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.

so being the average uni week, it goes by with not that much interesting occurring (well not interesting to those that weren’t there at the time usually).  time to cover a few of the more minor details of my life over here?

the two kids you see above live over the road from my family.  taka-kun and tomo-kun.  it was tomo-kun’s birthday yesterday, so they were still playing with their new presents.  yes – both of them got presents, because there would be quite a lot of screaming and crying if only one did.  boy can they scream :/.

anyways the toys they got were boukensha figurines – basically the original power rangers which are somehow still popular in japan.

we went out to a family restaurant called Saizeria for dinner last night.  this is one of the places with drink bars – which means you can drink all the melon soda you want, but the amount you drink is very proportional to the suffering experienced as you make many visits to the toilet during the night ^^;.  this particular restaurant has a nice selection of pizzas, pasta dishes and some very mouth-watering desserts.  unfortunately even though i didn’t eat lunch, i couldn’t manage a dessert after a single main course..

i had a macaroni cheese with crab dish, as well as garlic bread and a lot of drinks.  it cost around 800yen (just under AU$10) – quite good value really.

speaking of family restaurants, i was watching a news talkback show this morning and they were talking about this incident that occurred last week at one.  a family went to eat, and at first they were told that quite a large selection of the dishes weren’t available, and to choose from specific salad and meat dishes.  when they did just that, and waited over 30 minutes for their meals to come out, the meat was hard and basically not consumable.  along the way the staff fobbed them with excuses and said to wait just a bit longer.  it was only when they got to the counter to pay that they were told rather impolitely that there was no chef there that could cook the food..  just a whole bunch of part-timers trying to cook the food.  no apology or anything.  quite bad really :/

soo i’m hoping that doesn’t happen to us.

on the way to uni yesterday we were met with a sparkling stream of whiteness on the road…

the first thing that came to my mind were pachinko balls! and i’m pretty sure thats what they were too. that blue container is the kind that is used to store large amounts of the balls for those hardcore gamblers. i guess one had a bit of an accident on the way home last night ^^;.

sooner or later i had to post a picture of this. in one of our classrooms we have this mysterious rectangular box with this sign on the side. i guess its meant as an emergency escape out of the building, but would you feel safe following those instructions then risking your life down 3 storeys being held up by this.. thing?