I have now gotten a blog in Japanese as well! I felt that I wanted a good way to practice writing/reading and just generally use Japanese more, so I started http://nikkichou.com/. にっきちょう (nikkichou) in Japanese means diary.

フレデリックのにっきちょう

Everything I write in that blog is stuff I have learnt so far. I want to use it as a sort of measuring-device of how much Japanese I know so I will only be using the kanji (Chinese characters) that I have studied and I will not be looking up words to write. This means that the blog is sort of limited in what I can write about, but that’s the point. As I get better I will be able to write about broader and broader subjects.

I have decided to not put it here based on feedback from people on twitter, so it has it’s own home over at tumblr. If any Japanese people are reading this blog, you can jump over to the other one and correct my probably horribly incorrect grammar and word-choice. If you don’t know any Japanese, I doubt you will be getting very much sense from it because Google Translate does a really horrible job of translating it.

I will put a link in the sidebar here later so you won’t have to remember the name of it.

I finally got it!

So if you watched my last video you found out I wanted to buy a bike. So… just like 3 days ago or something like that we bought bikes! We found a pair of awesome bikes for 12.000 yen each. I sooo loved my bike for the first.. 30 minutes or so.

We biked them home, parked them besides a sign that looked like this:

Which we assumed meant something like “bicycle parking to the left of this sign”, because all bikes were parked to the left of that sign and no-one to the right. We went home and when we got back out in the morning our bikes were gone. Since we during the night had been informed by the ever-so-kind-and-helpful Maho (really, I mean it, thanks Maho) that parking along the streets is illegal and that sign actually said “bicycle parking garage this way”; we assumed that our bikes had been impounded.

We went to pick up our bikes and paid the quite hefty fine of 5000 yen, so now our very good 12k yen bikes were not so good 17k yen bikes.

Upon further investigation we found out that parking along the streets is practically illegal everywhere and you have to rent a parking-spot in one of those garages that I mentioned earlier. Renting a spot in one of those garages costs 2000 yen per month, and we need to have at least two spots, one by the station or school and one at home. So now our 12k yen bikes were 17k yen + 4k yen a month bikes.

Also, the parking garage close to our home is in the wrong direction. Which just makes everything so much more inconvenient. So basically we save 4k yen by taking the train from the other station and those savings (and the very moderate convenience) has now been all but wiped out.

The only possible way we could recover our investment at this points is by biking all the way to school. Which would probably take around 20-30 minutes considering traffic. Which is not all that bad, I could consider doing it but not in this heat.

So we now have two remaining options, biking 25 minutes in 40 degree heat or selling the bikes again and recover as much as we can of our losses. Actually, there is a third alternative; somehow find long-time storage that is free or practically free so that we can start biking in 3-4 months when the heat dies down. I had a plan for this, but I’m not sure if it would work. Park the bikes on the street and get them towed away, then come pick them up and pay 5k yen in 4 months. I don’t think they store the bikes for that long though :/

Who would have thunk that owning a bike in Japan is as complicated as owning a car. I think we’ll sell the bikes…

Yesterday we were at Lalaport, a huge, huge shopping mall in Tokyo Bay. My sister could probably spend a year in here without ever leaving or seeing the same thing twice.

LaLaport TOKYO-BAY is home to 540 stores, with 8,200 parking spaces. Committed to further development, it aims to be one of the largest shopping centers in Japan, adapting to ever-changing trends and needs and providing new experiences for its customers.

Yes that’s right. 540 different stores. It was completely insane. And they had quite awesome food too!

It’s empty in the restaurant because we ate at a weird time.

I can’t stand my 90′s Japanese phone anymore so I’ve ordered an iPhone. Also, we went to Yokohama last week so there’s some video from there as well as a bunch of new pictures on flickr.

On my previous two trips to Japan I have always found something to be amazed and surprised by, but until last weekend I hadn’t found anything new to be amazed and surprised by yet. However, Asakusa Hanabi (fireworks festival) was truly surprising and amazing. I have never, ever seen so many people gather for this kind of festival. I’m pretty sure there were literally millions of people on the streets, everywhere, watching this thing. The fireworks went on for one and a half hours non-stop.

The fireworks were spectacular, but what really amazed and surprised me was the amount of people that had spent the whole day sitting on a tarp, eating grilled food and drinking beer, just having an awesome time waiting for the fireworks. I give you a video of said fireworks, but it cannot begin to capture the spirit of the festival and what it felt to be among those (at least) hundreds of thousands of people celebrating on the streets. I don’t know if they were celebrating anything in particular, I don’t think so. I just think Hanabi festivals exist because they are fun.