apparently celebrated in japan, but it seems like just another scam so more money is spent in shops.

anyways i treated myself to an iced cocoa from this shop with a heap of interesting drinks. does it look tasty? because it was ! also being close by i made the routine visit to mister donut, and received my two bag presents using the cards collected over the last few weeks .

i was also lucky enough to see a group of four girls called “voices of peace” singing 世界にひとつだけの花 at the shopping centre. take a look if you like the song . i uploaded a whooole lot of pictures to the gallery too, for those that are interested.

today we all ventured to a sake brewery in aboshi called 米のささやき, or the whisper of rice. this was with the intention of finding out how sake was produced, and we assumed we would be able to get a glimpse of the process in action!

after a few delays, we arrived at the brewery where we were lead to the fourth floor. it was a room with tables, chairs and not much else in sight apart from a television and microphone setup.

we were joined along the way by about 20 people who all graduated from the same high school, and were gathering as a kind of reunion event. they brought with them a lot of tasty food in boat-shaped containers. it looked expensive, but we weren’t paying so that was beside the point .

well we soon found out we weren’t able to see the process of nuturing rice into the final alcoholic product – since it is only produced in the winter. instead we watched a video, where hundreds of shirtless sweaty men moved rice in various sized containers, and tasted it waay too many times along the way. japan has a low unemployment rate – i think its because they haven’t done enough research into automation yet.

with a number of different flavoured bottles of shouchuu at our disposal, we ended up drinking quite a bit. unfortunately, the taste wasn’t that fond for some of us (sorry daniel i used this photo on my own blog, i know you’re going to be annoyed :p) and we ended up diluting it with some coke. we don’t appreciate fine liquor do we. i wouldn’t find visiting the chuuhai factory next time for some sampling though :d.

ate too much today. i think ill fast for most of tomorrow ^^;

you know nothing about japan if you are unaware of the number of japanese people that have addictions to something. of course, the two most popular are pachinko (a gambling game which *apparently* takes skill, and looks like quite a lot of fun really :p) and smoking. the amount of chain smokers i’ve met since i’ve been in japan is quite outrageous. that includes most of my host family’s relatives and friends.

so i was quite pleased to find out that neither of my host parents smoked or spent their nights in pachinko parlours. unfortunately, my host mother has recently picked up an obsession with these bead-filled dolls manufactured by mogu.

sounds quite harmless right? it started with a single pink human-shaped figurine which sat in the living room, and acted as a pillow when you lay on the ground under the kotatsu table. you can imagine how surprised i was when my mother came home with a bag full of various size mogu dolls, which she bought as presents for close friends and relatives. i got a nice blue one which stays in my bed and keeps me company.

that was roughly one month ago. she has now been to the factory (we like to call it that anyway – i think its just a shop with lots of them for cheapish prices) which produces these dolls 3 times, and is already planning the next 2 trips. i *do* have a feeling there was another trip which i was never told about… but that will never be known.

today she brought home some new faces, including this cute black dog. its ears feel very nice :p.

so you may think its quite an innocent addiction… but with each of these dolls costing between 1500 and 4000yen, it really is an expensive one.

we were on the way to school when i looked up at the sky and saw a strange line drawn along the sky from one horizon to the other. i didn’t really think much of this – probably just a plane having some fun.

but then on the way home the same line was there – about 2 hours later. there was also some strange cloudish formation to one side of the line. i don’t know how it got there, but it looked quite impressive anyways

update: my host mother said she saw two helicopters flying *very* close together this afternoon. beau says the trail was left by a military plane, which is quite likely with the military base located so close by. i’m kind of sad i didn’t get a photo of the helicopters though

daniel’s bathroom got attacked by flying ants. there were seriously thousand of these little insects crawling around the bathroom and quite a few hundred in the kitchen and other rooms nearby. they seemed to be landing, shedding their wings and crawling around. craziness. luckily his mum was on her way home and i think it has been sorted out now.

on my way out of his house, i went to open the bike fence only to find that a group of bees have made themselves at home inside the tiny hole compartments inside the fence (!). so daniel if you read this, you might want to check your fence for the bee hive inside it sometime ^^;.

just for a little bit of testing, i’ve set up a shoutcast stream straight from jp radio. i have it set to Kiss FM at the moment, and encoding at 96kbit stereo. feel free to have a listen if you are that way inclined. i’m not sure how long i’ll keep it up – it depends if people actually want to listen, and whether i can get a better aerial for this radio, and pick up some of the better stations.

the shoutcast addy is http://202.225.241.228:8000/listen.m3u

oh i forgot to mention how fscking hot it was today – hitting a maximum of 26° at 1500, and a humidity of 64%. while it doesn’t sound that bad, temperature is a relative thing and this was the first time anyone in the country felt this kind of heat in quiiite a while. apparently its cooling down over the rest of the week, with some rain near the end/weekend.