I just heard my neighbor sigh, then fart. I think my walls might be a little thin.

It's strange, I don't think I've had anyone refer to me as being thin in almost five years, but I've gotten it a few times lately. I haven't been exercising or consciously been exercising since I've been here, but there definitely has been a change in my diet. At home, it used to be such a treat to eat Japanese food, especially sashimi. Here I eat it almost every other night!

Three days a week I finish work at 9:15 at night. This is a totally ridiculous time to eat dinner considering I don't get home until atleast 10pm. But, the good news is, by this time all the supermarkets have sales on all the premade food before they throw it all out. So this means I can eat a meal like this for 8-10 bucks a night.

I have weird phases with food every few months. I'm finally getting over my tan tan mein phase, now I'm getting back into my cold tofu phase.

Aside from that, I've made a new friend recently. Someone mentioned that it's good luck to have one of these guys in your house, so we've been coexisting peacefully for the time being. At the very least I figure he'll eat up most of my other grosser friends that make their way into my apartment.

Nice guy, huh? I finally got my vacation days and we're heading to Okinawa at the end of next month. Hopefully something on that.

Better late than never, I present to you, my apartment!

I live five minutes walking distance from Sagami-Ono station. I am about 40 minutes from Yokohama and Shinjuku. Although the area is more of a suburb, there are plenty of shops, supermarkets, and restaurants near the station.

I haven't bought a stove or microwave because I usually don't like to cook for myself, and I usually buy premade food from the supermarket before I come home after work. The apartment is about half the size of my apartment I had in Campbell, and the bathroom is small (almost feels like an airplane bathroom). But it's' all I need really, it's my home.

About a month ago, my coworker Nick told me that he wanted to check out a manga convention in Tokyo. It sounded like a good idea considering I've never gone to one before in Japan. I was expecting all sorts of weirdos, and I was a little disappointed when I saw that everyone seemed to be pretty normal when we arrived.

The place was in the Tokyo big site, and was incredibly crowded, we pretty much had no idea what the hell was going on. Nick had almost no information about the event besides the fact that it was a manga convention. We eventually figured out that it was a convention for independent artists to display and sell their work. What amazed me was that most of the artists were women.

What I didn't expect to see was all the ridiculous amounts of gay manga porn that the women artists drew. I would pick up a manga fan fiction about star wars, look at the pictures, and realize that Obi-Wan Kanobi was having sex with Darth Vader. Or I would pick up a Spiderman fan fiction and see pictures of Dr. Octopus raping Spiderman with one of his mechanical tentacles. I guess guys aren't the only weirdos in Japan.

I originally started looking at the Star Wars fan fiction because I know Haruka loves Star Wars. After I got over my initial revoltion of seeing Yoda get raped by a light saber, I thought about getting one of the comics for Haruka just for amusement factor, but I just couldn't get myself to buy one with a straight face.

But where were all the cosplay people?? (the people that dress up as Japanese characters) I had been to Fanime con once in San Jose, and there were plenty of people dressed up in weird costumes. We saw a few inside the exhibition hall, and Nick and Adam asked to get pictures with them, only to be turned down. What was up??

We later learned that there was an area outside where people could freely take pictures of all the people in costumes. The biggest line in the whole exhibit hall was going to this place. I can never get away with this, but because I was with two white guys, we did the "gaijin cut" where we pretended like we didn't know where the friont or end of the line was.

This place was pretty much what we were hoping for. People in all sorts of costumes, and even stranger people taking pictures of them. I took a decent amount of pictures of the people in costumes, but I mostly regret not taking any pictures of the people taking pictures of the girls in costumes. I seriously saw some of the sweatiest, greasiest, people with the most expensive cameras just completely swarming the girls.

Keep in mind the day was pretty hot, and some of these people were wearing pretty extravagant costumes. As we were walking up, we saw some kids being taken out of the area in wheel chairs because they passed out from heat exhaustion. I have a video of one guy passing out and getting dragged off, I'm still debating whether to put it on youtube or not.

I'm still trying to update this journal more often, all this happened over a month ago so I still have a lot of catching up to do. Also, recently Mike started a new band with Max and Morgan called "Hard Girls." I've been listening to them a lot, and they just put some songs up at www.myspace.com/hardgirls

All the major stations in Kanagawa and Tokyo were having fireworks displays almost every weekend. I asked a lot of Japanese what the occasion was, and the general concensus was there wasn't really any occasion, they just wanted an excuse to light shit up. I have no problem with that.

I was originally supposed to go with Haruka to watch fireworks in Tokyo. We were going to wear yukatas, and meet up with her friends from Chiba. But as things turned out, the yukata idea got scrapped because I finished work too late, and her friends ended up having a barbeque in Chiba that night instead. Because Chiba is about 2 hours from where I live, and because it absolutely wouldn't have been worth it for me to go there for only a few hours, before I had to come back home because of work the next day, I asked around at work to see if anyone wanted to go with me to watch fireworks.

I ended up going out with some of the staff, and another newer teacher, Emily. One of the staff suggested that we goto Hakkejima Sea Paradise because they were having fireworks displays. Hakkejima Sea Paradise is sort of a combination amusement park and aquarium, totally tight.

I invited Adam from my school to meet up with us, he ended up meeting up with us and bringing two other Yokohama teachers with him, Lisa and Kevin. We started off with dinner at Pepper Steak, and then headedto Hakkejima Sea Paradise to catch the fireworks. Unfortunately, we didn't realize the fireworks would only be going on for about fifteen minutes, and came in time to watch the tail end of the show.

Afterwards we played some arcade games and ufo catchers, and after had a little romantic walk around the park. All the rides and attractions were closed because it was too late, but we had a good time walking around the park as bats flew around us, and as the cicada's were dropping dead at our feet. Did I mention that bugs are gross in Japan?? I had a red praying mantis chilling out on my door the other day.

Almost all my experience with amusement parks have been with Great America back at home. I went to Busch Gardens once during a Jr. High School field trip to Washington D.C., but I don't really remember much of it. Everyone's always telling me about how their state always has the most exciting roller coasters and amusement parks, which we don't exactly have in Parmount's Great America in San Jose.


We already went to Disneyland, so I asked Haruka which amusement park in Japan had the best rides. She told me it was a place called Fuji-Q Highland near Mt. Fuji. We both had a day off sometime last month and we decided to go.


Before going to Fuji-Q, I did a little bit of my homework (thank you again Wikipedia) and found out that Fuji-Q once had the tallest roller coaster in the world (now the 8th tallest), called "Fujiyama." A roller coaster called "Dodonpa," which was the world's fastest roller coaster in 2001 (now the 3rd at 106.9 mph!), and another roller caster called "Eejanaika" which is the 2nd 4th dimensional roller coaster in the world (left and above picture).


From Tokyo we took a bus to Mt. Fuji, which was about two hours. The rides definitely were much better than anything at Great America Fujiyama was the longest roller coaster I have ever ridden, it seemed almost twice as long as anything I've ridden before. The food was as you would expect, a little expensive, and not very good. They had a lot more ethnic selections of food, we decided to start off the days with Gyros, and ended the night with dinner in the Thai food plaza before going on Fujiyama for the second time before the park closed.

I had a really good time, my only complaint being the length of the lines. Japan is so big on procedures and safety, that not only does it take me an hour just to wire money home from my bank, but the lines at Fuji-Q took twice as long as anything back home. Just looking at the line, you wouldn't think that it would take more than an hour to get on the ride, but that's not taking into consideration that the Japanese take twice as long to ensure that everyone is fastened securely into the ride. Hell, I'm always one for safety, but by the end of the night I was mumbling that I'd gladly trade having some kid fall off the ride every few years just to make the lines go faster.

O yea, one other big difference I noticed was that not only did they have signs that prohibited kids under the age of 10 from going on the rides, but they also had signs prohibiting people over 55! So I guess if you're old, or you got some kind of crazy disease that makes you look old, you're SOL.

The idea of a ramen musuem sounds totally lame and unexciting, but I found myself with a three hour break at work with nothing to do. I talked to my coworker Nick, and we decided to head over and check out what all the fuss was about.

I was pretty much expecting some plain jane looking museum with some plastic models of ramen and what not, but the basement of the museum turned out to be a totally self contained historic looking downtown area.

There were a lot of different types of restaurants in the museum. Each of the restaurants had ramen from the different areas of Japan, we ended up eating Kyushu style ramen. The place was a little more expensive than normal ramen restaurants, but we got about twice as much as the normal servings of meat, and almost 50% more ramen.

On top of the good selection of restaurants, there were a lot of different activities we could do. Most of the places didn't want me taking pictures, so I just took a few before people started yelling at me.

Woo, new beginning. Here's hoping I'll be updating this blog more often than I did before.

So in a nutshell, I'm pretty much doing the same as since my last posts. Working about 50 hours a week, been going out a little more lately. I made a few more trips to Kamakura, and was finally able to take some decent night time pictures with my new camera.

Bob came and joined me in Japan about a month ago. He had training in Tokyo for a few days, so I was able to hang out with him, Reiko (Yumiko's little sister), and her boyfriend Atsuhiko. Bob pretty much wanted to check out all his old spots, so we ended up going to Shimokitazawa, and Haruka and I showed him Koenji. Unfortunately Bob's living over in Gifu, which is about 6 hours by local train from where I live, but fortunately for him, he's living about 45 minutes from our friend Adam in Nagoya.

We met up with most of the Ging Nang Boyz the second day we hung out, and the next day with Chin and Shoji. Chin ended up taking us out to a Korean BBQ restaurant near Shinjuku, which was way different from the Korean food I eat back at home. As we left, Chin invited Haruka and me to one of their shows this month. I'm basically hoping I can get some decent video of the show without getting kicked in the face. We'll see!