So as you know I got a cold last week. As expected the soar throat gave way to a runny nose, but something very unexpected arrived as well. I’ve gotten one of these “i’m-on-my-last-breath-help-me-i’m-gonna-fucking-die”-coughs too! It’s really annoying because I fucking hate coughing, and I think our neighbors and Emmas’ need to sleep agrees with me.

So I thought I’d fix the problem, googled and found this. So I subsequently went out to buy “az アネトン”. On my way there I had a really nice feeling! I had woken up a bit earlier today from the cough so I let Emma sleep in while I went out. I had a clear purpose (walking to the drugstore) and it felt a lot like morning because of the weather (even though it wasn’t morning in most peoples definition) and with both those things, it really felt like I was doing something here. Like walking to school or work, like I was actually living here, totally nice feeling.

Now I’m gonna try to take 3 pills of this 3 times a day as the lady in the store said. Lets hope it works cuz we’re going to the OriginalFake store today and I don’t want to be all nasty and cough over their super-expensive cool stuff. (Oh and yeah, the image is mirrored)

Today I found the worlds greatest T-shirt store in Harajuku. It’s called Beams and it’s beyond awesome. I didn’t take any pictures inside I’m afraid, but they had the coolest T-shirts I’ve ever seen and the prices were between 2800 and 5000 yen, which is awesomely good. You can barely find a mediocre T-shirt in Sweden for 5000 yen.

This is the bag I got from them, it’s extra big because I was carrying around another bag from UNI QLO and they were kind enough to give me this bigger one so I could put the UNI QLO bag inside it as well.

This is the t-shirt I bought.

Today I went on a bit of a shopping spree, so I came home with 6 t-shirts. (^_^)

Without any delay, here’s a collage of all the T-shirts I’ve bought so far. (The one in the upper right corner is Emmas, the other ones are mine)

They are all awesomely awesome and for a fraction of the price I would pay at home for this quality.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — Japanese bookstores kick ass!

Here’s why:

There are tons of magazines and literature on every imaginable subject, you could literally walk into a Japanese bookstore and ask to become a master at ___ and the clerk will happily guide you to an entire shelf full of stuff on the subject of ___.

The image above for example are really thick magazines filled with every piece of information you could possibly want about pens, different kinds of pens, fountain pens. They have tests on different kinds of ink, which ink holds the best while moist and so forth. Information about new pens, about antique pens and their ink. It’s insane!

But that’s not it. I found this one magazine which just makes me want to be able to read Japanese that much more!

It’s a magazine about Mad-Science, this specific edition covered atomic, chemical and biological warfare. It shows detailed articles on crazy science and whack plans, it goes through potential biological weapons and weapons used in the past.

Click for larger versions.
As you can see, it covers stuff pretty well, down to chemical compounds and pretty advanced shit about how it affects the brainstem (I assume).

But wait, theres more!

Theres a shelf full of magazines containing every bit of information you could ever want on guns. One of which details everything about every gun ever used in a hollywood movie.

Here’s a shelf full of magazines about watches, everything from latest fashion to one full magazine all about Rolex watches and their every detail.

They even have Match Lectures in magainze format, including a CD with the spoken lectures so you can listen to the lectures and follow along in the magazine.

One thing I really love about Japanese books (not magazines this time) is that they’re really small. Most books you seem to buy in three parts, where the cost of all three books is about equal to the cost of one pocket-book in Sweden (even a little less usually).

They fit perfectly in the hand and don’t weigh anything! There’s no need to carry around the whole book, you don’t read a whole book that fast anyway. You only need one part at a time. Perfect.

As you can see, one can easily waste away quite a few hours in these stores, even if you can’t read Japanese. And if you can, you just want to read everything! I’m starting to understand the whole culture of standing in the store and reading. You couldn’t possibly afford to buy everything you want to read.

Well our time is almost up here in this.. indescribable place. And the bad feeling of having to leave is certainly creeping up on me. It really has been a wonderful time and even though we didn’t get to see as many “new” things as the last trip, we have gotten a fantastic experience.

I feel we have gotten more of a feeling of how it is to be here when you’re a bit more used to it, and it’s still not boring me! Not one bit. The first time around of course it’s going to be awesomely fun, but the second time around could have turned out to be boring just because we’ve already seen it all once. It did not turn out that way!

But I plan my departure from this country with one experience missing – one that I wanted, but didn’t know how to get and haven’t gotten. The experience of how it would actually be to live and study or work here.

I want to know what young people complain about with Japan, I want to know what old people are complaining about with Japan. From knowing the complaints of the people, I can decide if they are complaints that actually matter to me and if I would complain about it too if I lived here.

I want to know how people live here, what all the apartments look like on the inside, how easy it is to get rich and how easy it is to get poor.

I want to know what the health care system is like, what insurance people have and if you get ruined if you get an illness requiring you to be in a hospital for a long time.

I want to know what kind of vacation I can expect and what kind of salary to expect as a Master of Engineering Physics fresh out of school. I want to know what kind of vacation and what kind of salary to expect after 10-15 years into my career.

It seems easy to get lost as a salaryman among the millions of salarymen, it seems almost impossible to “climb the ladder” and to earn a reputation.

I want to know what the political system is like, if people care about politics and how they show their care.

I want to know about issues that matter to me, like personal integrity and welfare.

Until I know these things, Japan will always only be a fantastic place for vacations to me. I can’t logically decide if it’s good or bad to live here without these facts, but of course — my heart tells me it’s good.

Yesterday we went clubbing again, we wanted to go to Ageha, one of the biggest clubs in Japan. It has a lot of dance floor, even one outdoors with a pool in the middle. Unfortunately, yesterday that club was host to “Asias biggest gay party”. Instead, we went to Tokyos second (I think, or third) largest club, Womb.

The club kicked ass actually and it played awesome music (according to me, not Emma :P), but I do think they should have mixed it up a bit and played some nice Hip Hop or something on the other floors, there were 3 “lounge floors” with bars and chairs and stuff and one big-ass dance floor. The lounge floors played the same music as the dance floor.

We left kind of early because I wasn’t in my best shape ever with my cold and all. All in all I think it was a pretty good night though! This club lived up much more to my expectations of what a club should be though! However I still want to see a club that plays Japanese music, but maybe on another trip since we won’t be here one more weekend.

So today, kind of tired, we went up a bit later than usual (we came home at like 6am even if we left early). We went to buy stuff for a friend of mine at Muji, went to buy more sneakers for Emma and then went to a cool bookstore (Junkudo, thanks Maho) in Shinjuku. We stayed there for like 1 1/2 hours just looking around and just when we got to the Manga floor they closed the store :(
They seemed to have a huuge selection of Manga though so we’re probably going back some day!

The number of pictures coming up have declined since we’re not.. finding new stuff all the time. I kind of feel like we’re just living life here now, being half-accustomed to everything here and just… strolling around having a nice time!

Oh right, we went to this mall in Harajuku too that are having a sale, it was craaazzzyy there! They have the weirdest TV commercial ever too that we’ve seen a couple of times.