lack of sleep mmm. updating takes effort at times :p so i’ll be brief today.

this weekend was well planned to make the most of every minute. saturday morning was the day of the visit to the mogu shop! being about a one hour drive from himeji on the tollways, the trip took about 4 hours total, including a lunch at a cafe which was built on top of a pond :d. what to say; there were lots of mogus, and daniel was happy. i bought my fair share as well.

sunday was a trip to nara which began at 0800. early, yes. and i went to sleep at around 3 the night before, so the two hour trip there consisted mainly of sleep.

nevertheless, it was a nice day weather wise, so quite enjoyable. we visited the usual places in nara (the fourth time for me ^^;) as well as a few i hadn’t seen up until today. 特に, we strolled down a old-style street… i guess. it had old houses that looked like they should’ve already fallen down, and lots of houses turn shops monopolizing on the small flow of tourism down the street.

as it was only 1400 after we finished our nara outing, including a tasty mushroom noodle dish for lunch, it was decided we’d also visit rokko mountain in kobe. just like any other mountain it had a nice view, although the rendering distance was a bit low today, meaning we couldn’t see the ocean or islands off the coast. oh well. there were a couple of nice stores selling english foods and cool glass statue things (teruteru!).

end of day was topped off with a drink bar restaurant and cake when i got home. i feel like i don’t need to eat for a few days :s.

for anyone wondering what my host family looks like, i finally got a nice picture with everyone. the two younger kids are actually from over the road, but they pretend they are part of our family quite a lot. i just realised the sister isnt in the picture. failed?

i haven’t been using my laptop on battery much lately, but since i was planning on taking it with me to nara i had a play around to see how many hours i could push out of it. not a bad result imo. then again that was with no wireless and just word processing.

updated galleries: 060603, 060604

first of all let me say – the weather is kind of getting to be lately. highish humidity and temperatures . let me use that as my excuse for not updating in quite a few days :p.

soo with two tests in a row on wed and thurs, as well as an essay and a speech to complete, it was a busy week. hell, its not even over yet, but friday is friiiday right?

i somehow managed to fit a trip to himeji castle and the gardens too. that was pretty tiring. i was at first thinking how stupid the osaka castle was for having an elevator to get to the top, but i seriously wouldn’t have cared if i could catch one rather than walking countless flights of stairs with not enough head room for even the shortest japanese person ^^;.

i guess they build the castle with the intention of tiring out the enemy though. ill upload pictures later on.. camera is somewhere upstairs. stairs BAD. instead ill just rant about games i’ve used to procrastinate in those periods while collecting enough motivation to study.

i made a trip back to jRO a couple of weekends ago thanks to tencho kindly giving dodd and myself a 1day pass to use. this was quite awesome fun – we visited juperos and attempted to complete the quest to get to 3f, but couldn’t find the last item required and never made it there :s.

i really would like to play ro – if it wasn’t for the lack of time in my semi-normal lifestyle. i was considering joining everyone on iro but this would involve a gradual decrease in sleep hours at night, and inversely proportional sleep during uni classes. not going to happen in short. and besides – playing ro in english just isnt the same. nor is the community anywhere near as competent ^^; (although that’s sometimes for the best).

hitman blood money! awesome. i can’t stop playing – despite my real dislike of single player FPS games. the ability to have total freedom over how you go about completing a mission is really really fun, and makes for interesting gameplay no matter how many times you play the same level. since i haven’t had that much time to plan my hits, my rating is in the mediocre levels, highest so far being Hitman rating on the madigras election thingy level. i spent extra long on that level though :s.

bf2 with broken textures :d. quite fun for a change, albeit very hard to play with a ping of 450ms.

てるてる明日へ～

so yeah, i have only charged my camera twice since i got to japan. considering how much i use it, this is quite amazing performance. the major downside is since it hardly ever needs charging, i forget to do it when it IS about to run out. last night at fireworks it stopped turning on (actually cut out halfway through a good video ), and i kind of forgot to charge it when i got home.

thus i missed a few interesting photos today when i went to aeon shopping centre with my family for dinner / to buy printer ink. the best part was seeing two young children (a boy and a girl) with their family at the restaurant. they both had DS (not lites though..) and just bought NSMB! and they were fighting over the instruction booklet, then they finally found out that you could play multiplayer with only 1 cart, and began to play in a more civilised manner. there were some other kids crowding around them watching and acting quite excited :d. i really want to get mario now. even my host sister was saying how interesting it looked when the CM came on tv earlier tonight.

buffet style food and drink was very satisfying especially at only 1600yen. must go back sometime.

i added a new video section using youtube just for fun. it seems to compress a lot better than google video. i’m waiting to see how long it takes for daniel to tell me to take down at least 1 of the videos that i put up there ^^;.

text only is boring so here’s my desktop at the end of this month! in a very usable state at the moment :d.

today we planned a trip 相生 (aioi) which is the next stop west of himeji on the shinkansen line. the aim of it was to see the ’superior’ fireworks display by the country that founded them originally. even with the weather forecast leaving is in doubt of whether they would happen or not, and a bit of rain falling during our 40 minute trip there, i still went with high hopes of seeing some nice explosions :d.

luckily enough it wasn’t cancelled, and all went quite smoothly. the 25 minute walk from the car was mostly along the main shopping road of aioi – which was littered with small stalls selling every kind of traditional japanese food you could possibly want. there were also lottery places selling what LOOKED to be ds lites… but for all i know they could’ve just been empty boxes.

as we arrived at the edge of the lake/river, we saw that the areas of pavement (yeah, no grass – its japan after all) had been reserved by people using large sheets that were taken to with masking tape. we managed to find quite a nice area to sit and unpacked all our food and alcohol.

the fireworks started at 1930, and continued for one and a half hours. quite a long display really – and it was filled with things you can’t see at even the biggest displays in perth (lol). at first our host family members present were worried the fireworks had been wet by the rain, as they fired off some test ones which seemed to fail badly. they were oh so relieved when an announcement came over the speakers about 5 minutes later saying they would start soon ^^;.

i took quiiite a few pictures so if you’re interested go visit the gallery :d. also took a few videos, and tried google video to see how it would retain quality. unfortunately it didn’t work that nicely. oh well :p.