House party

I didn´t get many good pictures from the karaoke though. But since I was kind of blurry I think it´s OK.

Last week I was together with Pim, Maja and Linus invited to a house party in Ootsuka through my room mate Hannes. Some of the people we had already met at a club and hung out with at a restaurant once so it was nice to meet them in another state of mind as well! Anyway the apartment was really nice. Tsubasa and Hiyoko (the owners) were very cool and friendly. They had recently moved in and had of course bought some furniture from IKEA ^^ haha... Anyway their friends were hilarious. Michi for example has some friends in sweden, so she had bought a swedish beginners course-book and wanted to learn useful sentences. She´s also working as an assistant connected with squaresoft company (that impressed me quite a bit since I´m a BIG Final fantasy nerd ;)). Another special character was Isao, a natural comedian who for example liked to mimic the photographer in lost in translation with different gestures and lines such as "I want mysterious" or "more intensity" Sooo good! They also had dj equipment in the apartment since Tsubasa is a skilled dj and owns a certain club chain located in dfferent parts of Tokyo. During the evening we bought a great deal of ingredients for "Nabe" a delicious japanese stew, and alcohol shared among everyone at the party. We also ate some ginger bread, swedish pickled herring, and glögg (spiced wine with a sweet taste) bought from Ikea.. Yummy! I think we were around 15 people altogether, and the amazing thing was that everyone were really open-minded and relaxed so the "keigo"(a polite way of speaking japanese) disappeared quicker than I realized. The chemistry was really good, and we chatted like pretty close friends. We finished the night with karaoke not far away from the apartment, and got ourselves even more drunk. It was a memorable night. When I went home together with Maja and Linus we stupidly walked at the wrong direction for a while we , so we had to get some help from a random person at some convenient store. After the train trip back home, I couldn´t have fallen asleep faster.

Asakusa

We also found a nice café before we entered the crowd in kaminarimon. They had tasty coffee, cinnamon toasts, macha cakes, liquer and beer since it was a bar as well. The interior was very old fashioned and they had some weird looking globe-shaped TV and a small gloomy room with big portraits in black and white. The music was calm and relaxing. When I thought about it I noticed that at some point they played instrumental temple music, which I cinsidered quite funny. Still nice though ;)

Helena and Sanna (trying to look cool)

I went to Asakusa lately with Helena and Sanna, two swedish girls from school who I´ve become good friends with lately. Swedes and koreans are basically invading ISI-language school for some reason. Approximately 70-80% of the students consists of these nationalities which means it´s like a small swedish community within our school. Good luck for rookies trying to learn japanese efficiently. Well this picture shows the pretty famous "kaminarimon" or Thundergate which it translates to. They have countless of stalls lining up and crossing each other with loads of japanese souvenirs, clothing, food, sweets, chinaware etc. Thre are both high class items and crappy stuff, as well as super tourist products of course. But all in all, the selection is great, and you can find really cool presents here, and on top of that it´s really beautiful. We mainly went to Asakusa to buy Christmas presents and for some sightseeing. The temple is pretty big, and there´s a huge jar-shaped stone thing in the middle of the temple area stuffed with incense. The smoke is meant to cure headaches and secure health in the future, so I took a deep breath hoping that the normal alcohol consumption sofar won´t destroy my health completely. After finding some flashy christmas presents and tasting some free of charge rice cookies we felt pleased.

Stunned

Last week a certain Yurie called me. At that time I thought she was still guiding around tourists in Thailand but she had apparently returned home to Japan only 4 days earlier she contacted me. Anyway, I hadn´t heard her voice in almost two years time so I was overjoyed! She´s just like I remembered her, energetic, open-minded and hilarious. I met her and the grim viking Nozomi at a bar called "Hub" (an english pub franchise) together with some friends from school, Pim and Hannes. We had soo much to talk about, and the happy hour (actually two hours), weren´t really enough. Anyway, they had a pretty big selection of drinks for 240 or 320 yen each which is unbelievably CHEAP! I can´t really complain about that. Well, I´ll be hanging around with these people a lot from now on that´s for sure.

Halloween

Garr! This was the second time I met my good old friend Nozomi since I came to Japan. Maybe you´re wondering about the reason why exactly she chose to dress up like a danish viking? She was there as an exchange student several years ago ...so we can speak a tiny bit scandinavian if we´d like, although swedes don´t really comprehend danish despite the strong similarities. The thing is that danish pretty much sounds like someone trying to talk and vomit simultaneously. Anyway she had learned some weird swedish phrases from a friend: "ska vi knulla på östersjön?" which means shall we fuck on (in?) the baltic sea?. Reeally useful in other words. The picture is from a club in Roppongi where basically everyone were transformed into ghosts, prisoners, rabbits or..vikings etc. Nozomi helped me and Hannes to get on the guestlist which was really nice! Unfortunately me and Hannes couldn´t get any discount on the entrance fee for putting on scary suits, that was only possible for girls (:)....so shallow). Oh one of the more positive spots with that place was that everyone were provided with free food as well^^ Eating drunk is the shit!

Enter

Peaceful

After a great deal of laziness and lack of disciplin I´ve finally managed to create a blog.
As an opening picture I though a gate to this quite impressive temple located in the Yoyogi park, would fit right in (a huuuge park very close to Harajuku station in Tokyo). Anyway, I figured it would be wise to use english so that I won´t exclude any funny characters I´ve come across lately, or my closest friends of course from following my everyday life in Japan. I´ve been living here for about one and a half month now together with two swedish pals: Hannes and Pim (we get along surprisingly well, a great combo I must say!). It would be a stupid idea to summarize everything we´ve been up to so far, experienced and seen etc, but roughly we´ve been clubbing from dusk til dawn quite often, eating deeelicios japanese dishes! Singing karaoke (where we can drink as much liquer as we like for hours^^) like lunatics, met interesting people and endured one month in the crappiest guesthouse I´ve ever witnessed. We basically slept in cells, and shared stinky/moldy toilets and on top of that developed a pretty close relationship to the cockroaches living in the kitchen. However, we met a lot of interesting people at that guesthouse, and right now we live in a brand new guesthouse-apartment in Tokyo with all kitchen supplies and necessaries we need, in a large and comfy room as well. There is no comparison at all. I´ve also met a few good old friends from my exchange-year more than several times now, and it´s been truly awesome. I´ve missed them a lot. Life is really wonderful here. Well from now on I´ll keep this blog updated and I hope you´ll enjoy it. Do feel free to write some comments!