Tina in Japan

Shikkaaa~!<3

for the Kansai region escapade we were in Nara for a half day. One of the main attractions of being in Nara is the deer feeding. Just two blocks away from the main station, and you start to see lots and lots of deer<3

Lots of deer are just chilling in the streets and temples of Nara where you are able to feed them biscuits that you can purchase from vendors on the streets. They were everywhere and so cute, it probably took us over an hour to finally get to the Daibutsu temple because we (or mainly I) wanted to keep seeing and feeding deer when in reality it was like a 10 minute walk to get to the temple. I think I bought like over 10 packs of the biscuits to feed to them. I was super giddy :3

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In the beginning of Jan.  was the Osaka/Nara/Kyoto trip that Leslie and I embarked on.  The night in Osaka we stayed at a capsule hotel. Omg I LOVE capsule hotels.  The boxes we live in are so freakin’ nifty and they are honestly not as small as everyone makes it seem to be, I was very comfy.

It was great! There was a bath house, bathroom with free hair dryers,  free internet, and so many more cool things =). It was a great price too at less than 3000yen a night ( roughly 30 USD  a night) per person.

Inside the capsule had a TV, radio, alarm, shelves to place items, air conditioning, and mirror. :3

For capsule hotels they aren’t great for huge families or couples who want to be together since each capsule separates per person and women and men have different sections of the hotel. But if you’re just traveling with a friend or two it’s great =)

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So this is my current stash of winnings. This does not include stuff I’ve sold on ebay, the ones scattered around my room or on my bed,  and items used as gifts.

A full basket with various different sizes ranging from small plush keychains to big full on plushes. Currently overflowing with plush tube pillows on top of Majin buu, two donalds, a mickey, and random stuff.

Man I’m glad I have ebay, I think my room would be overflowing if I didn’t sell off some of my winnings.

My lastest batch, lots and lots of Ragnarok Online Porings.

This was like back in November. Gotta catch up on these posts! On ho~!

A group of us went to Tsukishima ( sort of kind of near Ginza area-ish) to try out Monja which is Tsukihima’s specialty in foods.

Monja is kind of like Okonomiyaki, except not. It’s more of a sticky pancake that’s really flat rather than a fat pancake like thing like Okonomiyaki. With Monja you eat it right off the grill with a cute small spatula.

I don’t remember having restuarants back in the state that has them.

The Monja was really good. My quirk on it though is it’s really not filling. Personally I think you would need 2-3 huge things of these to be full and even then it’s not really full. It’s still great once a while though. Very different.

We found a shirt that teaches us how to cook Monja in Romanji =p

This made it, I think the 3rd time I’ve been to the tower. It’s still so much cooler at night.

This was during when Anthony was visiting shortly after Christmas and right before the New Years. There were Christmas decorations and some statues outside of the tower prior to the entrance. As always the top view was very pretty.

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I was watching Ferris Bueller with Leslie late last night and I totally forgot for a second or so that in America we drive our cars on the right side of the road. I actually said out loud ” oh wow/ oh yeah, we drive on the right side!”

doy. I thought it was kind of funny how I forgot that for a moment there.

So December 20-21st was Jump Festa 2009 ( why it’s 2009, I don’t know). It was a pretty fun Jump Festa since it’s Weekly Jump’s 40th year anniversary and the series “Naruto” 10th year anniversary.

I wasn’t able to take a lot of pictures since a lot of booths didn’t allow you to take pictures of inside their booths. But I got a lot of the displays since there were a lot of giant blow up balloons and really nice statues.

So when Anthony and I got there we first waited in a line that we didn’t know what it was for XD. ” hey, if it’s a line this long it’s gotta be good”. Luckily it was. The line we waited in was to purchase the exclusive Jump Festa 2009 goods, there was a catalog around mid-line given that you can look through to pick out which items you want and how many. I got plenty of goods to keep in my collection and some extras to probably sell off. I was particularly fond of the Bleach metal tin bank. It is such a clever concept.

Anyway, after all that was done and over we went out to the main floor. The entire convention was huge with 3 hall rooms. All the booths were very impressive with lots of displays. Each series got their own huge booth or two with displays and statues that you can pose with. The Yu Gi Oh booth was HUGE, took basically a quarter of one hall room. ( card tourneys and all that)

One huge booth had original artwork of manga pages of each series and original artwork displayed for everyone to see. It was really cool to see the process of how some manga-kas did their work, or to see the original print before going into the publisher.

Pictures below of pictures I was able to take.

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Japan clinics takes some of what I view as more trivial sicknesses or problems a lot more seriously than what I am use to.

Example: last month I got a UTI, and normally UTIs really aren’t a huge deal as long as you take care of it early. As the days went on the UTI was actually disappearing and it wasn’t stinging as bad, but I thought it was good to be safe to go to the doctor to see if I should take any medications or not.

Normally in the US when I had this problem, you just go and tell your doctor you have symptoms of an UTI, they’ll ask you some more questions, and if it all matches they give you the meds all in one shot right? When I went to the school clinic here it concluded to ” oh you need a urine test at this particular hospital over here and then we need to see what bacteria it is before giving you medicine.” The place where the hospital was at and its available times really clashed with my schedule at the time so in the end I couldn’t go and the UTI disappeared. I double checked with the clinic on if my symptoms disappear should I still worry about it and they said I didn’t need to worry about it.

So today I went to the doctors regarding my cold and potential pink eye ( that actually is better today). They concluded that I have a stomach infection, throat infection, and an eye infection. ( which honestly, I think it’s just a simple cold and a minor case of pink eye if even pink eye) Then afterwards they gave me four different medicines to take that last for a few days.

It’s like wow, in that situation I seriously would have just taken Nyquil and used some eyedrops or something.

What an adventure.

maybe it was 3+ weeks.

A lot has gone on the last 3 weeks that I haven’t really been able to post anything nor really had access to a computer because I’ve just been up and about.

During the 3-4ish months I’ve been here, I have gotten sick constantly and sometimes happening one right after the other. Stomach problems twice, cold/flu twice, some weird body function problems, and now I have a cold again with the potential of pink eye. Grrr! I’m thinking to go to a doctor tomorrow, Leslie mentioned that me constantly getting sick may possibly be due to internal stress from living in another country even if I’m not aware of it or feel it.

The past 3 weeks have been fun. Anthony visited, went around places in Tokyo which will be posted later. Also went to Jump Festa 09 and Comiket 75. Just the previous weekend went to Kyoto/Nara/Osaka with Leslie.

Better load the pictures to the computer and start posting~!