Whoo... Uh... Oops?

Yeah... I misread my clock this morning, and thought it was an hour later than it was. Got some money for breakfast from the bank, got some food, and got to the library half an hour before it opened. I had brought nothing to do, so I went up to the music department. There are some piano practice rooms up there, which is where I usually go if I need to waste some time but don't want to leave the school/use the library or whatever.

Usually, I work on songs I already know, but today (for the second time) I grabbed one of the random music books off the shelf and rifled through it. I found a really delightful Beethoven song whose name I always forget but really want to learn, so I started working on it. Another girl came along shortly to grab a few things from the practice room, and asked me to play what I had been working on for her. ^^' Turns out the books belong, not to the school as I had thought, but to students, and I was using her book. That was kind of embarassing, but she told me I could go ahead and continue to use her books, which was awesome. I still don't know her name.

When I was typing about Sapporo, I forgot something. After leaving the Esta department store and before going back to the station, I spent some time watching people at an intersection. The sidewalks were fairly busy with people out drinking, and going home, and stuff. The intersection I chose was one of the ones where either cars or going or people are; all the crosswalks go green at once. It was interesting to see how many people went caddy-corner across the intersection to get where they were going. There were a couple of people who had to wait for the next turn of the light because they followed the crosswalks instead.

There was also, at one point, a blind guy. He was walking along by himself, tap-tap-tap with his stick. He reached the edge of the curb and knocked his stick against a taxi at first, then found the appropriate spot and waited. When the cars started moving parallel to the direction he wanted to go, he started walking across the street, not realizing that it was a free-for-all crosswalk. He was on the other side of the intersection from me, or I'd have stopped him. Fortunately, a couple of young people who had just finished crossing notice and pulled him back, then waited with him until it was safe to cross. It was kind of interesting to watch, as I had had a feeling that that was the sort of thing that would happen.

I also forgot to mention that since I had some money, I walked to Kushiro's major shopping district on Monday. It was mostly a mission to see what the Posful department store had to offer, but I also wanted to hit the 100 yen store nearby to grab some more dishes and some miscellanea. I hit Posful first for two reasons. One is that I encounered it first. The other is that it had a McDonald's.

Taste-O-Meter!

McDonald's Teriyaki Chicken Burger: 5
Only available in Japan, my friend Nacilik recommended that I try it. It's the best thing to ever come out of a McDonald's, ever. I don't normally like mayonnaise, but on a bun with hot, saucy teriyakai chicken... oh man, you've gotta try it.

I also didn't expect the smell of french fries to be quite that alluring. One thing I absolutely love about the Japanese McDonald's is that you can get orange juice instead of soda with a meal without getting this tiny cup. It's a regular soft drink there.

The rest of posful mostly had clothes, but there was one store that had a wide variety of nifty hair ornaments. There was also a Claire's. Some stores on the second floor had nifty trinkets and school supplies and stuff. In one store I found this awesome character and a whole bunch of stuff related to it. The character is called O-Chan.

There are also a couple of others called Obaa-chan and the like, but the basic idea here is that it's a pun. Most if not all of you who read this should know that the Japanese have suffixes that they apply to names, one of which is -chan. The Japanese word for tea is cha, and since they like tea so much they often put O in front of it as an honorific.

Do you see where this is going?

The result: A guy who pretty much lives in a variety of tea cups (by live I mean that you see a tea cup with a head and sometimes an arm or two sticking out). There were so many variations, including different tea cups and O-chan holding a variety of things. The aforementioned Obaa-chan also lives in a tea cup, but the Japanese word for grandmother is obaasan, which is often pronounced by kids and girls as obaachan.

After that I hit the 100 yen store. I only bought a couple of dishes, but I bought a variety of other useful things, like extra chopsticks in case I have company, a bigger seive, that sort of thing. I also found lotion that wasn't ￥3500 yen a bottle. Woo! Japanese lotion isn't a cream, though, it's a liquid. I like this; it's not oily. This stuff also says on the bottle that it contains sake. It smells like it, too, so I'm inclined to believe it, but since I've always thought alcohol dehydrates... ? Weird. But hey.

Realizations of the Period

1) Sitting in a chair for 7 hours straight is hard on your tailbone.