Autumn-Winter Memories

Oh wow, it's been almost half a year since last post? Oops... So much has been going on I haven't had time left to spare. Let's try to do a recap...

There was Tokyo Game Show, which I went to. Plenty of games, but sadly not a whole lot I was super hyped about. Was lucky enough to pass a 2 hour queue for Psycho Break/The Evil Within, it looked great at TGS, but recently saw that the ending of that game was super disappointing... Went there with a bunch of friends, saw great cosplays and even saw Hideo Kojima in person. Definitely a good trip.

Tried the Burger King Black Burger when that was being sold. Pretty average. Tastes just like a normal Burger King burger to be honest.

Other experiences would be spotting a Japanese wedding at Meiji Shrine, a visit to the Edo era museum, going up Tokyo Sky Tree, a cat café, and a small Lantern Festival. These are things I could recommend taking a look at.

One thing that really stood out was the Owl Café. The owls are super cute and fluffy! Definitely a recommendation, and something I won't forget in a loooong time!

Another great thing to I did with friends was going to a shooting bar. That's right, alcohol and airsoft guns in the same place! Japan truly is a great country.

Recently, I was dressing up as Santa Claus for a kindergarten as part of a volunteer event from school. Being Santa Claus for 150-ish kids is an amazing experience. Definitely something to remember!

Also went to Shiodome with my girlfriend to see the Christmas illumination. They know how to decorate and set up a light show here! Until next post, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Festival Fantasy

Last week I did go to the festival that I mentioned last week. Along with half of Tokyo. The place was seriously crowded, but it was still a lot of fun! Saw the decorations, tried some of the food from the food stands and saw the lanterns float on the water down-river.

The decorations for the festivals are surprisingly elaborate for the few days they stay up, which surprised me. It's really great! The food at the stalls are also really good, but a bit more expensive than food you would find at other places.

I also went to the Square Enix offices and their shop nearby my school. I ended up buying a small Tonberry plushie as well. Inside the store they had a lot of stuff like soundtracks, games, plushies, food (as it was like a café in a small portion of it) and figures. It's been a pretty good week, and if you want to see even more of the pictures you can find them on my tumblr.

Trying to be a tourist

So I went to Ueno and Asakusa today, in a weak attempt to be a bit more like a tourist since I am in Japan on a limited time after all. The big shrine in Asakusa looks great around 7 in the evening, but most of the shops there close at 6.

It's a veery big shrine, lots of stores. Definitely worth the trip. Ueno on the other hand didn't have too much to offer today, as the supposed festival there hadn't started yet...

Other than that, there is a festival I'm going to tomorrow. If it's good I might post something about that tomorrow. Also, the following xkcd comic strip fits me surprisingly well... Well, the French and blog part anyhow.

Level up!

Level 2 classes have started and I can honestly say that they want us to step up our game when it comes to learning Japanese. From now on, all the class lessons are in just Japanese, the amount of kanji we had weekly before is now daily, and we are now also gonna have a class weekly on Japanese old-style culture. Guess the real schoolwork starts here.

I've also discovered why the karaoke places are really popular here. It's not crazy expensive and you can get as much as you want to drink included in the price. The only downside us that non-alcoholic drinks are self-service.

Anyway, that's it for this post I suppose. Nothing too special going on in this past week.

Delayed Status Update

Been a while since the previous blog post... Again. I've been bad at keeping this blog up to date and as an apology I've added some photos.

Been really bust lately, with my end of level 1 exams (last one on Monday, with feedback on Wednesday). Luckily it's "only" 133 Kanji for level 1 to know, and a whole lot of grammar. (；´Д｀)

I've gone ahead and gotten myself a Japanese phone, which makes blogging a whole lot easier than it was on the iPad. I also recently went to the Okinawa Music Festival in Ueno with a friend. Lots of fun and very catchy music.

I've gotten a lot of impressions and started to settle in a bit more here in Tokyo, so I'm planning on doing a post about the more different aspects of Japan and things I would've liked to know earlier, instead of when I had arrived in Japan.

Anyway, this was just supposed to be a short post letting you all know that I'm still alive and blogging! (The pictures are hopefully a nice bonus). Until next time! (≧∇≦)b

Golden Week

During Golden Week I was lucky enough to be allowed to join a friend of mine and his family for their trip to Atami and Hakone, as they have a house there. Atami is a great place, we had some rice crackers wrapped in nori (a kind of seaweed), went to some hot springs and saw the art museum! The art museum had some stuff from way back to the 2nd and 3rd centuries, as well as a display of the golden tea ceremony room the emperor had in his castle way back in the Edo era, if my memory serves correctly.

In Hakone we went up on the ropeway, walked on the trail at the top and had some of the black eggs they boil in the area. According to my friends japanese wife, those eggs supposedly prolong your life by 7 years, but they looked like normal eggs to me underneath the sulfur encrusted black shell. Was also lots of sulfur in the air, so the place smelled like the worst fart ever though...

It's also been more than a month since I've arrived, and I've gotten the chance to meet a lot of amazing people. Some have said that they've had some racist encounters here, but I haven't as of yet. The closest would be someone asking me why I chose Japan and not China or Korea, just for someone else to point out that they should stop asking questions like that because it makes them look bad, wanting to gloat over their neighbours. xD

As always, pictures of my trip can be found on my tumblr. I might just pop them in the blog posts one day if I ever go to a net-cafe or something. No promises though.

Umtil next time, stay safe, and have fun!

Kyojins, Harajuku and food!

Been a while since last post, and for that I apologize. The network we got at the Share House I live in is a bit flimsy at times, dropping out and dying whenever it feels like it. Probably doesn't help that whenever the network is up, my neighbor keeps blasting boring music that is just two or three beats that repeat over and over from the net, haha.

So, if you've seen my tumblr, I recently got some Shingeki no Kyojin loot with my drink at a 7-11. That series is immensely popular here, and you'll spot some stuff even at family restaurants or convenience stores. I also went to a big, eight floor store called Tokyo Hands, where I bought the Tiger Tank nanopuzzle model I'm working on in between studying and looking around.

Speaking of Kyojins, I've tried looking a bit on TV over here, but it's not that great when the only thing you manage to make sense from is baseball, haha. Did see a match between the Tokyo Kyojins and another team I can't remember where they were from, just that they were named Sparrows. Pretty good stuff. There's also a tv-show where they showed off a couple of Rube Goldberg machines though, that was pretty cool, and I saw one performance of Rakugo on the TV shortly before that. I find Rakugo fascinating, even if I don't get the jokes (yet).

I've also been lucky enough to meet a couple of people I can call friends! Been at some local bars and Izakayas with them, with more probably to come. Food and drinks here are great, both in taste and price. Lunch at a restaurant here costs about as much as a hot dog from a gas station in Norway! It's great!

Also tried taking the trip to Harajuku, as I was told that there's cosplays and stuff there. The weather wasn't too great (overcast, lots of clouds), and the entire area seemed to consist of foreigners, girls under 20 in groups shouting "kawaii" every two seconds, lots and lots of girl stores (clothes, phone accessories, outfits like school uniforms and such...), candy stores and the famous pancake/crepe stalls every 150 meters. It was nice to see it, but I think you need to have female company to fully enjoy what Harajuku has to offer.

However, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Taking the train to school is a bit of a pain. Those train-pushers you might've heard about? A real thing during rush-hours. A German friend of mine put it in a rather eloquent way: "You will never be as close to a woman, not even during sex, as you will be to the women on the train". It is crazy how many people they want to fit into one train...

I'm afraid that is it for this post, as I got some preparation to do before tomorrow. Tomorrow we begin with the Kanji characters, as well as some more grammar. Until next time, stay safe and have fun!

First school week!

My first week at school is over, and we seriously went through all of hiragana in that one week, along with some "survival-japanese" phrases (stuff like ordering at a restaurant, asking for directions, and shopping). We even had a test at Friday, which I think went really well. Tomorrow it's the same deal as this week, just with Katakana I bet. They really weren't kidding about it being an intensive course!

Also went to an Izakaya, which was great! Lots of drinks, food and happy people! We ate liver, the small intestine of chicken, shark-sushi and some kind of vegetable that I was told was similar to natto in texture. It all tasted really, really good! Until next post, stay safe and have fun!

Cherry blossoms

It's raining, today. A lot. Because of the rain, I haven't done a lot, but I did take the chance to go and see the cherry blossoms! Even in the rain they looked great! I'll try to take some photos of them in the sun if the weather allows.

Tomorrow I gotta check in with the school for some paperwork, as well as the Ward Office... Doesn't sound like much fun to deal with paperworks, nor does it give any good pictures to share, so don't expect any. 

Stay safe!

A brand new adventure!

As of today, I've moved to the Suginami Ward in Tokyo! I'm still in the process of settling in, getting some paperwork in order and all the boring stuff you probably don't care about. Therefore, have a picture I took nine in the morning from the roof!

As a bonus for this short post, have a picture of my breakfast/morning snack.

It's Melon Bread! It tastes amazing! 

Until next post, stay safe!

Recommendation: Dr. Koto & Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei

I figured that today would be a good day to write about two of the things I wish more people knew about, because of how great these things are, in my eyes. The first to be mentioned is Dr. Koto's Clinic. I haven't read the manga version of it, but the live action TV show is amazing, and highly recommended. Do be warned though, as it may give you a severe case of the feels.

Dr. Koto is a series about a small village somewhere in the southern part of Japan, which the new doctor Kensuke Goto has just arrived to. A lot of the people don't trust him, because he's an outsider and a doctor. They've previously had good-for-nothing doctors who would either get drunk or give them wrong medicine and other malpractices. Nevertheless, he works diligently to help the villagers and improve the reputation doctors have on the island. It's a great story, with amazing characters, and I really wish more people knew of this series. 

Even if you're normally not a fan of live-action TV shows, do give this one a try. I did, with no prior experience to Japanese TV-shows, and I'm extremely happy I gave it a chance. It also has a pretty amazing ending song. 

The other series I want to talk about is Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. Some may recognize it as the current banner on my blog. It's an anime series made by SHAFT that parodies everything and anything you could possibly come up with. A few of the running gags include attempted suicide which always fails followed by the line "What if I had died?!", stalking, blissful ignorance, preciseness, despair and tropes that are popular. 

It's something of a skit-comedy, meaning there isn't a particular strong story to follow. It's a series made to entertain with jokes. Because of this it may not be everyone's cup of tea, but give it a fair chance and you too might end up a fan of this amazing series.

Please give these two series a shot if you got the time. My next blog post might be a while, as my trip to Japan is coming up. Once I get settled in, you can expect content on this blog right from Tokyo! Until next time, stay safe!

The Big "What's Going On?" Update

Holy carp, it's been a long time since my previous post, and a lot has happened since last time! I've kind of struggled with making a post because of this. I also have a super-special announcement at the end of this post! Anyway, let's start of with something recent...

Holy Magicarp, the Demigod of Time

I went to the US, to Florida for the Daytona 500. For those not in the know, it's a big 200 lap race, with amazingly fast cars that are LOUD. We had tickets that allowed us on the in-field, and take a look at the pre-race checks and such. Got to see 30-something laps, then it started to rain heavily, they issued a tornado warning and shit, so we decided to go back to our rental house. The race continued on later in the evening, so we watched it on TV...

The Great American Race

I also got the chance to fire a gun for the first time at a gun range. That was amazing! I tried a Glock 20 (which had a helluva recoil, being made of plastic and firing 10mm bullets), and a .357 Magnum (which I felt had less recoil, maybe because of the weight an the heavy barrel). Definitely an experience to remember.

I bought a 3DS, Pokemon Y and The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. So far I've only played Pokemon, and it's just been a big old Nostalgia trip for me. It's a great game, the new Exp. Share makes it easier to have your entire team at about the same level, reducing grinding time to almost nothing. Might make a more detailed post about these games later on in a different post.

So, for something a bit more exciting, that will have a big impact on this blog... I'm leaving for Japan by the end of the month. My housing arrangements should be in order, during these next two weeks my Visa application should hopefully be done and dealt with, and happy, scary times will be here! An ENTIRE YEAR in Japan! With no one I know on beforehand!

My feels. Nervous? Not at all! Looking forward to it though!

On to the super-special announcement: absolutelyanime (previously known as Blackragdoll), my friend Marius and I, made a podcast where we talk bullshit about anime! I would have it embed in here, but it's impossibly hard to find via the tools blogger has. Instead, have a link to it! Anime Talkathon's first episode!

As a bonus note, I recently watched the OVAs of Valkyria Chronicles 3 (all two of 'em). It's really, really great, but you kind of need to have played the PSP-game to know the relationships the people have, and a healthy dose of the first Valkyria Chronicles game (for PS3) to know who Squad 7 is would also be helpful. A really great OVA though, which I would recommend even so.

Until next time, stay safe and have fun!

Status Update: January

Another post, weeks later than planned. To compensate for this, I got some surprises planned! You can read more about it at the end of this post.

First off, I just want to write about some "recent" events. I celebrated New Years with friends, and was over at my best friend's place afterwards. Saw a couple movies and had a great time. He has since then, gone back to England where he studies Chinese and English, and was kind enough to lend me his PS3 while he's gone! Because of this, I can now play the PS3 games I own physically, because my own PS3's disc drive is dead. I'm planning on getting that repaired after I return from Japan. I've also worked on learning Hiragana and Katakana, and I'm now able to write them from memory.

So, thanks to my best friend, I've been playing Tales of Xillia. I've spent 20 hours in it so far, and I love every second.  If you have played a Tales game before, you know what to expect. Very likeable characters, funny and sad moments, a lot of characterization and an epic tale spun around it all.

As I wrote on my previous post, Valkyria Chronicles 3 got an English translation patch, which is amazing. I've spent about 23 hours in that so far, decided to slow down on it, since I'm going to the US in February for the Daytona 500. That's a NASCAR event, for those of you not in the know about motorsports. Will most likely have a lot of time to play it then on the flight.

Speaking of handheld gaming, I recently got back into Persona 4: Golden. Still got a lot of stuff to do in that game. The "Hardcore Risette Fan" trophy is still eluding me, but I'm feeling confident that I'll be able to get it this time through the game.

When it comes to anime, I recently finished re-watching Clannad and Clannad: After Story (for the 15th time... It still gets me right in the feels,) before moving on to the anime version of Tales of the Abyss. I'm happy to see that they reconstructed the game into an anime so faithfully. If you've played the game, you can easily tell which location they are at, and where they are heading. It is by far the best makeover from game to anime I've seen to this date.

Luke might just be my favourite RPG character, ever.

As I stated earlier, I do have a couple of surprises coming up. One is still a secret between me, Black Ragdoll and a friend of mine, while the other surprise will be out in less than a week as a new post! It will have lots of pictures, and definitely be a post us collectors might appreciate more than others.

Status Update: December

So I felt it was time for another post, this time a bit more of an update than a review or something like that. First things first: It's closing in on Christmas pretty quick! I've been busy trying to figure out what to give as presents, because I'm really bad at that. I guess I lack the creativity, as I've been asked myself what I want for Christmas only to disappoint with an answer like "I dunno". Anyway, Christmas is supposed to be a holiday to spend with your family, enjoy the best of the Christmas movies (I heartily recommend Die Hard, if you remain unconvinced here's 5 reasons Die Hard is the best Christmas movie ever ) and eat great food. I might however not have that chance this year, due to work.

On the other hand, I've received some great news! I've gotten accepted into the language school for my one-year Japan trip, and now I only gotta wait for my Student Visa, along with other paperwork to be done. I am seriously excited to go to Japan. I'll probably end up taking a lot of pictures, maybe making a few videos as well, who knows. I'll toss them up on this blog and attempt to make some sort of regular schedule for them by then. Not promising anything on a regular schedule as of yet. Another thing I wanted to mention real quick, is the weather. Normally at this point in December, we'd have loads of snow in Norway, and freezing temperatures of around -5 to -10 degrees Celsius at least. So far we've had two snowfalls, both being washed away by rain the days after with the warm weather. Today it's 5 degrees Celsius. I went out with a T-shirt and an open college-jacket today and still felt warm.

This looks so beautiful!

When it comes to anime I've finished watching Katanagatari, and considered doing a review of it. I scrapped that idea though, because it ended up just being me praising it to the stars and not having any negative things to say about it... It looks gorgeous, the story is great, funny and took some unexpected turns. Gave it a 10/10 on MAL, just because of how much it amazed me and kept me glued to the screen. I strongly recommend this series, as it gets my seal of approval.

Another series I've recently gotten into is Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai, or The World God Only Knows in English. This series came recommended to me by a friend, who thought the main character, Keima Katsuragi, reminded him of me because of his looks and his character. I'll admit, I'm a bit similar, and hold some of the same views, but nowhere near to the same extent as Keima! Anyway, even if the jokes sometimes hit a bit close to home, I'm thoroughly enjoying this series and will most likely watch the sequels when I get the time.

As a finishing note, I'd like to wish you, the reader, a merry Christmas and happy holiday!