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September 19, 2002 - 11:56PM
Wes Ehrlichman
Well, I won't be updating again until at least the 27th.
Why is that, you may ask? Well, it's because I'll be in Tokyo
for the weekend then from Monday until Friday morning I'll
be at an intensive Japanese Language camp in Kanoya. I won't
be in Kedouin for an entire week! It should be worth it though.
I'm meeting Christina in Tokyo and I'll see her for the first
time since July 27th (that's almost two months). I'm also
meeting my friend Quinton, who's an ALT up north in Hokkaido.
The plans for Tokyo are to go to the Ghibli
Museum on Friday and the Tokyo
Game Show on Saturday, then on Sunday I'm going to explore
Tokyo with Christina. It should be a good time all around.
I was looking through my pictures, trying to decide what
to write about and I decided I'd write about last Monday.
I probably could write about something more current, but Sunday
was a good time. The pictures don't lie. Here's a taste.
 
Doesn't that look interesting?
First of all, last Monday we didn't have school because
Sunday was Respect for the Elders day.
Japan is really cool in that if a holiday falls on a
Sunday then you're expected to recieve Monday off of work
instead. Because of this policy Japanese people get more days
off of work than almost any other people. It seems like there's
at least two holidays per month, meaning a lot of three day
weekends. In fact, at the beginning of May there's an entire
week that Japanse people get off of work because a different
holiday happens to fall on every single day of that week.
I'm not joking. It's called golden week. All of these holidays
don't really help the fact that Japanese people work unbelieveably
hard while they are at work. Even if they've got nothing to
do at all they'll stay at the office late reorganizing their
pens. I'm not joking about that either, but back to the story.
On Monday's day off of school I woke up late then sat
around on my computer for a while writing an article about
the Japanese Gaming scene for a Finnish magazine. This was
really cool and I would explain it now, but I'm planning on
maybe running into the guy I wrote it for at the Tokyo Game
Show and finding out more. So this might get brought up later.
At any rate, I was typing away and the ALT from Hiwaki-cho,
about 20 minutes away by car called me and asked if I would
like to go to the beach. She's a second year ALT, so she knows
where a lot cooler things to do are than I do. She knew about
this beach for example, that is about a half an hour north
of Sendai. I accepted the offer for the beach and she rode
her scooter over here, then we headed to Sendai in my car.
On the way there we decided to stop at a cool looking
toy store that I'd been to with Sue. It's called Sun Sun Land,
and it first caught my eye because of the huge Mario painted
on the wall near the entrance. Oh wait, did I say Mario? It's
not actually Mario, as you can clearly see from his hat that's
marked with a K.
 
Apparently Japan has a lot less strict copywrite infingement
laws. I wonder what you CAN get away with here. At any rate
though, here are some pictures. It was really hard not to
buy anything in this store. Their prices aren't great on everything,
but they've definately got some good stuff.
 
Budget PS1 Bin
And the prices are at least descent if not really good
on some things. This trip was almost fruitless. Cindy made
up for the lack of new games for Wes by buying some 30 yen
pop rocks that were really fun. On the way to the beach she
offered me some, along with some Onsen water that she carries
around in a water bottle. An Onsen is a hot spring bath. A
lot of older Japanese people go in these things to soothe
their old bones. She apparently took some dirty bath water
from these old people's baths and was trying to convince me
that it is clean (actually it probably was clean)
Ok, I'm getting really tired. I must confess, today I
got my birthday present (4 new games. In English no less!!!)
so I put off doing this until the last minute. I'm gonna have
to finish this up when I get back. Here are the rest of the
pictures as a preview though, along with some preview captions.
 
This is Cindy. This
is Wes.
We are at the Japanese Beach.
 
Bowling
in Japan.
 
Dance Dance Revolution with an actual group of Japanese
High School girls. Life doesn't get much geekier than this.
Sorry.
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