to the day :s.

making the most of my time is quite a priority now. and this weekend was no exception – with a full day shopping trip to kobe, and quite a random sunday ^^;.

we saw some new vending machines being installed at himeji station. apparently you can drink tobacco here! as usual there were two guys doing the labour while one (higher up on the salaryman ladder) watched over them eyeing anyone who stood too close. apparently the station has been getting a facelift to make it look brighter, so i guess this is part of it.

after spending a bit of time in sannomiya – a station further away than kobe with a different selection of shops – we did the usual walk back to kobe station and the shopping centres located there named harbour land. on the way there were balloons floating from the sky for some reason.. there was a lot of popping going on as cars had collisions with them on one of the more major streets. random?

Sofmap is a trap – there’s no way i can enter the store without spending money… just too much awesome stuff! i bought myself a new nintrndoo ds game – the equivalent of the brain game series in western countries. its quite good to practise kanji writing as well as make your brain work… while having fun?

it thinks my brain age is that of a 46 year old. i think that is an insult, but apparently i can improve every day! oh yay. the game basically adds new tests and challenges every day, so you can only play a certain amount before it starts repeating. this is a good way to keep up the replay value i guess . its a really fun game anyway, and utilises all the functions of the ds very very nicely. for instance, you can play a jankennpon game where you have to yell into the microphone the choice you should make to either win or lose against the hand that appears on the screen. it also warns you when you have low battery, celebrates your birthday, and comments on your sleeping/training habits.

next move to toys r us. we were wondering why the ら in the japanese written version of the shop name was the only hiragana while the rest were katakana. daniel came up with the intelligent answer that this is equivalent of the backwards ‘r’ in the english version. i never really consciously noticed that the r was backwards ^^;.

anyways, above is a picture of something that would NEVER make it on the shelves in australia. its a disney… knife, with a relatively sharp looking cerated edge. i can just see the court cases that would be born from the sales of these.

kids were hogging the ds stand. it had mario and i wanted a go . next time i guess.

enter sweetharbor. and don’t leave. this place is supposed to be a miniature shopping centre for buying every kind of dessert you could possibly imagine. once you enter, you feel like you are in a fantasy world, and if you aren’t very careful, you will no doubt lose your sense of direction. it took us about 5 minutes to find the exit – and this wasn’t even the one we used to enter, but an elevator we found :s. it was SCARY.

japan has a shortage of ds lites – we all know that. they even lost $2.3m US worth of them. but they can still afford to place one in the janken game machine! in all fairness though, this shop was selling the actual units, but you had to buy a game with it for 4000yen. and it couldn’t be the new mario game because they sold out of that! still quite a good deal though.

i finally got myself a case for my ds – for 680yen. its quite nice and well padded, and fits 3 or 4 games as well as a stylus. also meet chi! a cat we all tooking a liking to after visiting animate and seeing some very cute merchandise .

we finally found out the truth. japanese think we are pillows! they should start treating us like humans instead .

oh and i finally bought an xbox360 control to use with my pc. n64 and gridwars along with the essential touhou are made a lot more fun with a decent controller to play with .

i think i am quite over ofuro and the concept behind it in japanese households.  for those who haven’t experienced it, japanese people fill the bath at the start of the night, and the idea is that each person in the family washes themselves first then “soaks” in the bath.

good concept.  relaxing in a warm bath is quite nice.

two majors problems, which as of today i can confidently announce.

a) the water temperature is horribly variable.  at least for those families without a nicely temperature controlled bathtub.  it begins at the start of the night at about 46 degrees, which provides me with very sore/burnt skin after i get out.  pain :/.

b) certain people DON’T WASH THEMSELVES before getting in.  i have been really annoyed at the bath being full of random dirt lately after my host father takes his turn.  in fact i haven’t been using the bath after him because of this (and not before because it BURNS).

i thought at first he just didn’t wash himself properly.  it was only tonight that i found out HE DOESN’T USE SOAP.  the old soap ran out, and there was a new one placed in the bath area, but it wasn’t opened after he took his turn.

oh no .  that would explain the dirtiness and the smell.

so before you enter a japanese bathtub think about those that have been in there before you – and if it smells strange in a bad way, just settle for a shower.

left today not expecting to get rained on as much as i did .  walking for the rest of the day felt like i had two water filled sponges beneath my feet.  kappa raincoats sure do a good job at protecting your body from getting wet, but all that water ends up in your shoes lol :s.

the cloud cover really ensures the temperature doesn’t drop at all during the night, which makes for uncomfortable humid sleeping conditions.  daniel described it quite well today – when he looked at the weather forecast on tv, the whole of japan was covered by one massive grey cloud.  *turns on the air conditioning*.

i guess i should be more positive – seeing as i only have another four weeks over here.  and two days.  really not much time, but its sure to pass quite fast with the amount of tests spaced over these next few weeks, along with busy weekend social life ^^l.

played a bit of hitman tonight but didn’t really get anywhere.  i took a few cool screenshots though .  i have so many cool ones that i decided to make an album specifically for them.  there are more on my other webspace but i’ll add them later.

so with a bit of free time on the weekend i decided to get a game or two of transport tycoon going. it went quite well, with a lot of participants and some interesting end results . its a pity playing through takes so long and i won’t get much chance to sit down and have a proper game.

we switched to using the latest nightly build patched with IN (a collection of user-made patches). the game above was started with the aim at connecting the whole rail network together to allow trains to travel anywhere they wished. although only about 3 hours into the game, it was going very smoothly (except for certain people building $500,000 islands and duplicating unnecessary stations ^^;).

one other thing i got around to doing was getting a linux install going on my laptop. after a while its only natural to feel the need for a local bash console window :s. i installed ubuntu within vmware in order to allow a bit of flexibility – and just to test it out before i go around demolishing my partitions. end results were quite pleasing .

now i have to get back to packing my box to send a bit of stuff back to australia. lightening luggage can’t be a bad thing, right?