You may, rightly, ask what the bloody hell has taken me so long, but although I had prepared an excellent list of excuses, containing some of my finest work if I may say so myself, I have decided not to use any of them and just go with: I was born lazy.
Another question that may spring to mind when regular readers read this blog, though I'd argue that a blog with an average of one post every 20 days can hardly claim to have any truly regular readers, is why this is written in English? The answer is quite simply that I have way too many friends who do not speak Danish. I also feel that the Danish language is counterintuitive to how I wish to convey myself here, so English it is(At least for now. If people really want a Danish version, I'll get one up ;))
Anyway, on to the meat of this blog: What I've been wasting my precious time with for the past two months. I've gone to school every day, slept way too little, and had way too much fun during the weekends. I've found a lovely group of like-minded foreigners down here, and I very much enjoy our weekly events during Saturday or Sunday. As anyone who has viewed my(Over 1000!) photos will know, we've been to quite an assortment of places, including an anime-themed café, two of the biggest geek shopping areas in the world(With a tour to the third, final, and original area coming up this Sunday), a huge amusement park located inside of what was once the tallest building in the world, and a maid café.
Before you run off looking for pictures of the last one, I'd better tell you that there are none, since taking pictures in there isn't a very nice thing to do. I do have one though, but I will need to scan it before it can be uploaded. Suffice to say that it is a café, and there are maids. You can fill in the blanks yourself ;)
Out Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life has been back home in the US for the past two weeks, so it will be nice seeing him again this Sunday. In the meantime, it has been up to us commoners to figure out what to do. With my incredibly industriousness, I decided to come up with a plan: Sit back and wait for someone else to do it. It worked pretty well, and a guy from the group did step up to my unspoken challenge, allowing me to enjoy myself thoroughly without much effort. We went shopping, and visited his home to watch anime and eat cake.
The cake was delicious :)
Apart from when I am with the group, I haven't ventured into Tokyo on my own all that much. What with the group activities taking up Saturday, and school taking up Monday through Friday, I am very content to just stay at home and do cleaning, watch anime, and do the laundry on Sundays, and rarely feel like taking the train into Tokyo when I finally have some time to myself.
I met an interesting guy in Tokyo after school a few weeks ago. I decided to go to a Sushi restaurant for the first time since coming her(It was delicious, and comparatively cheap), so I called home to tell them I wouldn't need dinner, and headed to a sushi place I'd noticed on my way to school. Once there, I sat down in a random free seat at the conveyor belt, and began to wonder how you went about this in Japan, when the Japanese man next to me began to address me in perfect English. I was quite surprised.
It turns out that he had just returned from the United States, where he works and lives, in order to enjoy a few weeks in his hometown Tokyo. He taught me pretty much everything about how you conduct yourself at these sushi places, and was generally just very interesting to talk to. It was also the first time I'd met a person who could speak proper English in months, which was quite a relief compared to the strenuous business of communicating in a language you've only just started to study. I'm afraid that I no longer recall exactly what we talked about, other than him heading to Spain in a few weeks, but I did have a lot of fun just talking to him.
It also reminds me of another anecdote: Two weeks ago, after leaving a Karaoke place with my geek group, I suddenly noticed that the area we were walking through, which is just on the other side of the station where my school is, transformed quite a lot in the evening, and that were quite a lot of pink lights, men in suits, and posters with women in sexy outfits. I asked someone from my group about this, and it turns out that the area is known as the second red light district of Tokyo,(The main being Kabuki-cho in Roppongi) also known as the second Kabuki-cho!
I will end the anecdotes here, but expect future blog post to be more like short anecdotes than long stories, since I really want to put out at least one per week, in order to not forget too much.
As some of you may have noticed, today is my birthday. We're celebrating it by going to the restaurant in nearby Omiya, where the guest who stayed here alongside me for two months now works. Oh, and we're going to be dining alongside the CEO of Air France, who will be moving in to the room next to me for a month. Yeah... That's weird.
I actually look forward to meeting the guy, I'm not exactly inexperienced when it comes to meeting people who are well-off, especially after our trip to South Africa, so I look forward to finding out what kind of crazy this particular rich guy subscribes to. More on that when I return home.
This weekend, I'll be taking the Hayabusa Shinkansen to Aomori on the northern tip of Honshu island, some 675 kilometers away, which will take exactly three hours and ten minutes.
I will then take a slightly less luxurious trip with two other trains to reach the capital of Hokkaido prefecture, Sapporo, where I will enjoy a western-style hotel for two days, while exploring the city and surrounding area, before heading halfway back to Aomori, where I need to get on the Shinkansen to take me home. At this halfway point lies a famous hot spring resort, where I'll be staying for two days at a traditional Japanese inn, which specializes in serving the local cuisine, and has excellent hot springs open 18 hours a day.
I will then head back home on the Shinkansen, and spend the rest of my vacation looking around Tokyo. There is still so much to see, and so little time.
Thanks for reading,
Nicholas.
