a pervert. I miss not having to ride a train for 20 minutes to buy something. But mainly, I miss central heating. Japan is interesting like that, they get 40-degree-plus summers that plunge into 0-degree winters, and all the buildings are built to keep the heat out, so as soon as it stops being 20 degrees outside, it stops being 20 degrees inside as well. It’s gotten so bad now that I’ve even started to drink tea, just as a way to keep warm. Not to mention the pain of getting up in the morning when it’s 15 degrees in my bedroom, which then got knocked up a notch when I’d done my laundry the day before and was gruesomely reminded that everything take at least two days to dry on these godforsaken islands. Let’s just say I’ve taken a shine to microwaving my underpants.

I apologise for the recent dip in quality of my blog posts, but nothing out of the ordinary has happened, except that time when it did and I were sworn to secrecy. I’ll hopefully have a new, at least somewhat interesting post in a little over two weeks, as I’m doing the ritual visa renewal run to Korea the Friday after next. Worst case scenario you get an interesting post about what it’s like to be declared Persona Non Grata. OR is that best case?

We’ll just have to see, won’t we?

Pretentiousness

As I was listening to Swedish Radio P1’s Summer program today, something that would recommend if it wasn’t for every Swede knowing about it and every non-Swede being unable to understand the language, I heard something that rang very true with me. Ulf Malmros, the director of one of my favourite movies (Slim Susie) said that, during his time at a Swedish television production company, the motto was that “every day has to trump the previous one”, and that is something that I found very true when it comes to my own blogging. Every post has to be more interesting, more profound, than the previous one. And that is something I cannot do, I have done nothing more interesting than when I spent the night in a US Army couch. I have met old friends, I have made a new friend, but beyond that nothing of note has really happened. Except for that time I found a mouse below my bench at a restaurant, that was pretty interesting. And that time I kinda went and bought japanese gay porn comics.

Therefore, I have decided to dedicate this entry to music, the music of Tokyo. The music that I feel captures the mood of Tokyo the best, to be more precise. To start somewhere, I will start with what I listened to when going home on a half-full train after sundown. Something that, to me captures the mood of the sparse city lights passing by the window while you stare out into the abyss that makes up a lot of the padding between the big city centres at night. The band in question, Kent. The reason? I feel that their music somehow manages to grip that feeling of emptiness, the feeling of life passing me by, that I get when I see the cityscape pass me by. So many lives that I will never know, never care about. So many people that won’t care whether I live or die. Stockholm ligger öde och världen håller andan.

To move on to something that Tokyo is extremely famous for, crowds. Wherever you are in this cosmopolis, there will be other people, lots of them. And not one of them is going your way. That very special brand of loneliness is something that, to me, blends beautifully into both the serene etherealness of Sigur Rós and the maelstrom of music that is 65daysofstatic. Something in the music flows past me in the same way that the sea of tiny men in too large suits do, and I continue my struggle alone. Brosandi hendumst í hringi höldumst í hendur allur heimurinn óskýr nema þú stendur.

I must really seem like quite a bitter person, reading back. And while that to a certain extent is true, there is a lot more to it. It’s not that I feel alienated in Tokyo, which I do, because I’m a 6′ gaijin. It’s that between my nationality having a slight preference for the depressed state of mind and my not exactly happy-go-lucky personality, this city of over three times the population of my home country inflicts a certain… impending sense. I’m far from sure what actually is impending, though. And the fact that my personal clock is going into winter depression mode isn’t helping either, although it must be getting confused what with the trees still being mostly green.

Nevertheless, it’s getting far too late and I have a friend coming in from Kyoto tomorrow morning, we are going to tear it up, viking style.

Now I just need to find something to deafen the laughs of my room mates as they, I don’t know, conspire against me or something.

Holy fuck I’m a pretentious son of a bitch sometimes.

brosandi
hendumst í hringi
höldumst í hendur
allur heimurinn óskýr
nema þú stendur

rennblautur
allur rennvotur
engin gúmmístígvél
hlaupandi inn í okkur
vill springa út úr skel

vindurinn
og útilykt af hárinu þínu
ég lamdi eins fast og ég get
með nefinu mínu

hoppípolla
í engum stígvélum
allur rennvotur (rennblautur)
í engum stígvélum

og ég fæ blóðnasir
en ég stend alltaf upp

og ég fæ blóðnasir
og ég stend alltaf upp

The Promised Land

So yes, where was I? Karaokeing to ABBA? Really? Since then, quite few things have happened, but I don’t want to force you to suffer through another two-week post, I don’t want to be the kind of person that writes 3500 words about things.

Anyway, Friday was, according to my great boss (I gave him the url to this blog, sssh) the high point of this internship. You see, it was time for the annual big seminar/workshop/reception thing that my company holds every year. This translated into suiting up, wearing uncomfortable shoes that rubbed the skin off of my feet and since I own a fancypants DSLR camera, I got to take pictures. I could’ve borrowed the firm’s camera, but after hearing what it cost I didn’t dare use it. It’d either break or I’d steal it. The day was otherwise dominated by sitting around “shooting the breeze” with my co-workers, taking better photographs than last year’s interns (this was my explicit instruction) and lending a hand with anything and everything. Oh, and being mildly paranoid every time I heard my name come up in any conversation I didn’t understand. And constantly wondering if they called me Sebasuchan (my name, transliterated) or Sebasu-chan (chan being something you put behind names, like san, but used primarily for small girls). Then, as I had to get up relatively early in the morning to meet the dirty American pigdogs, I decided not to join the old men that were heading out, instead opting to walk home 3 or 4 stations. With hurting feet. Sometimes, for someone considered at least kind of intelligent, I can be really stupid. On the upside, I got some great pictures I uploaded to flickr when I got home.

Saturday morning, I packed my camera bag and made sure to bring my passport, because I did not plan to sleep at home that night. I met up with the American delegation in Akihabara around lunch, I told them about the vile den of pornography, and they insisted of going inside. I guess there’s a reason why the US of A is the world’s lead producer of pornography after all. Their reactions more or less mirrored mine the first time I went in there, and I kept repeating “I did not want to go in here, you did, remember that”, because that place is very good at removing the last vestiges of innocence a person might have. After Akihabara we went to Ikebukuro and had some ice cream at the fabled Ice Cream City, and bought each other strange flavours, with charcoal and squid ink being voted the best tasting, beef tongue and shark fin noodles taking runner up, and crab being voted the worst tasting. After that started the big adventure on my part, as we left the safety of Ikebukuro and headed to the outskirts of Tokyo, to the army camp.

Now, the first thing I thought was strange was that the currency of choice was not the Yen, but the almighty Dollar. They bought some drinks (orange juice and vodka, but neither my first choice of Absolut or my second choice of Army brand 7$ vodka), dinner (pizza rolls, holy fuck they were great. Unhealthy as all get-out, but great.) and true american snacks because the fact that I hadn’t ever had skittles, starbursts or tootsie pops was flabbergasting to them. Sadly the explosion of unexpected awesome tastes was not to be, as basically the same things are available as lösgodis in Sweden. Except tootsie pops, they were just weird, and way too sweet. Movies were also rented, two great comedies with Will Ferrel (Stepbrothers and Land of the Lost) and one kinda crappy comedy with Vince Vaughn (couples retreat or something). Besides watching the movies, very little of note happened. Between the first and second movies, me and the American girl fought for some reason, and even though I invoked the names of Odin, Thor and Valhalla I lost, brutally. Still, it was all good fun.

After the second movie, everyone went to sleep, I got to borrow a cover worthy of zero degrees Celsius, which worked great in 20+ degrees heat. When I woke up an hour later, dripping wet, I also discovered that there was a hole in the mosquito-netting to the room I was sleeping in, so it was either be really hot all night, or get eaten alive by bugs. And that I didn’t dare take off my shirt out of an abstract fear that R. Lee Ermey would bust into the room in the middle of the night and demand to know who the fuck I was and what the fuck I was doing on American soil. Having my shirt on was going to help somehow. After falling in and out of sleep for a couple of hours, the day broke and I stole a shower and a shirt from American girl (stole in the sense that she offered me, being that thoroughly beaten up puts a sense of respect and/or fear into you). The day went on, we watched the last movie, went into Machida where I had literally the best burger I’ve ever had, and then I was dozing off on the train home, listening to Kent sing about how Stockholm lies deserted and the world is holding it’s breath.

To sum up my impressions of the base, it was not at all as I had expected, which was some strange mix of M*A*S*H and Band of Brothers, with a touch of modern day life. It seemed more like any kind of university dormitory, only I had to sign in at an armed guard before entering. And you feel a hell of a lot more rebellious singing the Soviet national anthem at an army base than at a university.

Now, as I’m getting kind of bored with just writing a day-by-day rendition of my weekends to you, my dear readers, I’m going to give you some alternatives, and then you get to vote through comments. The choices are as follow; I could write something pretentious about music, and what bands/genres I feel fit Tokyo or something, very pretentious but possibly fun, at least for me.

I could write about food, tell you what I eat at least two times a week, how much I could go for some Swedish food right now and things like that, has a chance of becoming pretty whiny, but I’m supposedly very entertaining to read when I complain about things.

Lastly, I could go on a mission. Now, this one is kind of special, as it’s less about a lot of people telling me to do it and more about me seeing something that sounds fun to do/write about.

Anyway, it’s past midnight and I have things to do tomorrow (work! Meet Swedes!), as well as this extended weekend (buy gay Japanese cartoon porn for a birthday present! Go to IKEA!)

So yes, kindly leave comments to this post where you tell me what to write about/do. Or if you just want to tell me something else.

Lastly, this week’s song, by the Boss himself.

Available

Before I write anything else, I’ve decided to eschew my regular naming scheme for a new, hipster-er one where I name entries after great music. (If you want to hear the song while reading this, look all the way down low)

I might as well start with writing some about what I do at work, it’s very boring but it’s good filler content. Me and my Norwegian co-worker are in charge of the weekly newsletter, which means reading news sites and writing up articles about news relevant to Asia, this takes about a day. At most. We’re also in charge of updating the bed night statistics, which is done once every month. And then we support the other departments when they need to, everything from finding and writing information about a restaurant to helping with the pronunciation of Swedish words for katakana transliteration, which feels so meaningful. The rest of the time I play flash games on the internet, read The Guardian (I’m so British I shit the queen and whatnot) online or find some other way of entertaining myself. I would honestly play Pokemon if I thought for a second I could get away with it. I hope my boss isn’t reading this.

Anyway, on to more exciting things! Tokyo Game Show is kind of the E3 of Asia, or at least of Japan. All the big companies have areas there and getting psyched about the games is both easy and hard. The easy part is because if 100 people are standing in front of a huge LCD screen, it has to be something good. The hard part, well, it’s all in Japanese. Three pretty awesome things happened to me at TGS. First of all, I saw Hideo Kojima in the flesh. Hideo “I don’t even know if he’s joking anymore” Kojima. Sadly the earlier noted 100 Japanese people were kind of in the way. Also there were at least 200 of them. Welp, I’m-a taller than the average Jap, so the problem solved itself. (The previous was meant as an impersonation of beloved children’s cartoon character Yogi Bear, not as a racist quip). After that, I watched some pretty rad cosplay, including a very impressive Cyborg Raiden fro- right, the people who care about VIDEOGAMEZ are in a minority, so I won’t bore you. Lastly, the most awesome thing, the least expected thing and the most fun thing. I made intercontinental friends, now, you might think “Just call them Japanese, GEEZ”, but the thing is, they’re American.  It all started with the three of them looking lost at the station, and me for once not being the antisocial git that I usually am. Next thing you know,  I’m in Machida, about an hour from Shinjuku by train, drinking in pubs with American soldiers. Getting drunk while knowing that every other person in the group is able to kill you in at least three different ways before you even notice it is a strange feeling. Then you take another sip and yell at them about starting unnecessary wars in Swedish. The night then abruptly ended when the Japanese security guard wouldn’t let me onto their base because apparently my Swedish ID wasn’t good enough. The fact that this made my dear new friends find their last remaining friend that wasn’t drunk or on pills to drive me all the way home fully cemented the impression that Oregon is the best state.

Sunday was the day I finally did one of the things I’d been looking forward to doing since before I left. I went to Akihabara, searched through 5 huge stores and then finally found what I was looking for in a tiny shop right outside the station. Pokémon White, bitches. Now, this might seem childish to some of you, or even kind of creepy, and while I won’t contest that I am both those things, liking pokemon has nothing to do with either. All there is to it is that I enjoy my Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest to include huge monsters killing each other by calling down the elements on their enemies.

Monday was a national holiday, “National Respect the Elders Day” or something along those lines. Not that Japanese elders need to be respected, all they need is to be feared. For me and my fellow interns, this meant earning some extra cash money by digging holes for children to plant trees in, for some environmental thing the place we intern has a hand in. We took the train for about an hour, to Musahi-Itsukaishi, and suddenly there were forested mountains all around us. I did not know that what at least felt like wilderness is that close to the, uh, urban sprawl (I’m not quite sure what it means, but people in magazines use it, so there) of down town Tokyo there is, well, forest. Then I suddenly felt the wind of history as I realised that all of Japan isn’t neat rice fields and bustling cityscapes, they have proper forests and everything. The feeling that I could take one turn off the road and suddenly end up in the camp of Tokugawa Ieyasu helped set the mood as well. Managed to do some nature-photography of misty peaks in the distance, and I got some really nice pictures of leaves reflected in green tea. I’m such an artiste. As night fell and our work for the day was done, the man whose house was used as our base offered us food, and what food! Delicious soup with tons of stuff in it, rice with things in it, fried pork and daikon that actually had taste, some kind of strange sashimi thing, only made from yams and with a really, really strange texture and tons of other stuff. The best cultural food really can’t be bought in restaurants.

Tuesday was bland, Wednesday was great. A previous intern at my firm has been visiting Japan (he was with us on Monday as well) had been invited to dinner by my landlady, who’d prepared sukiyaki (more like daisukiyaki amirite?). Now, for those of you who don’t know sukiyaki, it’s kind of like teppanyaki, but you boil the food in a special sauce instead of fry it. For those of you who doesn’t know teppanyaki, it’s like fondue but you fry the stuff in a big pan in the middle of the table. After cooking the food, be it pork, noodles, mushrooms, salad or tofu, you dip whatever you’re about to put in your mouth in raw egg, and then eat it. It probably sounds kind of icky, if not down right dangerous, but since there’s no salmonella here, it’s all good. Going to Japan will really ruin my appreciation of Japanese food, won’t it?

After the dinner, us younguns went out, to dance the night away in Roppongi. The Japanese girl (pause) friend of the oldtimer intern got us to a place called Muse, it seemed like a pretty neat place, I got in despite having my ID checked. Then we saw the entrance fee of 3000 yen for men (women got in for free). Luckily, two drinks were included in the entrance fee, so we paid and got inside. That’s when I noticed that they had Long Island Ice Tea on the menu, in other words, I could exchange currency (in this case the drink vouchers) for goods and services. For those of you not in the “know”, Long Island Ice Tea is pretty much 5 different kinds of spirits, two drops of some kind of soda, and a slice of lemon. When my companions asked my why I ordered it, I lectured them on one of the great teachings of Sweden. APK, or Alkohol Per Krona. It’s quite a simple idea, whichever potable liquid gives you the most alcohol for the least amount of money is the best. After going through it a couple of times, they agreed that it’s a very reasonable idea. Hopefully I’ve now introduced a third Swedish word in the English vocabulary. After my lecture on micro-economics, we staggered home.

Friday was the day of realising nothing relevant to Asian-Scandinavian tourism has happened this week, having an argument about how fanart for gay japanese cartoon softcore porn in a newsletter might not be a great idea and being shown a pretty cool place called Alps (well, Arupusu, but whatevs yo), drinking a couple of highballs there and then moving on to the awesomely cool shady bar in Shibuya for some more umeshu, before I went home early because I had something to do in the morning. Saturday arrived and I made my room a bit tidier by hiding things in drawers. Then I went to Shibuya, with the added excitement of the Chuo line being shut down because of an accident, and by accident they mean suicide.

I finally got to Shibuya, albeit 20 minutes late, which didn’t matter, because the AWESOME AMERICANS that I were meeting wouldn’t be there for another 90 minutes, but I didn’t know that at the time. So, to waste some time I decided to walk around Shibuya a bit, with the only interesting thing happening being that I got lost in Love Hotel Hills for a while, and had lunch at a Yoshinoya, some meat, some rice and a raw egg. Raw eggs are my new favourite gravy. Anyway, the.. Yankees (I have no idea if that’s something you can call people from the west coast) finally arrived and we hung out around Shibuya for like 5 hours, I didn’t bring my camera, but if you KNOW ME IRL ON THE INTERNETZ you might be able to catch some pictures of me being uploaded. And if you don’t, why would you read this?

Anyway, we were supposed to meet my room mates and their friends at the Shinjuku station, but as we were 20 minutes early we decided to go to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building or something like that, because they have a free observatory on the 45th floor or something. Tokyo at night is even more beautiful than Tokyo during the day, all the tiny lights are pretty mesmerising. Being the eternal time-optimist that I am, this took quite a bit longer than anticipated, and by the time we finally got to Alps we were an hour late. I bought my new favourite cultural imperialists some umeshu, we ordered some assorted food, one of them somehow got the right to punch me as hard as she’d like, wherever she’d like. We had a couple of drinks and then somehow left, because Americans apparently don’t like 150 yen beer (it is a mystery). We went to a couple of pubs, got a couple of things, and then went karaokeing for the remaining two hours until the trains would start running again.  I even sang ABBA, because they are a vital part of the Swedish cultural heritage, let’s say. I also sang my heart out to Born to Run, twice, because Bruce Springsteen really is The Guy. After debating doing a sing-and-skedaddle, we paid for ourselves in an honourable way and took the first trains home.

And, to end everything with a song, have the title track of this entry, the magnificent Available, by the magnificent The National.

Yoyogi, Roppongi and Ikebukuro

Quite a few things have happened since last I wrote. I’ve been to a very large Shrine in the Yoyogi park, I’ve worked my first week at my job, I’ve partied in Roppongi until the trains started running again and I have walked my feet off in Ikebukuro. But let’s start with some small thoughts not worthy of a full blog post.

An interesting thing about garbage handling in Japan is that you sort your rubbish into combustible and non-combustible. Combustible is paper, leftover food, used chopsticks, stuff like that. Non-combustible is everything else, basically. Those of you who know me might realise that this led to me having an inner debate every time I was going to throw anything out, because plastic IS combustible, but it goes in the non-combustible bin. It really was quite distressing. Then someone told me that it’s not whether it CAN or CAN’T burn, but whether it should burn. And then you throw both the bags out in the same pile.

Another thing, nomihoudai. Nomihoudai is the best thing that happened to partying since partying. You go to a restaurant that has Nomihoudai, and you order it, it costs a few thousand yen and then you get to drink as much as you want for one or two hours. It’s very practical and it wouldn’t work at all in Sweden, which is a shame. Anyway, on to our regularly scheduled programming.

Last Sunday, me and my co-interns went to Harajuku, the place to be if you want to buy cool clothes. Nothing much out of the ordinary happened, except for seeing some SS-earrings in a shop. We went on to Yoyogi, the (probably) largest park in Tokyo, which provided some well needed shelter from the sun. We walked along the wide path until we got to Meiji-jingu, a large shrine that probably has something to do with emperor Meiji, of Meiji-era fame. That guy must’ve really liked his name. Anyway, at the temple we watched a few shintoist wedding processions, made a wish and shook forth a fortune from a wooden box. Sadly the fortune was in Japanese, so we couldn’t tell if we had good or bad fortune. We walked out of the park and I managed to get my companions into a restaurant that served ramen, japanese noodle soup. Which I ate, in spite of the temperature outside being a searing 35 degrees. After Harajuku and Yoyogi we went back to Akihabara, I wanted to show/scare my new friends with what I saw last time. The porn shelf has little impact, especially on the Dane. He then drags us off to show us some stores, we go to a huge book store and the largest electronics store I’ve ever seen. But that’s not where we went first, first we went to a 7 stories tall (plus a basement) sex shop. We came out again half an hour later, after seeing in no particular order three vending machines for used panties, every kind of porn imaginable, one floor that was packed with more phalli than, I don’t know, Lady Gaga’s new dress. One floor had the walls stacked with essentially fleshlights, only in all kinds of sizes. And by all sizes I mean that they were all worryingly small. Also I don’t think some of the ANIME GIRLZ on the covers were above 18. Also one had tentacles. Then there was one floor with some bondage stuff and one with some costumes, but after what I had seen, it barely phased me.

Then the working week started, we got our official introduction and got to meet our coworkers, they all seem really nice and you don’t even care do you?

Friday! We’d gotten the address of a store close to our job that sells some nordic food, most notably Knäckebröd, which I bought a pack of for 500 yen (and that’s with half off). After work, we met up with our boss, let’s call him M-chan and went to Roppongi (or “Roppan”, as he called it). We found a restaurant that had nomihoudai and food for 3500 yen, which is acceptable. Two hours later we emerged from the restaurant, not necessarily in a straight line, let’s say. From there we went to Gas Panic, one of the fixtures of the Roppongi night life, where we started dancing the night away. After an hour M-chan left with the excuse that he had to get up early in the morning, and the Dane had disappeared before that, so me and the Norwegian somehow got roped in with 10-13 Japanese people that had decided to go somewhere else. To a slightly more up scale club. To a slighly more up scale club having it’s opening party. One of the girls knew someone that knew someone, so we all got in. At this point, miss Norwegian casually mentions that it’s her birthday, something that somehow meant that the club gave us all a glass of champagne, free of charge. We then went up on the dance floor and kept dancing the night away, with the lingerie-clad women dancing on tables near the dancing area only being a slight distraction. We kept dancing, and after an hour or so my friend from the west needed something to drink, so she went to get that. A bit later I notice her talking to some guy, and she waves at me to get there, which I do. We talk for 2 minutes or so, the guy seems to be quite the douche. We go back on the dance floor, the three of us. At this point the Norwegian wants to leave, I assume because the guy was kind of a creep. And just when I had started hitting it of with a cute Japanese girl. OH WELL.

Outside, we realise that we have nothing to do for the next 2½ hours, when the trains start running again, so we decide to walk home. Roppongi is about 30-45 minutes from Shibuya, which is about 30-45 minutes from Shinjuku, which is 20-30 minutes away from where we live. It was a great idea at the time. About halfway between Roppongi and Shibuya we see some lanterns, they looked interesting and we went to investigate. We come across what looked like a temple, but we decided against going into a shrine at 3 in the morning, we didn’t want to disturb anyone. Then we see another foreigner, who asks us if we know what was up with the lanterns, followed by where we were from. He was from Denmark, an intern at the Danish embassy.

We’re quite shocked by that, and since he had to wait for the trains to start running again too, we decide to go to Shibuya together. Once we get there, we decide against continuing so Shinjuku, but rather to go sing karaoke. After scrapping that idea 5 minutes later, the new Dane shows us to a pretty seedy bar in a basement in Shibuya, and I do mean seedy in the best possible way. We each have a glass of Umeshu, sake that has had plums in it, making it sweet and all kinds of delicious. So we sit in this, well, really cool bar for an hour or so, “shooting the breeze”. We pay (and even get a discount of 100 yen each) and go to the train station, which was going to open in 20 minutes or so. Then we ride the first trains home and go to bed. All in all a pretty rad evening.

Today, I was abruptly pulled from the warm embrace of sleep by my landlady at half past 11. People were coming over to view the house and I had to clean my room. What follows is essentially triage, but I manage to get some semblance of order to my things. After the people came by, I had a shower and set my plan for the day in motion. I’m going to Ikebukuro to visit Ice Cream City, I assume my dear readers can guess what that place’s gimmick is. I get to Ikebukuro and planlessly walk down a street, I have no times to keep today, after all. I walk all over the place, marvelling at the architecture and the wonderful haphazardness that is Tokyo city planning. I was on my own, walking down whatever street took my fancy and being generally artistic with my photography. After walking around for two hours with no Sunshine City (the place that house Ice Cream City) in sight, I look at a local map. Nothing

I walk on, to the next map. Nothing. I keep walking, a couple of maps later I find an arrow that said “Sunshine City”. I walk towards it. Another map, I change direction slightly. Yet another map, same thing. New map. I’m close. I turn round a corner and spies a comic book store. Not being a better person than that, I enter. This bookshop wasn’t like the one in Akiba, I had manage to get myself onto Otome road. Otome road is like the worst parts of Akiba, with one large difference. Here, the walls are not adorned with gargantuan cartoon breasts, they’re covered in men, burly men, thin men, men of all kinds save “actually a real man”. After walking into the store and seeing rows and rows of bookshelves with girls looking at comicbooks, I decide that this place is not for me. I do note the adress though, because a certain someone might like a birthday present from that place. I leave the store and go the other way, and finally reach Sunshine City. After not finding Ice Cream City, I decide to go up the elevator to the top (60th) floor, to see the sights, as it were. To gather my impressions in one simple, easy-to-use phrase, holy shit Tokyo is fucking huge.

I also, just now, realised that both my current favourite building in Tokyo and one that served as a bit of a red thread through today’s photography are rather tall, round-ish towers. Maybe this place is getting to me more than I thought.

After being flabbergasted for at least half an hour, I went down again with the promise that I have to return twice. Once when the weather is clear and Fuji is viewable in the distance, and once at night, when the whole city lights up like a Christmas tree of unfulfilled promises. After drinking my complimentary glass of coke and being artistic with it, I ride the (rad) elevator down to the ground floor and leave the building, my feet hurt and I want to go home. Instead of closely inspecting the map and calculating the best road to the train station, I walk vaguely towards it. I ended up taking a really weird long-cut through a residential area before I reach one of the roads I planlessly walked down earlier today. Smiling from the coincidence I walk back to the station and ride home. I pull up my mp3 player and realise post-rock really fits Tokyo, both the calculated rush of energy that is 65daysofstatic and the almost ethereal dream that is Sigur Rós. I put on some National and have a silent karaoke all the way home. Once I got to my stop and Mister November started playing I became a one man band, simultaneously playing air guitar, air drums and.. air vocals. I draw some stares but fuck it, I’m a gaijin.

Shibuyawakening

I have studied the Japanese language and culture for about a year, and I thought I “got” Japan. One night in the Shibuya area made me realise just how little I know. At first, we (me and my Norwegian co-intern) went there during the early stage of the afternoon rush, around 5 in the afternoon. We watched the super-crossing and the swarms of people going in and out. We then decided to sightsee a bit, and walked up one street, past Shibuya 109 (at this stage I was pretty impressed with the developers for The World Ends With You, as I recognised a few of the areas). After walking around a bit, I saw something that up until that point I wasn’t sure existed. I saw the word “Don Quijote” in large katakana letters. Don Quijote (or Don Kihoote, as the sign really says) is the Harrod’s of Japan, except where Harrod’s claim to have everything, DQ does. And it’s cheap. We must’ve been in there for half an hour, just walking around in a daze from being assailed by 50 signs in 200 colours promoting 100 different things to buy. If any of my dear readers ever go to Japan, you have to go to DQ, because it has to be experienced to really see what it’s all about.

After being overwhelmed by the gloriousness that is DQ, seemingly having missed the rush hour. At home, we talked to our Danish co-intern who’s already been here a month, and decided to go back to Shibuya, to a little restaurant called Locked Up, for dinner. It was pretty much the most interesting dinner I’ve ever had. It started out with me and my Norwegian colleague being singled out from our group of four (we had also picked up a German friend of the Dane) as the bad boy and girl, so we got handcuffed by a scantily clad policewoman and led to our room. We ordered some food and drinks (I had a slime monster cocktail, served in a sciency-looking glass) and ate. This is when we discovered the second gimmick the place had. You can order what is essentially Russian roulette on a plate. By Russian roulette I mean that one of the pieces of croquette/takoyaki or bowls of udon will be filled with tabasco. The surprise on people’s faces when they get the spicy one kept me entertained for a good part of the dinner.

We then decided to nerd it up a notch, and went to the nearby arcade/pachinko tower. Pachinko is kind of like pinball, except you can only control the speed of the ball, and when you win, you win balls, which can be exchanged for prices, which can be exchanged for money in a nearby, “non-affiliated” pawn shop. Going up the escalators to the Pachinko floors, we were overwhelmed by the cacophony of easily over a hundred machines beeping, a thousand tiny metal balls falling through them every minute. In the search for cheap beer, we passed another arcade that had one of the “coolest” games I’ve ever seen. A gundam simulator that seemed to be sound-proof, had a control stick for both hands, and a huge screen. Sadly, it cost 400 yen to play, and since I was the only one that seemed to think it was worth it, we left.

We found somewhere with cheap beer, my companions drank a few glasses (At this point I was too jet lagged and didn’t want to take the chance of falling asleep somewhere public). After that, me and my colleague from the north went home, because I was too tired and she didn’t want to go with the southerners to Strawberry Heaven, which seemed a distinct possiblity. What Strawberry Heaven is? According to the german, the place involves girls eating only strawberries and not wearing panties. Then he said something about red diarrhoea and I wept for humanity. We then rode one of the last trains on the yamanote line home. As to how full the train was, let’s just say I’ve lost my grasp of the idea of personal space.

Akihabarrival

I write this at 20 past 4, having spent most of yesterday and a good part of today traveling.

I have been in Japan for 7 hours, and I’ve spent half of that getting from the airport. In the remaining time, I have seen at least 7 french maids, entered a hive of scum and villany unheard of in my native Sweden, and had a shower. Let’s start there.

When I finally got to where I’m staying, I was… Let’s just say I had been traveling for 15 or so hours, the last few of those was also spent in the sweltering (oh look at me I know big words) heat of late august/early september. (Up to and beyond 30 degrees centigrade.) After having bought shampoo, soap and a Cup Noodle at the local Lawsons (think 7-11) I had probably the best shower in my life. Then I went to cook the Cup Noodle, and once I decided that it didn’t have any instructions (not that I could read, anyway) I figured I’d wing it. This is when I noticed that my kitchen lacks a microwave oven. No lunch for me, then.

Then I went on and did what every self-proclaimed nerd would do when they got to Japan. I went to Akihabara. For those of you not in the know, Akihabara is where you go if you want to buy anything electronic or anything geeky. You can get anything from a rice boiler or the weekly edition of the comic book Shonen Jump to a computer or a mousepad with whatever anime girl you like on it, her ample bosom providing a place to rest your weary wrist. Or you get a daimakura case, daimakura are essentially giant pillows that lonely japanese geeks buy pillowcases with their favourite (female, naked) characters on. What they then do with the pillows, I do not want to know. At the huge store I went to (Gamers) there was also a 18+ section where I did not dare enter, for my own sanity’s sake. Let’s just say I saw enough partially-to-fully unclothed japanese cartoon girls outside of the 18+ area. Now there’s a sentence I did not think I was going to write, ever. I left the store, having given up on finding the wonderfully childish and happy manga Yotsuba&!, because who needs to feel good about a young girl’s (wholesome) adventures when you can buy stuff that had huge breasts?

After the adventure in blatant sexual references, I went to get what I originally went to Akiba for. (Akiba is the “cool” way of saying Akihabara). I first entered a very large electronics store called “Akky One” (If you know why I went there first, you’ve known me for way too long), but that place catered more towards tax-free shopping, and the fact they they all spoke english was advertised widly (they didn’t). So I went to another, equally large store that didn’t have people yelling at me in broken english to get inside and buy their stuff. This is where I found what I was looking for, a kanji training program for the Nintendo DS, complete with a small, plastic calligraphy paintbrush.

Onto the maids, I really only expected them to come out during the evening, to lure unsuspecting customers into shady cafes. This was not the case. I pretty much walked up and down the same 300 meter piece of road and saw at least seven girls in french maid outfits of varying colour. (Black was the most popular, but I also saw white and pink versions) I even took a flier from one of the girls, looking at it now it appears to promote the “MaiDreamin” café, the “No. 1 Maid café”. It has three affiliates within walking distance of the Akihabara train station. They also apparently host Dreamin Parties, but I don’t think I’ll go. I’m not 50 and a creep, you see.

So that’s today then, now I’ll wait for one of my roommates to get home and show me how to connect to the internet. Depending on when I wake up tomorrow, I might go down to the fish market and eat some sushi for breakfast. Might aswell get something for waking up at 4 in the morning.

WordPress is disagreeing with my posting of pictures, if anyone has any clue as to why, feel free to enlighten me. For now, pictures will appear in my Flickr photostream to the right.