Nakano report, Canadian Embassy.

I had some Extra time after going to renew my passport today and went to Nakano, Spoke to a cute nekomimi maid for an hour, in Japanese, not sure how I accomplished that, and then raided Nakano Broadway.

Interestingly, there's a new Mandarake shop.
It's not really interesting though, but the entrance looks super cool.

It's kind of like the 4th floor old toy museum, this one is kind of a museum for old plastic model kit.

I found a goldmine of nice ToAru stuff in one of the Mandarake, and that super cute Asuka's figure.
I haven't bought an Evangelion figure in a long time, but that one was too cute. And cheap...
Now I'll have to hunt down the Rei that goes with it.

And I'm adding 1 more Misaka Imouto to my strap/keychain collection.

I posted the collection yesterday on G+ but I'll post it here as well.

While I'm actually writing something on my blog, I guess I could talk about the Canadian embassy in Japan, since I had to go there today to renew my passport.
It's the second embassy I go to in my life, the first one being the Japanese embassy in Montreal.
The Canadian one in Tokyo is super huge compared to that little room in the middle of a big complex building in Montreal.
The Canadian Embassy is called Place Canada, and is a super huge building. I didn't visit any of it though, just went straight to the consulate place. Where I was told, I can only submit passport renewals in the mornings...
That's super stupid, fortunately, the girl let me submit it anyway, so all was fine in the end.
Passport renewal is super easy, hand the papers, pay, and wait 2 weeks (or so), no real hassle so that was fine.

Innocence of children

I was hit by the cute innocence of children earlier today.
I teach English to some kids in Japan, and 2 of them (twins) are taking their class at the same time.
The girl started singing some song at some point which was sounding like "do you like 3, do you like 2"
I have no idea what that song was, but I took the opportunity to teach them about what "do you like" means.
With some examples, do you like pink? do you like apples?
and they made their own example...
That's when the boy said: "Do you like Oppai?"
I had hard time not to laugh pretty hard there, but that’s when the innocence of children hit me, because his sister answered with "Only baby loves Oppai!"
Oppai is where the food comes from for babies, that’s all she was thinking about. That was funny.... not sure if the boy had the same thoughts though lol.

Getting Glasses in Japan

Hello, Here's a little post about something that might interest you. This could be useful information for anyone wanting to live in Japan, or even just visiting, in case something happens to your glasses.
I was pretty nervous about getting new glasses in Japan.
The eye exam was the most stressful part because I though a miscommunication error during that exam could be really bad for my eyes.
I check a little on the internet, and a lot of people gave their own experience, all pretty positive, about getting glasses in Japan. And it was really that easy for me too.

I went to Jins in shinjuku station, because it was the easiest to access for me, and Jins was recommended a lot on other websites. The selection in that shop was a little small, but I think the other Jins should be bigger than this one.

Took me about 20 minutes to decided which frame I wanted, then I went to see them and told them which ones I wanted. They brought me to the eye exam space, and made me do the classic eye exam things immediately. Instead of reading letters you had to tell where the whole in a circle was located, for example think of "c" as a circle, so you would have to say "right", and the circle became smaller and smaller.
There was 0 waiting time, and the exam went smoothly. They also had English speaking staff on place.
I bought the Jins PC lens, which are more expensive (2000 yen per lens). I'll make a review on those soon, after trying them more.
They didn't have my lens on site, so I had to come back about a week later, which was the only small bad point about all this. Beside that everything was super easy, no stress at all, quick  and actually pretty cheap.

Christmas in Japan

Sucks.
...
This year was my first Christmas in Japan as someone who lives here.
2 years ago I was just arriving, and I was clearly just a tourist, and last year I went back to Canada.

So I had apprehension to the arrival of this Christmas.

While in Canada Christmas is mostly about Family, here it's about couples.
Being single, that wasn't really a nice sounding event.
But even as I was already not looking forward to it, I was underestimating another important fact.
Christmas is also not an holiday officially here, so there's no day off for it. And to top it up, right now at work we're doing overtime like crazy. So I spent the 24 and 25 pretty much in front of my computer working.

When I got home, since I was alone, I celebrated Christmas with Shinobu the best I could.

Merry Christmas!

Living somewhere

This was the first room I had in Japan, in my first youth hostel during my first trip.
I rented it for the whole duration of my trip (2 weeks) but I only stayed there 1 week, the other week I was traveling around the west part of japan, but I left most of my luggage in that room.
Looking at it makes me nostalgic....
The feeling you get when you get into a new place for the first time, completely lost, knowing nothing, traveling around and discovering everything as you go with no one to guide you.
I'll never get this feeling again. Even If I leave japan for a long time and come back, I'll know my way around. I won't ever feel lost again in Tokyo. I won't ever see Japan again with those eyes.

Getting used to live somewhere makes it it normal. Even if I still can't speak Japanese well, I've gotten used to living here. It has became my daily boring life.

This is not a post to say that I don't like Japan anymore, it's just to say that, living somewhere makes it seems normal, so I can hardly find something I'm excited to share on this blog anymore. I still do fun stuff from time to time, but I wasn't blogging about everytime I went to play with my friends, or went shopping when I was in Canada, so doing it here just because its japan kinda feels redundant.
This is to explain why I'm not posting lately, but that doesn't mean I'll stop posting. I have a couple thing coming soon that maybe I'll feel like blogging about, so keep checking from time to time please!

Curry Pizza

Right now, and until the 19th, it's the Curry Festival in Shimokitazawa.
Many curry shop adds new "special" items to celebrate it, and many non-curry shop add a special curry dish to celebrate it.

Today I tasted a Curry Pizza at a pizza shop called Napoli.

I had never been to that shop before but I'll go back to taste their normal pizza soon, they look actually pretty good.
The Curry pizza however wasn't so good.
It wasn't bad, and I'm glad I tried it, but I wouldn't order it again lol.

I went there with my boss, and since we weren't sure of how it would taste we also ordered a normal Quattro Formaggi pizza along with it.
It was pretty good.

I'm probably gonna try a bunch of other curry stuff until the festival ends, I'll post about it here.
I don't want this blog to become a food blog... but I don't have much things to talk about lately haha. Sorry!

McDonald's IkaSumi Burger

So I ate the IkaSumi(Squid Ink) Burger at McDonalds, I'm still alive.
It tasted weird, but not bad. The visual effect was hurting my appetite though.

I did it to support Ika-Musume!

Ramune ChocoWafer

Found this today .... had to try it.... it taste horrible!
Didn't try the gum yet.... I'm scared now :P

Pepsi Energy Cola

I didn't know this existed, and I don't know if it exist outside Japan, please let me know if it does.
So it's an energy drink, made by Pepsi, having the name Pepsi, so I could not not buy it, being the Pepsi master....
Well the liquid has the right color as you can see on this picture:

looks like pepsi

But the taste is completly wrong.... well it doesn'T taste bad, but it really doesn'T even come close to tasting like... a cola. It taste like.... water with an samll fruity after taste.
And I'm still tired so it's not really effective!

Little trip to Akiba again today!

After 2 unsuccessful tries at fighting my laziness and get out of my house on a day off, Today I was finally able to do it!
I went to akiba, just for a short time, the month ending soon (my pay day being on the 15 of every month, that's where my month ends and starts) I didn't want to waste too much money,
I still a little though so here's today's loot!

2 figures (Lucky Star), 1 glass(Bakemonogatari) and 1 art book (Mouretsu Pirates).
Let's take a look at each items!, first the glass, it's actually taller than I expected it to be, which is nice. The biggest downpoint of it is that Shinobu is missing, but it's still a pretty damn nice Glass, especially for less than 5$.

Nest the Figures, first the Tsukasa maid figure, I actually saw her in a box earlier in the day for 3800 yen, and really loves how she looked, unfortunately she was kinda expensive so I just took this picture and left.

Just before leaving Akiba I decided to stop at the Volks store and saw her, brand new (the one above isn't in her box anymore) for 1500, so I jumper on it, and here it is!

I also tried the "new" function "lens blur" on my N5 on some of these picture and it didn't work so well...
to see all the pictures from Tsukasa Maid version go here: Tsukasa Maid

Next Kagami with an alternate hair style, I saw her 2 weeks or so ago, at the same time that I saw Kontata with a ponytail...

 but while I found Konata in a shop, I wasn't so lucky with Kagami.... until this week!
I found her in the same shop that I found Tsukasa, but this one was in the used part, I don't have a box with her, but I don't really care (actually that's 1 less box to worry about)
Here she is:

I also took some pics of her alongside Konata (BECAUSE THEY BELONG SIDE BY SIDE)

KonaKaga Forever! <3
Lastly, I found the Artbook of the Mouretsu Pirate's Movie (which is actually just a general Art book for Mouretsu Pirate series) by Akiman, including rough sketch of almost all the characters. The story of Mouretsu pirate is good, but not awesome, and it's probably not one of my favourite anime, but every time I see a figure of it, or a soundtrack, I rush to it, why? Because even if the anime itself isn't the greatest ever, it had the best Anime OP of all time, and probably my favourite character design of all time. That mix of Pirate Captain outfit and school girl outfit looks so great! So of Course I'd buy the art book of one of my favourite Character Designer!

I'm not gonna post the book here, but I really wanted to show at least one of the rough sketch to show how messy his style actually is, it's really interesting:

And that's all for today folks!

Very late and short Reitaisai 11 post

Wanted to at least post about it, don't have much thing to say though, the event was soso, content was great, the new touhou game is fun, the one thing that really sucked is how you need to pay 1000 more than the normal entry price if you want to be able to take pictures. wtf is that shit.
Of course when I disagree strongly against something, I do the opposite, so I took as much stealth pictures as I could!
here are the best shots, you can see the full album here: Reitaisai11

The line to get Touhou 14.3

+Sandy Whitmore Showing us Keine

Touhou 14.3

I didn't buy too much this time around, here's my loot: