Shibuya

Yesterday Kat and I met up with Tatsu to go check out Shibuya and then meet friends for dinner. Shibuya is basically Consumer City with loads and loads of shops, department stores, restaurants, etc. Whenever you see a movie depicting modern Japan, it’s likely that they will show footage of the huge and busy crossing at Shibuya with all it’s lights, advertisements and thousands of people.

We went into a department store to look for some cute.. erm.. dongles to hang from Kat’s keitai, but were unsuccessful. It was interesting to see though how, while fashion here varies, girls all for a rather ‘crowded’ look. It’s hard to explain. Also, a lot of girls in Shibuya wear so much make up they look like surreal clowns.

Anyway, we had dinner at a nice restaurant high up in 7th floor. The food wasn’t mind blowing, but still quite good. After that the six of us went for ‘purikura’, which is basically a photobooth where Japanese take cute or funny pictures and get to edit and print them after. It’s interesting to see the result because pictures are taken with very high exposure, making faces really bright and eyes seem huge. If I can find the time, I’ll upload some.

Time Travel

I can’t believe how fast these days go by. I would love to write about what happened on my second day, but I don’t know if I can tell what happened then apart from what happened just yesterday.

Basically, we are meeting our friends almost every day. I also met my tutor Maya who has been an enormous help with all the formal things like alien registration, opening a bank account and sorting out the JASSO scholarship stuff. Without her I would have died under a flood of paper forms and kanji.

I also got my keitai! It’s a sweet Sony Ericsson. Here’s what it looks like:

It’s good fun writing “mails” on it, but also really slow compared to regular texting in England or Germany, as I have yet to get used to the keypad. The phone was free with a 2 year contract, which I will have to pay for to cancel. I chose the packet option with the least minutes, e.g. the cheapest, and added “pakehoudai”, which means “all you can use packets”. Packets are data transfer units used for sending mails and browsing the web. In a month I’ll pay anywhere between 1800 and 5800 yen, depending on packet use.