I’m moving tomorrow morning, I pick up the keys for the new flat at 11. Its in Sendagaya, halfway between Sendagaya station (and the national stadium and gymnasium(!)) and Harajuku station (and Yoyogi park). I’ll be mailing out the address when I know what it looks like when its written down in a script I can understand – I’ve got some kanji, but thats just a bunch of squiggles to me at the moment. Mail me if you think I’ve not got your email address with me and you would like to send me love letters or hate mail or something more mass produced to read.
I went to a Korean Barbeque resturant the other day. An interesting experience, where you basically get a hob in the middle of your table and a lump of raw meat (or fish, if you’re into that sort of thing) delivered to your table and you cook it yourself. It looked like it would be quite entertaining to go as a group, it was suboptimal on my own. Oh well.
I went up to Shinjuku again today, essentially to get a Smartmedia reader and a mouse, and a USB hub ‘cos theres no way they’ll all plug into the single USB socket I have on this laptop. I found the silliest mouse I could, but more on that later.
I spent most of my time there in the Times Square department store (well, I think its a department store, it might be a collection of shops not quite organised as a mall. It did have a couple of discrete units though, Tokyu Hands (creative life store) and HMV were obviously seperate places. Tokyu hands was an odd collection of DIY and crafts things, including a toys and games section which took quite a bit of my attention. Oddly most of the games stocked appeared to originate in Germany and come with Japanese rules. Also unexpected was the appearance of Cashflow amongst those stocked, though its not so surprising given Robert Kyosakis background…
The job is going OK, though its not quite what I’d hoped for – more coordinating integration of other peoples software and less writing our own. Shouldn’t be too difficult, and I’ve finally pursuaded them to let me have a go at doing something useful next week as well. I fear I may be a bit brutal for this culture when it comes to trying to get things done, we’ll have to see how it goes.
I’m currently watching a program about “One foot in the grave”, a punk band made up of old people, which is peculiar, but they sound quite cool. No idea where they’re based, but they’re speaking english, so its probably some kind of laughing at the stupid westerners program.
One of the other noticable things here is the number of programs teaching English. I keep trying to watch these hoping to pick up some of the translations the other way around but its not so easy like that.
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