Sorry I haven't updated in so long

It is a really bad habit of mine. This blog doesn't affect anyone but me, yet I feel like I am letting down a child.

Oh well, at least my own disappointment only lasts for five minutes!

So when you are extremely confused, can't make sense of or understand your own emotions, what do you recommend to recollect ones thoughts?

A reevaluation of ones life? A ninety degree change of direction? I have been so emotionally lost this weekend. I don't know what I feel. Is it happiness? Sadness? Anger? Relief? Tension?  I am not sad or disappointed per se, I just honestly don't know what I feel, only that I feel.

Halloween party at borderless house

This is just a small and quick post about the halloween party my housemates held in October. Just wanted to share the awesome meal they made and the cute little rice jack o' lanterns.

A curry dish with rice, salad and a wonderfully adorable halloween theme was just what we needed to celebrate the scariest time of the year!

We spent the longer half of the evening cutting seaweed eyes, noses and mouths. Totally worth it!

Hope you all had a great halloween and lots of trick or treats! I know I did!

Expenses

• 500 yen each

Ramen is serious business

I have been in Japan for almost two months and one thing that I have learned is, ramen is serious business. Like saying that all ramen tastes the same will give you some odd looks and always one person chiming in that you are wrong. You should consider the texture, the flavor, the soup it is served with, toppings, thickness of the soup and a thousand more points that make every ramen unique.

To prove this point I got invited out together with some other housemates to try what should be the best ramen ever according to one of the long term housemates.

If you ever wonder if a restaurant is any good you can always check for how long you will have to wait to get your food. The restaurant we went to was on a main street, had room for ten guests at a time and you had to walk in and out sideways to get to your seat. It was really weird to see such a small place being able to stay open in what I assume an expensive location. There was already a line of maybe ten more people waiting to get in and be served this amazing ramen, with us the line suddenly grew to sixteen. According to my calculations (in my mind) this should be an amazing experience.

We had to wait for maybe 45 minutes or so for us to be able to sit and when we finally got our ramen I got pleasantly surprised. I was sceptical at first as to why we would wait for so long just for ramen, but I once again was proven that quality trumps quantity. That is not to say the quantity was small, it was more than enough to get full, but as I was analyzing the different points of ramen quality and soup I noticed the difference between the stuff you buy at a convenience store and this.

It was think, creamy, lots of flavor without being too much, spicy in a non-intrusive way and a perfect temperature to keep you warm on a cool November evening.

Expenses

• 850 yen for a regular size ramen with ajitama egg

Buying games can be cheaper than buying a chewing gum

I think most people who play games regularly have at least heard about a place called Akihabara in Tokyo. Also known as Electric town, Akihabara is a gamer's paradise. I am not going deep into what you can buy here, since it would be a lot easier to tell you what electronics you can't buy here. Instead I just wanted to share this funny store I saw.

If you want to buy old games in Sweden you are most likely not going to find any store that sell anything older than Playstation 2 games and even then the prices are a bit on the expensive side. Not much but just enough to give a purchase a second thought. I have some friends that collect games and they agree that most purchases are better imported.

Anyway, I was walking around on the main street in Akihabara and found this store selling old Super Famicom (known as Super nintendo in Europe and America) games for as low as ten yen per game. Admittedly, almost all of those games were really old sports games with obsolete stats on famous sports athletes. Baseball is very popular in Japan so it was not surprising that most of it was baseball games. Still, it was there. 

The store also had a huge collection of better and more popular games, old game consoles and gaming paraphernalia. If you have been searching for classics like Zelda, Mario, Sonic, Kid Icarus, Metroid or the like you could find it for a mere 1000-2000 yen depending on the quality of the cassette.

They also fixed several old broken gaming consoles, if you want a Super famicom for less than a pub night, Akihabara's different stores have you covered.

Also, if you are interesting in video game discussions and let's plays, you should check out my classmate's FaceBook page of MASP and his Youtube channel MASP Games. They talk about old school games, gaming culture and generally nerdy gaming stuff.

If you are interested in video game music and hopefully learn to play yourself someday you can listen to another friend, Piano perspective. He is incredibly talented and once I get a piano I will definitely listen to him play.

And just for some silly music and dance:

Small cheese fondue party at our sharehouse

 This was actually some time agao, I just found these pictues. A couple of the previous housemates visited and to celebrate there was a fondue party! With food even!

Our sharehouse has room for up to sixteen occupants which means that from time to time the shared space can get a bit messy, but nothing that a free afternoon can fix. We got the living room all tidied up while some of the Japanese housemates went shopping for ingredients to dip. The picture don't show it, but we also got a setup for a chocolate fondue with marshmallows and other kinds of snacks.

From what I understand cheese is very expensive in Japan, especially the higher quality ones. You can still get some of the softer massproduced cheese for a very reasonable price, but I think any cheese connoiseur would just consider it very hard butter. It is pretty good, usually sold in slices individually wrapped, making it quite easy to pack a slice for your lunch box if you so wish. As a Swede I find it a bit overkill with so much plastic, but who am I to complain. I love buying new writing paper just for the sake of having new and fresh paper that most likely will never be used.

We had loads of bread pieces, croutons, vegetables, fruit, waffles, fried mushroom, marshmallows and crackers. Some of it was of course for the chocolate fondue afterwards but I still tried parts of it dipped in cheese and it was okay! The fruits and the cheese flavor never really mixed, it was more like the left side of my mouth tasted the fruit while the right side tasted the cheese.

When you eat cheese there seem to be some rule that you have to drink wine to it. This sharehouse loves wine! You open a bottle and everyone gets a glass. Simply put, it was unnecessary to sample cheese dipped broccoli without some red wine. 

To save ourselves from too much dishes we heated up the cheese in small procelain cups usually used for creme brulé. The cheese turned really stringy and it didn't take long until we had small cheese webs running along all the different plates.

It was a great evening, lots of good food, laughs, weird comparisons of Japan and Sweden. This has to be done again!

Expenses

• I think we paid 400 yen each for this

A quick trip in Shinjuku and a Swedish bar!

I previously wrote about how I visited Shinjuku and enjoyed a view over Tokyo from the Shinjuku Metropolitan Building. What I didn't tell you about was that I found a shop called Swedish bar! I was so thrilled that I forgot to check what they sold and just managed to take a picture. It wasn't until after that I realized that they had accidentally misspelled Swedish so to avoid any further embarassment I have corrected their spelling on the picture below. Phew! Another Sweden-Japan crisis averted!

Oh, and I also took a picture of a mid-November Tokyo. Jeez, get it right, Sweden! Green leaves, no snow, girls in ridiculously short, uh, hair, discount noodles and Christmas jingles being played in most clothes stores.

A meal with a view

Your homework is done, you have cleaned your room, none of your games seem appealing, your housemates are either sleeping or out exercising, working or studying. What do you do?

You decide to go buy a book, take the train to Shinjuku, get out of the wrong exit, think you can find your way back to the right exit, be lost for two hours, think "Screw this" and change your plans to visit the observatory deck of the Shinjuku Metropolitan government building.

I have always wanted to get another view over Tokyo but feel that after the third time paying to get to the top of Tokyo tower it's not really worth it. So when I heard that the SMGB (as I will call it from now) let visitors in for free I thought I could at least see some of Tokyo from there. From the 45th floor?! That's pretty darn high! 202 meters according to Wikipedia.

When you first enter the SMGB you will go through a small visitation of your bags before being lead by very friendly staff to the elevator that will send you over 200 meters into the air. I think the ride took less than half a minute and you could really feel the air pressure change half way.

It feels humbling to see tall building tower over you and it feels even more humbling knowing that any of the tiny dots could be you being observed by someone looking out the window. What feels less humbling is that most of the space is occupied by a souvenir shop seeling overpriced Disney toys. 

But there is a small restaurant that lets you grab something to eat. I could choose between three set meals such as a curry plate, salad or something with more meat. With a price range between 1000 yen and 1300 yen you get wonderful lounge music, an amazing view and a decent meal.

I chose the cheapest set meal, a curry plate, a side salad and ginger ale which was a mere 1000 yen. The food itself wasn't as impressive as one could expect for that price but the atmosphere and the view made well up for it. How to compare it? Like a poor man's reenactment of the bar scene in "Lost in translation". Which reminds me, I need to find a nice smoky jazz bar, drink whiskey and be all broody.

This was on a Saturday and not parrticularly cloudy letting me get a great view over Tokyo. Realzing how insanely huge the area covered by buildings is almost unfathomable. One person builds one house and that impressive. The ocean of concrete squares with different shapes and sizes is art in itself. I wish I had a giant hand so I could drag it along the ground just to feel the texture of the city.

Expenses

• 1000 yen for a curry meal with a view