My feet are not killing me, they've actually hired assassins to throttle me in my sleep

Last Thursday until this Wednesday (with the exception of Friday) is called Golden week in Japan. For anyone who loves peace, harmony and just easy-going don't set foot outside during golden week, if you have plans cancel 'em, because there are people EVERYWHERE! I've been slot of hanging out with other UTS people that came to Japan and their friends since Saturday haven't had much time to do even blog so I'll start from way back saturday night.

Our Contemporary Japanese (subject I did in Australia last semester) tutor or sempai as he titled himself, planned a huge get together of UTS students from as far north as Sapporo to as far south-west as Osaka! Everyone flocked in to meet at Shibuya, some people got lost or were doing something right before so we actually got to sit down at the Izakaya (Japanese traditional drinking house) quite late. Normally, that isn't a problem unless you have a booking for a set time. For the sum of about 3500yen pp we got 2-3 dishes of light food and unlimited drinks for 2 hours from the start of our booking, last orders were taken after about 90 minutes. All in all it was quite light stuff, mainly had beer and moscow mule (sounds so cool, the Japanese pronounce it MOSuKO MIYUURu). After the group was relaxed a bit we hit the Karaoke bar. I think we started at 8-830? the last people left at 12, I walked some people who had to go earlier back to Shibuya and then I myself headed home. Unfortunately upon arriving I couldn't really sleep because I was distracted with writing up my shopping list (before cooking something, I need to find a good recipe, decode the ingredients, translate what I need to buy in Japanese, look up how it's written in Kanji, find an image of what it looks like, and any special words I would need to know to be able to describe it if I couldn't find it, e.g. if I wanted Miso paste I would ask for the Miso used in Miso Soup). Then I played some video games, read a little and before long I was making breakfast as the sun came up. I ate and took a little nap but quite soon after I headed out to meet Harry and Hanna.

The weather was quite nice, sunny but not hot good temperature to walk around another huge city of Japan, Yokohama. Yokohama to my knowledge started off as a seaport for trading, until it slowly became urbanised, the local population grew and it actually became quite a big district. Starting off as a trading port it has had quite frequent foreign visitors and residents so english is quite easy to use, not that we did :p The train station structure alone is huge about the size of Central (actually most stations that interchange more that 3 lines are huge) and included in the actual entire building are shops of all sorts. It's probably equal to Shinjuku station in size but Shinjuku Station is surrounded by a ton of shops, eateries, departments stores, clubs etc etc. Anyway, we had a little time so we went downtown to find a yodobashi because hanna's camera was playing up. Unfortunately, they were of little help during Golden week so we decided to trek back and we also stopped at a restaurant along the way. It wasn't cheap 800yen standard, but I wasn't a happy camper since the soup had a weird taste to me, Harry had the same but said it was fine, Hanna also had curry for the first time rofl! Oh yeah totally forgot that one the way to Yodobashi and returning I saw Geishas for the first time. I don't know if they were proper Geisha Geishas but they looked the part, pretty cool.
We headed off to see Hanna's church in Yokohama called New Life Yokohama?! Charismatic church thats grown quite well in its 6 year plant in Yokohama. That day was a special children's day service with appropriate sermon, for which I largely don't remember seeing as I was so buggered and after 15 minutes lost concentration and fell asleep... I felt really bad so after the service I loaded up on coffee and chocolate in order to wake myself up for meeting up with two of Harry's Japanese friends at Shinjuku.

Getting out at Shinjuku we found one straight away and we hung around till the second arrived. Originally there was supposed to be more but they canceled for various reasons, the first friend also left shortly after meeting us but no big deal. We found out from Hanna that some more UTS students would be coming to Shinjuku soon so we thought to wait for them, we waited quite a while and then split up weirdly? I joined the Kinokuniya group cos I wanted to check some manga/anime prices. They didn't have all of the anime (Trinity Blood) I wanted, but they did have the entire Manga series (Hajime no Ippo) I wanted, a whole 91 volumes, each about 400yen. Harry's friend told me that I could check second-hand book stores since they priced them at around 100 yen, I decided a quarter of the price is worth my time since I'll be here for a while hehe. We re-joined and headed off for dinner when Harry's friend had to go to another engagement. We also found out that another International student from Yamanashi wished to join us so we waited on the highway quite a while. After said while we went to find the restaurant and sent Harry back as a scout to go find the losties who had been given wrong directions by the Japanese, according to them hahaha. I had a spinach and bacon PIzza with Latte. The pizza was....When they said spinach and bacon they really meant it, it only had spinach and bacon with a thin crust. The coffee.... was a big cappuccino with no chocolate, as for the beans they used....whatever I was glad to have coffee in me again at that point. After bidding everyone goodbye and sending some of the Yamanashi crew home I trudged home and fell ontop of my bed and slept. Until....

Hanging-out-with-Victor-day! So Victor told me some his intentions for his last day in Tokyo (he's from Yamanashi but stayed an extra day) on Sunday so I invited myself. First up we were both late but we headed to Daimon station, to walk to POKEMON CENTRE!!!!! The journey along the way was quite eventful though, even though we got off the same train (didn't know at the time) we managed to head in completely opposite directions so it took us a while to find each other. Then while enroute to the centre we took a wrong turn into a building and a lift upto the wrong floor to find a ecchi/hentai comic convention...lovely....So we started to walk back and while he was attempting to decipher the map a flyer girl tried for the second time to hand me a brochure. Since I was waiting on Victor I decided to read it.

Faith-related stuff, don't read if you don't want to but I suggest you do, at the very least so that you don't put me in the same boat as these people who call themselves Christians.

The title is 'THE END OF THE WORLD IS ALMOST HERE! HOLY GOD WILL BRING JUDGEMENT DAY ON MAY 21, 2011', before I walked over to ask 'wat the crap', I decided to look for the church sponsor of these people and sure enough at the bottom of the back page 'Family Radio is a Bible-based Christian broadcasting ministry with no church affliation', wonderful. So I went back and asked more politely than I intended to 'Where you[they] got this date from?', he replied in an American accent and a smile 'The Bible'. So I asked where, he said the date isn't actually written specifically but they had ascertained the information from the Bible by the means of using certain references and using a Bible calendar. I'll quickly go into the gist of it.

It starts off going on about Judgement day being the feared day of man, The Bible gives us the correct day, Bible is the Holy book 'written' (I put those apostraphes in for fun) by God. It was completed about first century BC, it it's original languages it has never been changed, each and every word in the original languages is from the 'mouth of God' (more fun). The bible is divided into two parts yadayadayada... quotes 2Tim 3:16 and Jer 36:1-4. Quotes and explains some creation and sin stuff, at this point I started looking for Jesus in this pamphlet. On the bottom of the second page...Talk about 'God being so great and glorious He calls Himself by many different names', tomorrow I'll call myself anthony just for fun sheesh.. 'Each name tells us something about the glorious character and nature of God. Thus in the Bible we find such names as God, Jehovah, Christ, Jesus, Lord, Allah, Holy Spirit, Savior etc. Names such as Jehovah, Jesus, Savior and Christ particularly point to God as the only means by which forgiveness from all of our sins and eternal life can be obtained by God's merciful and glorious actions'
Weird plug about hoping will save me.
'Many books have been written about the BIble or considered additions to the Bible, life the Koran or the Book of Mormon' Goes onto say that out of these only the Bible is Holy. blah blah blah and Now the way judgement day is worked out.
'By careful study of the Bible we learn that in the year 4990BC God brought a flood of water..', I'm so glad they solved it for us so easily 4990BC it amazes me that the scholarly world is still divided on a proper calendar to my knowledge.
So we have the period 4990BC and the date 17th of the second month, as the date of the flood from this pamphlet Gen 7:10-11...
Gen 7:4 is quoted followed by the explanation that 2Pet 3:8 means to us that one day from Gen 7:4 can be considered as 1000 years. So God was warning us that he would destroy the world in the seven days warning he gave Noah back in Gen 7:4. Math time!!
-4990 + 7000 - 1 (no year 0) = 2011 YAY May 21 is equivalent to 17th of the second month of the Biblical calendar. Followed by random plug about more information available on the subject.
The rest talks about how God MIGHT save you, that on Judgement day 200 million people (according to the bible) will be saved, on the first Day of Judgement they will be caught up (raptured) into Heaven because God had great mercy on them.
So, our action plan? Don't go to your priest, pastor etc turn away from your sin, beg God for forgiveness. Thank God for His great Mercy in letting you know when he will kill everyone and hope you win the Heaven lottery. Does anyone else think
......these people have too much spare time to be making this sort of crap and then distributing it.......as you can see im angered

call me arrogant, I might be making a mistake but that's just got to be the most unhelpful stuff...ever....
End of Faith-related stuff, back to Pokemon Centre!

So finding the place it was smaller than I expected and since it was Golden week...Chock-a-block with families. As I waded through the store I looked at the merchandise everywhere and didn't really find anything I liked, even the mobile phone chains weren't to my liking. After Victor was done being a fan I totally encouraged him to battle a Japanese dude since Victor had brought his NDS. The Japanese dude was maybe a little younger than us, but since he was dressed with a weird puffy black train-conductor type hat, checkered white shirt tucked into oversize beige cargo pants and black sneakers. Along with a UTILITY BELT that contained cases for his DS and mobile, wired up with music and a small pokemon train-as-you-walk gagdet. He looked pro. Not only that when Victor started a conversation with him he was acting quite confident and cool, he didn't know that I was watching him before lose his cool while battling a primary school girl rofl. Shortly the battle started, as we find out 3 pokemon into the match he ran a theme team, which was basically an all water type team for a team bonus and use of a special skill to increase the accuracy of certain killer skills. However I did mention that we found this out 3 pokemon into the match, 3 of his pokemon of course. He had started with his strongest number which Victor took out in two shots, luckily it was paralyzed and couldn't retaliate. After that he lost the next 5 straight without Victor's pokemon going to half hp. That dude's bubble was burst, the next contender was quite a bit younger....also no chance against Victor's more defensive pokemon. But man was I happy he beat the first dude hahahahaha.

After that ownage we trekked off to catch some trains to Akihabara, big electronics district in Tokyo. We had the hope that it was also a manga/anime meccah/makkah of sorts and to see some stereo-typical Otaku. After walking around for about 4 hours out hope was crushed. But we did manage to see alot of Akiba (short name), two main things worthy of mention. First up was MAID CAFE ROFL ROFL. For those who don't know in Japan and mainly in Akiba there are cafes where the staff dress up in cosplay (anime character dress-up), maid cafe's are most common we also saw a Office-Lady (stereo -type fetish dress-up of course) cafe. Back to the Maid cafes, you can pay quick a bit extra for your meal/drink to become a course with a time limit. The time limit is for talking to the waitress employees i.e. they sit and chat with you, of course using Japanese maid talk which is super honorific and they use the word Goshujin-sama heaps(which is like referring to another person's husband except the sama make's the status of the dude like royalty). Now we thought that it was like a cafe full of Otaku's and no girls, but it was actually like 40% girls and less weird than I thought it would be, they even had Western-nationality maids. I order Iced cocoa which was 600 yen.... and washed down with a 600 yen kebab after we left (kebabs are quite a popular sell in Akiba, Japanese portions sux though). Victor order Curry rice for 1200 (he kept whingeing about the cost for the rest of the day cos he's tight, but so am I, still I did point out it was his idea). Now when his meal came...he had to do the become-delicious-power-dance BAHAHAHA I knew about this, but didn't think they would do it so I didn't actually warn him, sooooo funny watching him struggle through that. There is also a dance for drinks and I also should have joined in making Victor's curry rice delicious (BAHAHAHAHA) but I was quite happy to passively guide them away from that idea. Victor found the meat quantity insufficient for 1200yen but I was too busy enjoying myself at his expense to have the slightest bit of compassion.

We kept on walking around after the cafe, looking for stuff. We found a book-store where Victor bought a ton of short novels he'd wanted to buy. He didn't find one series which we found later back in Kinokuniya in Shinjuku. Can I just say that if you think Japans Manga, Anime and games selection is big.....the adult selection probably is about quadruple or more the size and more popular and way more available, from the manga section I counted about half the people that were in the adult section. Also apparently in Japan it's not weird if you just read like a whole book in the store and don't buy it, I found that weird. We also went to look around the more shabby places, found a souvenirs shop. They had sword stands and tea sets etc. I had a look at some of the sword blades before I noticed the 'do not touch' in Japanese sign. Luckily went unnoticed. They also have a sign in English too that says the swords aren't real. From there it was largely uneventful till I spied something funny from a distance.... GUNDAM CAFE!!!! Apparently only opened this year sometime, inside it's a normal cafe, the staff wear Gundam cosplay and theres certain menu items that are Gundam-related somehow. We didn't go in cos the line was about 30 minutes long (Japapese are not averse to lines, it comes with the territory and the population). It did look super cool so I need to pay a visit eventually.

For dinner we went to a cheap sushi-train joint. Spent about 9 bux on 6 plates. Along the way though an African-American dude was trying to invite us to a club, even though I gave reasons like I'm tired (which I was) and that we've just finished shopping (evident by the heavy heavy bags we were carring) he was trying hard to no avail though. We got some things for a friend and then I bade Victor farewell at Shinjuku station after hitting Kinokuniya. In the last 4 days I've had about 9-10 hours sleep so I'm looking forward to it right now...night :)