The End, More or Less

As I've said in the past few posts, I'm back in the United States, which marks the end of my study abroad trip to Japan. It was fun, educational, expensive, and delicious, though if you were to ask me to put those in order, I don't think I could.

The best thing about going has to have been the people I was able to meet. I made a number of friends with whom I identified with in a surprising number of ways, and I was able to experience and relish in the rich variety of languages and accents, as well as getting to see little bits of the world from other people's points of view.

One of my goals while I was in Japan was to eat ramen. Sure, it sounds silly, but I'd only eaten instant ramen prior to coming to Japan, and I did so on a daily basis for upwards of eight years. So I wanted to eat lots of varieties of ramen. While I was able to try a number of shops' ramen - probably around 30 - I still couldn't tell you whether I like the miso-, soy-, or salt-based ramen best.

While tasty, my primary reason for coming to Japan was not to eat ramen, or gyuudon, or takoyaki, but to study Japanese, and my stay there was - of course! - invaluable to that end. I'm still very weak with kanji and my vocabulary is very small compared to a native speaker, but the difference between when I left and my current ability is no less than marked.

Writing on this blog was an experience all of its own, and I'm glad that I did. I'll be able to look back on this much like I might a journal.

For those of you that have been reading this whole time: your time and your comments are appreciated.

For who have supported me in other ways, be it in the form of money, cookies, a partner for Super Smash Brothers or DDR or that taiko game, or help defrosting my fridge because I forgot and was late to miss plane, I cannot thank you enough.you for your efforts and your friendship. I don't know how I would've survived this year without the help I received from others.

I hope that many others have the opportunity that I did, and I hope that maybe this log will help one or two of those people out at some point.

Good day and best wishes.
- William Lockwood

先生の家

Today, I visited one of my teachers from last semester who I've been in somewhat constant contact with. He invited me to lunch a few weeks back, and I kind of invited myself up to his house. He said it was fine, and we decided on a day, which was today.

It takes him (who was sick today, hence the mask) about ten minutes to get to school by scooter; it took me about an hour to get to his house by bike. Needless to say, there're some slopes involved. It was difficult, and I barely managed it, but I was able to bike the entire way up and even farther than I had to go by quite a ways. He lives up in a suburb about eight kilometers (5.7 miles) away from where I live, and while the elevation gain is only about 200m (~650 feet) it feels a lot more significant on a bike.

He met me at a traffic circle - the first I've ever actually seen - which I went to kind of on a hunch, and it ended up being right next to his house. This picture is a 360-degree panorama taken from nearly the middle of the traffic circle. Guess where the sun is.

I met for the first time both his children (two of 'em) and his wife (one of those!) and both seemed very pleasant to say the least. My teacher is well into his fifties, and from the time frames they mentioned while we were talking, his wife (who is Canadian, and appeared to be of Northern European ancestry, maybe so far as Irish, but I didn't ask) must be getting near that mark as well, but she must be benefiting from the Japanese lifestyle or something, because she could very well be in her early thirties judging by her appearance.

Oh, and they had cheese. Real, honest to cheese, cheese. White cheddar, yum, yum. You have no idea how long it's been since I had cheesy cheesy cheese. Cheese. ... Apparently, they had gone to Costco (there's one in Osaka somewhere) the previous day with some friends, and had just gotten back, as they gave me about a half a pound of cheese to me and a further half pound to deliver to some friends. Yum. Cheese.

We went for a walk and ran into some kids who were walking a dog. When they saw me, they started talking about me a little, and eventually, one of them said to another "Hey, say something in English!" I turned around and interjected "Japanese is okay, too." I love getting people with that one. They had a cute little dog, as well. Isn't he (?) cute?

We visited a bird sanctuary near where he lives as well as a couple of parks, then came back to his house for a bit and talked for another hour or so, then I headed home. The ride home didn't take nearly as long, since the whole thing was downhill and I don't need a map to simply go down a hill.

[These random plants are blurry because I have my camera set to use a shutter speed of 1/60 when the flash is on, and I didn't think to compensate for the fact that I had the lens zoomed at 200mm on top of the 1.5x magnification from my APS-C sensor. That gives an effective 300mm of focal length, and while my lens is rated for a nominal three stops (1/60>1/120>1/240>1/480) the flash didn't take in enough light to overpower the ambient, hence the blur.]

With just a few days left in Japan, I'll be selling my bike tomorrow. I've used it pretty hard, so it looks older than it is, but used bikes don't fetch much anyway. I'd be getting a pretty good deal if I got $30 for it. The other one (the first new bike I bought in Japan) is too beat up to fetch me more than $10 if I'm lucky, but one of my friends is going to fix it up and use it, since it has gears and she has a tire patching kit.

[Edit: We also saw this car while we were walking around. You can see on the front it's a GT-R, but we saw a couple of other really nice cars while wandering around.
On the way back, I saw an import car shop and saw for the first time in nearly a year a car with the steering wheel on the right (which is to say, "left") side.]

[Another edit: I asked my teacher later if it was alright for me to put this up later, and I like it, so here it is. My teacher and his wife, at right.]

Flash: チョコ・ブービーズに関して

I was just eating the remnants of the chocolate breasts when I realized they're actually milk flavored. Like, not white chocolate, but more like a very sweet milk. Oh, and each one is a tiny little truffle. Say, breast milk?

Political Debate

I went to get pastries last night and ended up getting in what was at times a rather heated political debate with a the clerk at the pastry shop.

At first we were just talking about random stuff, and we eventually got onto the topic of water usage during bathing. She feels that Americans waste vast quantities of water by only bathing in bathwater once.

This is a great example of cross-cultural weirdness. For a Westerner, I think the idea of using the same bathwater that was just used by three other people is kind of gross. For a Japanese, not doing that is a terrible waste of water, and they don't seriously consider our cultural aversion to reusing bathing water as a valid point because, to someone raised with that kind of tradition, it's just silly. I'm speaking in sweeping generalizations here, of course, but I thought it was an interesting point.

On the other hand, I was able to counter by pointing out that Japanese shower before they take a bath, and that shower is as long as many people's entire bathing process. In other words, the shower at the beginning of their shared-bath thing may use a similar amount of water to what someone in the US might use in their shower.

At one point, we were talking about congress and various houses and whatnot, but I have neither the vocabulary nor the knowledge for a lengthy discussion on such things.

A bit after that, she said that she was someone disturbed by the fact that America drafts only black people and the poor into the military. When I was shocked by this, she said "I see there are many things Americans don't know", which I have to admit, I thought was kind of rude. I slowly managed to batter some sense into her (this is, of course, assuming that I am more knowledgeable about it than she is) about what the draft is and how it isn't currently implemented, and how the Selective Service works, and how it doesn't.

Later, she played the "You nuked us!" card and even knows history well enough to play the "You firebombed us!" card to trump the "You nuked us!" card.

Clerk: Attacking civilians... There should be a better way.
Me: I think it was done to lower the morale and try and convince the Japanese government to stop fighting in the war.
Clerk: Still.
Me: I agree, but that's how World War II* was fought.
Clerk: But napalm? Think of all the people, just sitting in their houses in fear, with no way out. And Japan is made of wood, so it's all the worse. It just burned completely.
Me: Yeah, but if you look at that from the enemy's point of view... That's good thinking, isn't it?
Clerk: Civilians.
Me: Yes.

It was quite an interesting discussion, and I enjoyed it. Further, it was very good practice, I think, and I felt I was doing a surprising job of holding up my end of it, which really shows the advances my Japanese has made from the first day of class last semester. I had to ask her to slow down a couple of times, but when people start getting upset, they're hard to understand no matter the language.

Oh, and the pastries were delicious, as always.

*第二次世界大戦 dai ni-ji sekai tai-sen Or "major second worldly big-ass war" Thank you, Okada! I don't what other vocab I remember from her class, but I've been wanting to use that one in discussion for two years now.

Judo Tournament

Woke up at 6AM yesterday to go to a judo tournament yesterday and... well, my club got its collective ass handed to it. The first guy lost in the groundfighting (far left. He's the one making funny faces and lying on his back), one guy won two matches before losing to a joint lock (at right, reading the information booklet), and two of our girls lost to good throws.

I didn't get any particularly good pictures of Reika's match, but you can see at left Shoji Erica losing about five seconds into her match to a nearly perfect tai-otoshi. Ironically, that's Erica's best technique.

I don't remember exactly what happened in the other two matches, but Tasku used his zombie-style gripping technique. I dunno if it works or not, but it sure is fun to make fun of. At right.

Last up are two random pictures of some nicely (not quite perfectly) executed throws that had no relation to my club members at all, but look cool anyway.

If you look closely at the second one, you'll see that there's one foot and one face on the ground.

I don't know how I forgot to mention this, but it was a pretty big tournament by my standards. I figured it would be, at most, 60 people or so. I think they had that many people in each of the four divisions. There were two weight classes (big vs not) and it was separated by gender as well (figure it out). I thought the white stripe in women's belts was to indicate that they had achieved a partial rank, but it's apparently so they can tell the difference between women and men. It pleases me to know that they need help in this endeavor. There were plenty of really cute girls, by the way.

I took a couple of panoramas so you can see more than just two people at once, and I think they really help to show the scale of the event. I'm not certain how they're lined up, but they didn't seem to have any problems finding their places. I already counted the edges, and it's a 21x12 (ish) square, which would put them at about 250 people. Surprisingly accurate with my 4-times estimate from earlier.

Strange Day

Today has been interesting, despite not starting until a good deal past 11AM. I hung out with Yanavy and her group who just sort of dropped by around 10PM and we all watched a movie and sat around and slacked off until 5AM, when we collectively realized we ought to get some sleep. My room still smells like Magi's (sp?) perfume very faintly. Could just be a little left on me, though.

That sounds bad, but nothing happened. She sprayed some around at one point.

Anyway, everybody went home and I... was at home, so I just fell over and went to sleep.

On my way to practice today, I stopped and stared at some pigeons, and found one with a peg leg - or at least no toes. I did my best to take his picture with my cell phone camera, but... Cell phone camera, so...

Once I got there, I found out practice was canceled and there was an art show. Random, no? I bought a scrunchie (シュシュ) I liked and headed back home.

Upon returning, I was summoned to go do some tech support. But on the way, I saw a wallet lying on the ground, open, stuffed full of money, in the road. I stopped my bike, parked it off to the side of the road, grabbed the wallet and immediately signaled a nearby guard and explained the situation. He wanted me to hang out for a while so the wallet's owner could thank me, and while I was saying how I was in a hurry, the owner of the wallet came out of the store looking confused and patting his pants pockets. The guard flagged him and we returned his wallet, they both thanked me, and the guy gave me $30 for my trouble. He said I should go buy some ramen or something with it. I thanked him and we went our ways.

So I got to the Cristina's apartment, where Valentina, Betta, and Daniela were waiting, and was able to figure out why they couldn't get on the Internet (they were connected to the wireless router as a gateway instead of the router plugged into the VDSL modem - and their modem had locked up at the same time). Being somewhat short on time, I set up their computers to use static IPs and assigned the gateway and DNS settings manually, and left them with instructions on how to power cycle their setup. It's nice to be able to help like that.

Oh, and I'm currently waiting for Chise and Mikako to show up, and we're going to make okonomiyaki and play some Super Smash Brothers.

Barring anything really bad happening, this has been another pretty decent day. This makes me worry a little bit about tomorrow, but...

女失敗な人

I went to ramen last night at Kurofune with some friends. The ramen there was a lot better than I remember it being, and used my last 千 ($10) bill for the next few days, but I haven't had ramen in quite a while and hanging out with that group is pretty fun. Well, due to the seating at the place, I ended up around the bend of the counter from them (three of the four of them were female, by the way) and the chef commented 「女失敗だなあ」 onna shippai da naa. This translates roughly to "Wow, you're a failure with women, aren't you?". I responded with something like an enthusiastic "I know!"

On top of that, some cute Japanese girls came in about half an hour later and I traded contact info with two of them. The chef was then like "Wow, you're fast!"

Unfortunately, he was rather more on with the first one, but... しょうがないのね。

Shopping Wander with Fish and "Lady's Only"

I went out and did some shopping in Kawaramachi today. I should've gone to club practice, but I just didn't feel up to it.
So I went via Sanjo street because it has long portions that are covered and it was raining pretty decently. I was wearing my rain gear, so I wasn't getting wet, but the opportunity to undo my jacket and cool off was certainly justified the choice. Further, I found these delicious fishes. Some were filled with cream and some with bean paste. Kind of expensive, but something I've wanted to try for a while. They were decent.

I also found this sticker on the side of a public telephone. The red-outlined stuff is my appended translations. I'm not quite sure what to make of the whole thing, but the whole thing was worth it for the "Banana Milk" bit.

Numbers have a couple of ways of being read and you can take advantage of this to create mnemonics to help remember them, such as they have done here.

A Little Late, But Good Enough

I want to start this post off by saying that I'm straight. That is to say, chix FTW.
While Japanese men and women are about one pair of genitals apart, that's a topic for another time.

So last Tuesday, a bunch of the the 留学生 (study-abroad students) went out to an 居酒屋 (kind of like a bar) and for dinner. The people I was sitting with (seated at lower left in the picture later) decided to leave early and go get ice cream.

I later discovered that the reason we had gone to this particular place was because four of the five girls I was with had a crush on one of the guys working there. Now, these people are all fairly new to Japan and are not quite comfortable with the language.

This led to me using my Japanese for something I never expected to: asking a Japanese guy out.

...

Yeah, it was for Maggie, who stood there the whole time and made little noises at random times, but still... Well, at least I know I can ask out a Japanese girl now, if I need or want to, 'cause there's no way that could be more awkward than this.

I took a bunch of pictures while we were out at okonomiyaki, but didn't gel my flash, so they all came out kind of lame. Random picture from the set that I stitched together:

Part-Time Job Interview

I had a kind of interview today for a job teaching English. It went really, really well, as far as I can tell. By "really, really well" I mean to say that I think if she didn't have someone teaching the class right now, she would've had me start right then and just start teaching.

Unfortunately, the reason she wanted to find a replacement for the current teacher is because he's leaving in December. With me leaving in March, it's too short a time to be worth the trouble of getting all the paperwork done. She said she'd keep me in mind if she needed a class covered or something since my visa allows occasional, random work. We're just not allowed to enter into real, contractual jobs, I think.

As an aside, I originally had some strange ideas about how it might go since I thought she was interviewing me at her apartment, but it turns out that she just runs the school there. She was fairly pretty, and I understand she has a daughter my age, as well... (Included for the sake of my ever-lecherous father who "wants some grandchildren already, damn it."

She said since I didn't have any experience, she'd only be able to pay me about $25 an hour, plus transportation fees. I wouldn't mind an extra $100 a week in return for getting more practice with Japanese. It is not to be, unfortunately.

Alas.

Tokyo: So Far (Day 0) - Traveling

First off: Apparently, you can buy large JR tickets with a credit card. Good to know.
I had a number of transfers due to the distance involved, but I ran into three other people going the same place as me on the second or third transfer, so I had a good time talking with them and we helped each other find the way. It was really lucky.

I somehow (probably due to the people I met) managed to get here without any major problems except my own stench - big thanks to Kyoto's humidity for that one - which I fixed by tossing one of my prized blue shirts. The last three times I've worn it, it's smelled really bad, really quick, so I think there may be something growing in it or something. It now smells bad somewhere between Kyoto and Tokyo, in a trash can in a bathroom.

It took Shimpei (the guy I'm staying with) a few minutes (~15) to find me due to the massive monstrosity that is Yokohama station. From there, a 15-minute train ride to the actual town he lives in, and a 15-minute walk to his apartment from the station.
Total time from leaving my apartment to getting to his apartment was... Long. 7:20AM to 6:30PM, so nearly 11 hours. Shinkansen (bullet train) would've put me here around 11AM, but would cost more one-way than my round-trip ticket did.

Dean said he's going to send me some cashes, so I should have some money to do some shopping while I'm here, which will be cool. It looks like Akihabara may not be the best place to get camera gear, but there's some pretty good deals at... some place. I dunno if I can find it.

Last thing before I hit the hay: the warm water here has a switch. I'm not kidding at all. You have to turn on the hot water knob, then turn on the hot water heater. Then you have hot water. I thought it was just really, really slow. I figured after five minutes, I was probably just missing something.

[Edit: I was just looking through my pictures I've taken so far, and I found these two signs, which felt left out, so they're getting put in to assuage their feelings.]

Things You Lie On...

Watching some anime today. Got it from a Portuguese friend of mine, so, naturally, it's subtitled in Portuguese.

Now, for me, it's really hard not to pay attention to subtitles if they're there. As it would turn out, Portuguese is not nearly hard enough to understand to kill off that habit.

It was pretty convenient, though, because they are different enough from English that I don't watch them as much, but they're similar enough that if there's something I don't get from the Japanese, I can figure out from the subs. I was surprised at that.
It took me 15 episodes to stop reading the subtitles constantly. I mean, this is nearly 10 years of conditioning I'm trying to fight here.

I'm watching a samurai drama, and I don't know if I'm a lot worse at understanding speech than I thought I was, or if it's the bucketloads of formal speech and antiquated words that are making it difficult. If it weren't for the subs, I would've never figured out that jabura is the same as samurai. It's not in my dictionary, that's for sure.

Speaking of my dictionary, I've got it set up to search through the antiquated words databases, and I found a great little gem of an expression. I don't know if it's actually antiquated, or what, but... Well, here you go:
女房と畳は新しいほうがいい
nyoubou to tatami wa atarashii hou ga ii
Wives and tatami are best when they're newI have to wonder if we have an expression like this in English.

No context?

Here's a bonus picture I wanted to put up, but couldn't really think of any context for. It's from the night before our trip to Arashiyama/Matsuo, I think, and we were on our way back from getting some food down by the station. When Hamid took this picture, Antonia (the girl in red) commented "Charlie's Angels... and... Charlie?" in Italian.

On the Roof

The manager actually let me borrow the key to the roof this time, and I went up all by myself! There was a cute girl keeping him company, and he was working through his lunch break handling her departure, if I read the situation right.
Anyway, went up on the roof to watch the lightning, but I missed the best part watching from my room and talking to the manager. Still, it was pretty cool. Gotta go drop off some ninja stuff to the next person in The Conspiracy, so I'm off.

相棒

I have a part-time job a few hours a week helping people with pronunciation. It's a class with English and Chinese, so I have a Chinese-speaking counterpart. She dressed up in yukata (light cotton summer kimono) and when I asked her to send me a picture she was showing me, she demanded to send the rest.



So, here they are.



The two on the right are examples of what the Japanese call purikura ("picture club"), which is a popular thing that girls make guys do, regardless of whether they're going out - these two are, by the way.



It's a testament to my unpopularity that I haven't done any, but you won't see me complaining! I think all of you know which side of the lens I prefer to be on.



Guesses on her age and nationality?

Slow Week, part two

I did some wandering on Sunday and got these two pictures, of which type you'll probably be seeing a lot of in the next few days.

At left is a float under construction. As you can see, they don't so much build the float as much as bondage half a forest. Very Japanese, I think.

At right are some women who, after some tittering and debating among themselves, agreed to pose for me.

Also, I had some sushi, which was pretty normal for the most part. Saw a couple new dishes, such as black sesame pudding and somem kind of coleslaw sushi.

But what really took the cake* was the hamburger sushi. You can see it at right. The sign in the background has the name of the store, then under that, hanbaagu which is "hamburger" in Japanese.

Friday evening: "Gaidai Summer Gala"

Light-ish warning: My jury-rigged hard drive is a little too jury-rigged, it would seem, and it's being fritzy. Because of that, I didn't process these pictures at all, and they're the massive, 10.2MP 2.xMB JPGs my camera spits out. In sum: they will probably load slowly. Especially for you, Wash. I''m hoping to take care of this today, but I'm not sure I can fix my drive and write the other two blog posts in addition.
Maybe I'll just put one up as a gallery...
When I went to this, I figured I would take pictures and be bored pretty much the entire time. "So... why'd you go?" you might ask. I mean, you just might.
In large part because it was the largest gathering of study-abroad students in one place, and I didn't want to miss out on cool stuff.

That there was free food and drinks may have been what clinched it for me, but I'll never tell.

Aaron Poulliot (sp?) did some juggling stuff on stage. He dropped stuff a couple of times, but I thought he was really good. The fact that handled the drops so well only made it better, I think.

You can see him at left, dancing with his juggling clubs, or at right with his recipe for disaster that he likes to call "eggs". I understand he almost threw one into a speaker, but I didn't see it first-hand.


The school had at least two photographers there (not counting me, 'cause I don't get the cool armband), plus a three-person camera crew (at right). And I think every Japanese person has at least one camera. And there about 250 people. So there are plenty of pictures of this event.

From a photographic standpoint, I don't think I had a lot of options, so I used the very high-level, pros-only (sarcasm!) "Nuke 'em till they glow" flash method and turned my flash up to full power for every shot. Went from 80% charge to 30% charge in about 70 pictures, so you can see the drain of the flash on the battery, which can give me 400 pictures on the same amount if I don't use a flash. I had a spare with me, of course.

Here are two of the school's photographers. I call the girl on the left "Canon chick" because, well, she uses a Canon (whose model I can't recall right now) and she's kinda cute.
The guy at right is... I forgot his name, he's the guy that helped me check over my Japanese camera terminology stuff. We took pictures of each other whenever we saw each other, working especially to catch the other by surprise. He's an Olympus shooter, probably a 410, but I didn't get a close look.

This is Asano (at left), one of people who works in the international exchange office, which is what keeps us alive and out of jail here in Japan. They help us with banking, paying bills, laws, and all sorts of things. Her English is pretty good.

At right is Kumada (in the purple), who deals mostly with people who are not yet in country, but she also helps us a lot. She also works in the international office. The thing that surprises me the most is that she's able to pull off so many different fashions, and do a pretty good job of 'em.

About halfway through the gala, I ran into a student from the dual-language class I TA (?) in. I wish my Japanese was as good as her English, but it's nowhere near. Her friend took a picture of us, and here it is. My camera seems to do strange exposures whenever other people take pictures with it, but I don't know why.
I just press the shutter button; they just press the shutter button. Where's the difference?

After they kicked everybody outside, I met up with Bryen, who wanted an action shot. He was trying to flirt with this girl, but she was completely and skillfully cold-shouldering him. "Well played!" is what I kept thinking. We had her take a picture of us in "action poses", and you're all probably familiar with my silly basic stance, but here's another picture, just in case you aren't.

Don't worry, I'm almost out of decent, relevant pictures. I'll finish up in just a couple more paragraphs. Hopefully.

Ran into Chise, my student assistant a couple of times. She is looking good, as she is wont to do.
I'm trying to get her to introduce me to her boyfriend, 'cause he's a gamer , but he's apparently hard to pull away from his many hobbies. Or something.

I met a British guy who will be here for another two weeks, and some of his friends. He was pretty cool and we got along very well. We talked largely about accents and comedy; in particular, Dane Cook and Eddie Izzard. He snuck off at some point and I haven't seen him since.

This is Catherine, one of the Swiss girls I mentioned a few posts back. She's in kyuudo, which kind of like archery, but only in that involves both a bow and an arrow. The similarities end there, and I'm not really joking. She works in IT back in her home country and is 24.

Here's a portraiture tip: apparent nose length/size in a picture has very little to do with actual length or size. The key that makes or breaks (ouch.) noses in pictures is whether or not they break the line made by the cheek behind them. You can see her nose is inside her cheek-line (above-right picture), as opposed to breaking it at left.

Surprising difference, isn't it?

Her nose is just fine, by the way.


Well, that wraps up the gala. I think I may have spent more time writing this post than I did actual time there, though.

Gala

There's a gala tonight at the school that I intend to go to. It's semi-formal, even, and in spite of that, I'm going of my own free will. And not just to mack on the women.
...
I'll admit that the free food was a pretty convincing argument.

Disappointment

I've been lightly flirting at the two Swiss girls in my study abroad program, until I found out a few weeks ago that one of them has a boyfriend. I found out today that the other one also has a boyfriend, so I'm a little disappointed.
Two cute girls who both have charming personalities - of course they're taken!

Keys

[Edit: I had this post all done and written the day it happened, but picture upload was once again being wenchy, so it's almost a week late.]

Meli got locked out of her room due to a fire alarm test that she (apparently?) forgot about. I guess she spent the night at her boyfriend's house, but when she came back to Paradole 2 in the morning, she found she was locked out of her apartment. Want to guess who is the only person silly enough to be awake in Paradole 2 at 8AM?

But I was taking a shower when she rang the doorbell, so I thought Uh, do I rush for the door and answer it wearing a towel, or ask them to wait? Maybe he/she already left... In the end, I opted for option towel, and answered the door wearing just my green towel tied around my waist.

Josh, hush.

Anyway, we ended up hanging out until around 9PM that day, and I got a couple of pictures you guys should like.

I went over to Tsutaya to drop off some movies I rented that had to be back in before the store opened at 10AM, and saw this... vehicle on the way.

I went over to Tsutaya to drop off some movies I rented that had to be back in before the store opened at 10AM, and saw this... vehicle on the way.

How do you describe this thing? It's not a truck, but it's not really a van or a car. It's like... a trunkmobile? It sort of reminds me of an elephant, in a way.

Meli, however, does not, and here's a Mario statue we found that was as tall as her when she took off her shoes.

And with a nose that phallic, could she really resist the second pose?
I didn't think so either. My camera was at 100 ISO for these shots, so it was trying to expose indoor lighting and decided to give me crappy shutter speed. They're a touch blurry, but if you wanted to professional photos, you'd be reading a different blog.
She looks pretty decent for having been up all night and not having showered in two days, I think.
I'm a bit tired, but here's a mochi shop we found. I hear there's a very good okonomiyaki shop right above this place, but I didn't know at the time, so we ate a barely mediocre burger place. They were confused by the idea of not putting mayonnaise on a burger.