月別アーカイブ: 2009年5月

Guns

Went to Blam! in Tokorozawa to shoot my friends with air-powered BB-guns. I wanted the AK-47 but ended up with some cheap Russian Kalashnikov.

It’s surprising how much fun it is to run around a barricade-filled warehouse wielding a replica machine gun. The fact that it actually hurts when you get hit definitely adds to the experience. I was so into it, ducking behind particle-board barriers and dodging plastic pellets shot at up to 95m/s, my quads needed ice the next day.

It’s surprisingly reasonable too. 3500yen is more than enough for the whole day – includes entrance, gun and mask rental, and enough BB’s to kill an army of prairie dogs.

Here’s the site:

http://www.blam.jp/

Just moved in to Higashi Ikebukuro and am happy with the house. It’s the quietest of the 7 places I’ve lived in Tokyo these past 5 years!

Have now met all three house-mates, and they all seem cool – Japanese, Bangladeshi, Italian and me, Saskatchewanean.

My first week in the house has been not so much in the house though. Went to a party at Fujiten Ski Resort in Yamanashi and decided it would be fun to ride a bicycle there. Turned out to be quite a mission but thanks to my friend scoping the route on Google Earth and printing off the critical junctions, we made it there without any major wrong turns.

Good to be back in the Tokes and ready for a little routine starting Monday.

KitKat Flavours

In case someone else also has noticed, there seems to be more than 10 flavours of KitKat chocolate bar at Japanese convenience stores. In Canad we have only 2, Vanilla and Milk Chocolate, and I think nobody has ever bothered to create more flavours. Maybe it’s the extreme cold weather!? Anyhow, it’s nice to have various flavours of KitKat,such as – our ordinary Vanilla and Milk Chocolate PLUS Green Tea, Cherry, Orange, Apple, Red Bean, Dark Chocolate, and Peach. Enjoy the variety!!!

My first post – Karaoke

Last Friday my housemates and I threw a farewell party as Momoko(one of our housemates) was leaving us soon. It was also a pot-luck dinner party, so we all cooked up a huge feast of different foods, the others made a delicious seafood green Thai curry, some fresh spring rolls, fried koroke and I made banana bread for dessert. A couple of the guys also decided to make some jelly shots for fun and they turned out really well and tasted yummy(but maybe also a bit strong as we could taste the vodka). 
 
After feasting and drinking, we walked over to Akabane to hit up karaoke! It is only a 15minute walk there. Our housemate Stefan from the USA had been telling us he was so good at singing Enka that he was praised for it at his local bar, that we had to see it to believe him. Turns out we were all blown away at his awesome talent. After only living in Japan for two years he sounded better than Enka singer Gero, also at his local bar he also wins free songs all the time. There were quite a few good singers among the bunch, man can Mitsu(another housemate) sing loud especially Linkin Park. But we all got into it really. We had such a fun time singing that we didnt even notice how long we had been at it. We started at 11pm and it was already 4.30am! We wished we had more time.
 
It was twilight as we walked back home. We left the karaoke place with sore throats and fun memories.

WEEK 1 (GOLDEN WEEK)

01/05/09

I got home from work at around 11pm, it took me a while to get home and I felt tired as I had been working since 10am that morning. As I was on the train home, my roommate had emailed me and told me that I had missed the Coke Cola and Mentos experiment. As I arrived home there were about six of my roommates in the common-room. They seemed excited as though the party was fully underway. We were throwing a leaving party for one of our roommates. They all showed me the pictures of the Cola bottle spewing cola into the air due to the catalyst of adding a Mento and asked if I wanted to come to Karaoke. I said yes and went to get changed out of my suit. As I was going to meet my family at Narita airport the next day, I though it would be better to stay up all night rather than risk oversleeping and we all walked to Akabane for Karaoke. On the way, I saw the Cola stained pavement of where the Mentos event must have taken place. We walked until Midnight passed…

02/05/09

After shopping around for a good place to sing Karaoke, we settled in and had snuck in some began drinking and singing. I was kinda nervous about singing considering everyone seemed to be really good, and to put it lightly, I suck. After a while, we were all comfortably drunk and I began singing. We drank, sang, drank and sang until we left. My memory is a little hazy, but I think remember singing Madonna La Isle Bonita, I must have been like, ten or something when that song came out and my eldest sister used to listen to it. Someone else must have picked it as I can’t imagine which recess of my brain that song would have emerged from had it been down to me.

As we left, we waked home in high spirits and when we approached the house we went in for Breakfast. We ate and arrived at the house together. I went and lay on my bed to rest just before I would leave for the airport. Darkness washed over me.

I awoke in a panic, I had to get to the airport as family’s flight was due to land in about 40mins, I rushed into the shower and then out again and to the train station, I managed to get there in time and meet my family. I was only 20mins late, they didn’t mind and had emailed my phone as I was approaching the airport, I told them that I would be there as soon as.

We spent the day together and I escorted them to their hotel. Later that day they met my girlfriend for the first time and we all drank and chatted. We wanted to go to the Ghibli in Mitaka. It is really cool and I must admit that I have been there before. Turns out, the tickets were sold out as we went to Lawson to get some.

03/05/09

 

The next day, we went to Harajuku and had a look around the market. We then went to a wood block printing museum called the Ota Museum of Art. It’s near Gap in Harajuku. It was better than I expected as some of the prints had interesting styles and Youkai in them. Youkai are kinda little Japanese monsters with various characteristics, my favourite being a giant foot that smashed through the ceiling of your apartment and shouts…. “WASH ME!!!” forcing the unsuspecting tenant to wash the giant foot until morning or face having their apartment demolished by a giant Monty Python type foot!!!

We looked around a bit more and then tried to find a restaurant that wasn’t ram-packed. There wasn’t any and we walked to Shibuya from Harajuku. After the restaurant, we walked back the same way and went to the Design Festa, it’s a museum in which artists can display their work for a small fee and possibly sell it. Me and my girlfriend did it last year. Might do it again sometime, but the some of the things I saw yesterday made me think I need to step up my game, for example, Mr. Beaker-man’s Under Ocean Adventure, was really cool!!! ( http://homepage3.nifty.com/under_water/index2.htm ) check it out.

 

Clean the Oceans

The ocean covers 70 percent of our planet’s surface and contains 90 percent of life on Earth. Celebrate the underwater world during Dive for Earth Day this April and May by joining a local cleanup, coral monitoring project or AWARE Kids event. You can join these events on this website: http://www.projectaware.org./english/

Enjoy warm weather and the beautiful waters in Japan!!

Golden Week

I start the morning by looking at some speeches at www.ted.com. I watch two speeches: one about Bird Flu and the other on The Eradication of Smallpox.  I am not really worried about Swine Flu (now A(H1N1)) because the World Health Organisation (WHO) said recently that there were only 7 recorded deaths all in Mexico.

It’s Golden Week at the moment, which is Japan’s longest holiday, being 8 days. As a result of this I have a break from Japanese school. During this week I should be studying Japanese but instead I have to finish some work on a website first. I am close to finishing this work so there is hope yet for my language studies. I finished one main part of the site last night which was good.

While I wait for my rice to cook, I watch the communal TV. My rice is ready. I am going to have nattou with my rice.When I get to the kitchen I see that someone has thrown my nattou into the bin. Its packaging is still intact so I retrieve it.

I am now eating the nattou on rice. Normally I eat them separately. Today, because the packaging had been in the bin, I empty the nattou onto the rice and throw away the packaging. I ask my a housemate if pouring the nattou on top of the rice is the correct way to eat it and he says that it is the way most Japanese people eat it including himself.

The scales here have a table showing height to average weight. I now weigh 67kg which is considered a little under average for my height. I have been eating well so I tell myself to do more pushups.

Normally when I want to get some exercise I go for a walk through Inokashira Park to Kichijouji. Yesterday I decided to go the other way when I left the front door. This way took me through the backstreets. I noticed a sign. This sign had a picture of a dog on it and it read “I can reach the fence in 2.8 seconds. Can you?”. I found this sign more accusatory than the usual “Beware of Dog”. I walked along a creek and eventually I found another park full of people enjoying Golden Week.