Stop the yelling, for god’s sake!

I’m getting very fed up with the japanese archery team practicing every frigging day next to L-kan (girl’s dorm). The team starts in the morning, sometimes very early, and practices untill 7. Well, okay. Archery. It can’t be very loud or irritating, right? Let me tell you something Holmes: japanese archery can be very frigging loud and irritating. Wanna know why? Because they keep on yelling for the whole time! I shit you not. And it isn’t just some “hey I’ll just yell a little because I’m supposed to”. Na-ah. It rather sounds like there’s a real 20-30 people war going on. And the balcony-doors are as thin as they can get, so I won’t miss a single shriek. Thank god I’m usually in lectures during their practice… and I guess I’ll escape the sound-pollution to Tokyo or something during the weekends. I hope I have enough money for that.

Anyway, let’s retrace what’s been going on since my visit to the boy’s dorm. Last wednesday I wen’t to Akihabara and Harajuku with Risto. I bought a DS lite (white one) and Yoshi’s Island, plus a lot of accessories from Harajuku. I did try a few shirts on, but they were all too big for me (!). On thursday and friday there were the placement tests and I ended up in the second lowest group. No wonder though, since there are people who have studied japanese for years, and I’ve only studied it for 8 months. On both days there was also a party, the usual let’s-get-drunk-and-paahtay -type. Kind of boring if you ask me, but at least I got to meet many of the people I’ll be studying with. Also, we went to a local bar called Boogies, and the owner couple is possibly the best bar owners ever. I’ll have to take a picture of them and the Boogies, so you’ll see what I’m talking about too.

Saturday was the first time I got to see Tokyo’s nightlife. A new acquaintance asked me and quite a few others to come and see this underground music and art event, and we decided to go see it. It was in Omote-sendoo, in a European-ish restaurant/bar/gallery called Las Chicas. The event included music from freestyle hip-hop to jazz, trance and samba-inspired electro, and a lot of different art pieces from different artists, and also a matrial-arts performance. The restaurant was at ground-level, while the bar/chill-out lounge and gallery could be found downstairs. To get to the gallery, one had to walk through quite a narrow corridor, which felt like a werid place for a gallery, but I guess this is the way things work in Japan. Still, for me it seemed even weirder that in the crowd there seemed to be people from all ages, youngest being about the age of two, and oldest over 90. Yes, there actually was man over 90 years old, called Saku Ishiyama. He was promoting his art with his granddaughter. And the paintings are quite impressive too.

The families with small children and the older people left around 8 or 9 though, so I guess it wasn’t that weird. The acquaintance performed too, he did some freestyle rapping in japanese and english with his fellas. He promised to help me find a band from Japan, and we also discussed the possibility of me helping him with arranging a music festival. Unfortunately he’s returning to US again, so we’ll have to continue the dicussion via email. I also talked with the samba-electro-something -band, Heco-Reco, after their show, and we ended up pondering the possibility of making music together. I hope they really are interested, I loved their music. I’ll let you know if something happens!

Although convenience stores are open 24/7, the trains stop moving around midnight in Japan. If you want to get further away from the city, you have to leave even earlier. As we weren’t planning on spending the night in Tokyo, we had to leave around eleven to get back to Hiratsuka. It was actually a good thing, since I was still kind of jet lagged, and had been sleeping way too little anyway. On sunday I decided to do something to my constant tiredness, and slept half of the day (well, as much as I could from all the shouting in the archery range…).

Yesterday I went to Tokyo again, and to Akiba (Akihabara) again. I wanted to buy microSD-thingy for my DS, so I could get the kanji-software to it, and Electric City (another nickname for Akihabara) is The Place when you need any kind of geeky gadgets. There’s just one problem, even if it is Akihabara. The SD-card is kind of… well, not illegal, but comparable to file sharing in p2p-networks etc. Meaning, you kind of shouldn’t do it. Apparently Nintendo has been putting the acid on the SD-sellers for about a month, and it’s getting harder and harder to find one. Anyway, I got lucky and found one. I also ended up doing a big mistake and found myself inside a shop full of all sorts of anime by-products. I thought I’d die. Or at least end up spending all my money. Well, I spent almost 100 euros, and I didn’t even buy a big plushie or anything…

From Akiba I continued my shopping extravaganza to Shibuya, and to 109 shopping centre. It’s supposed to have everything that’s hip in Tokyo today, at least when it comes to clothes and accessories. Well, i found quite a lot of things I needed (didn’t bring that many clothes with me), but I was one or two sizes too big for the trendy skirts and trousers. Japanese girls just don’t have any hips, bottom or thighs. I, on the other hand, have plenty, so I’ll have to give up on the trendy rags and go somewhere else to buy pants. Sigh.

Today I decided to clean up this appartment finally. In the morning I was thinking of just doing nothing today, except going jogging etc. But then I wanted to change the furniture’s places a bit, and realised that the last time this place had been cleaned was… quite a while ago. So I went and took the vacuum cleaner. What a huge mistake. It was filled with ancient dust, inside and out, and when I turned it on, it just made the room smell like dust. Incredible. I should’ve taken a picture. After the hoover-episode, the room felt (and smelled) even more dirty, so off to he kombini (convenience store) I went. It was quite a pickle to try and find the right things when everything was in japanese, but I managed somehow. Except, the device for cleaning the floor was working quite badly, but at least it’s a little cleaner now.

To end this post, I’ll tell you about Anansi’s messenger. It was still chilling at the bug-net door today, and I even decided to give it a name (thanks Pauli for this): Kumo. It’s japanese for cloud and spider. Unfortunately, it seems that Kumo decided I’m making too much noise with my cleaning, and he ran away. I hope he doesn’t have any hard feelings :/

P.S. The event we went to on saturady is apparently a series of events called Culture. I gathered quite a few flyers, and one of them says that there’s a ‘Culture’ -event on November too. I’m so going there!