M: We had a day off school on Wednesday so we decided to get all our admin-type stuff out of the way and become fully-fledged 'gaijin' (aliens/outsiders etc). We started off in the morning by collecting our Alien Registration Cards from the town hall in Chiba. They took about 4 weeks to be processed, and have lovely photos on them of Jack and I looking relatively shell-shocked. It 's now our formal ford of ID which means we don't have to carry round our passports anymore. Excellent, so job number one done.Job number two - setting up a bank account. You can't set up an account until you have your alien registration card, so I made an appointment for us for the afternoon after calling several different numbers and speaking to people that had a weak grasp of English (quite frustrating by the fourth phonecall!). Once we were there, it was very simple just lots of forms to fill out, and the ladies who served at the branch spoke English well. We visited a branch it what seemed to be the business district of Tokyo (Otemachi). In all the excitement of trying to arrange an appointment I forgot to ask for directions to the dang place! I thought it'd be easy to spot once we got to the right metro station. It wasn't. Thankfully we asked the right person for help as she gave us a detailed map in English of the whole area, bingo.We saw on the map that we were close to one entrance to the gardens of the Imperial Palace where the Imperial family live. This was the side gate...
This was another gate - a bit more of a beast, shame there's nooone in the pic to give it a sense of scale, but it was BIG
This is the stereotypical kind of scene that you'd expect to see in Japan (the fish in there were massive, with weird tentacles around their eyes)
There were loads of crazy spiders that spun webs all around the gardens. This was a particularly mean-looking one. I got a bit nervous when Jack decided to blow on it to make it move
Job number 3 - getting a phone. You can't get a mobile phone until you have a bank account. We heard on the grapevine that the Softbank store in Harajuku had English speaking staff and that Softbank are one of the cheaper companies to go with. We were rather excited as Japanese phones look cooooool! The technology is much further ahead than in the UK - internet is standard, as is GPs, and some of the slightly more expensive phones have TV on them! It explains why a good 80% of people on trains here stare at their phones the whole time. Once we were told about the calling plans here we had to go for the cheapest option as, quite frankly, it's kinda bullshit. You have to buy the phone straight up and then each month they deduct a certain amount from your bill that goes towards paying for your handset, and if you have the contract for 26 months then it pays for itself. Hmmm. We needed phones so went along with all the sell from the shop assistant who'd been working in the States and definitely had that American salesman mentality. After a good one and a half ours of forms and extra costs (we had to buy a phone charger as it doesn't come included!?), we were finally with phones and played with them all the way home. I'm planning to pimp mine up with lots of charms that everyone seems to have dangling from their mobiles, and lots of fake jewels and other nonsense. Jack's phone is awesome in it's purity. See below...
It has an awesome gold strip along the back and you can choose the colours of the warning lights. I think it's a bit Daft Punk-esque
J: When we got home, we were pretty hungry after all the administrative hassle in Tokyo so we decided to go to our favourite restaurant - Okonomitie. Okonomiyaki is an Osaka based dish where you select a kind of pancake but you cook it on a hot plate in your table. It looks a lot like barf when you first get it and mix it all up but once cooked it's pretty awesome!
I'm still not sure what this green fish was all about, but it was also very tasty. The bowl that also looks like chunder was wasabi squid, one of the more interesting things we have tried.
Whilst this game phonetically could be construed as being antisemitic Jubeat was actually a bit like simon says but with a j-pop backing, really quite addictive.
This is a phone pic in our local izakaya (sp) the chef was pretty awesome he had a chin beard with loads of shitty beads dangling out of it. We were incredibly glad that one of the waiters spoke English.
This is the only picture I took of todays trip to the Chiba science museum with a load of students from school. I had 11 kids to supervise and May had 8. I don't think I did too badly - none were lost, none cried and I didn't maim any of them. Also i found out that Japanese kids are really easy to shake down for any snacks you might need or want - they literally cough up the goods without too much encouragement. I see it as a progressive form of 'freeganism'. The only downside to today was that I ripped a crucial button from my shirt while horsing around with the little swines in a bubble labyrinth, I spent quite a long time inadvertently flashing my navel to my charges - they didn't seem to mind, but one of them did complain of 'snow blindness'.
Weirdly enough, most kids here carry flasks with them, I thought they might have squash or something sugary as most things for kids here are laced with sweeteners. But no! they generally hoof around with cold green tea, it smells pretty bad and tastes like sock water to me but as long as they don't ask me to drink any of that muck we'll get along just fine.
