Day 158: One day more! (Another day, another destiny) ♪ 金曜日・2015年2月20日

Tomorrow I fly to Sapporo. Or at least, I’m hoping I do. No baggage. All I’m going to take is hand luggage. Be a true backpacker.

I rewatched more Breaking Bad and tried to make a better job of clearing out my fridge than I did when I went to Tokyo. Lunch was the rest of the spaghetti bolognaise, and then I made omuraisu (omelette on top of rice) for dinner. All I have left to worry about is a couple of packets of tofu, a carrot, and a cucumber. The offending yogurt doesn’t go off until after I get back. Maybe I’ll make some frozen yogurt. Otherwise known as frogurt. Which may or may not be cursed. (Simpsons reference.)

I went on a walk around 7pm. Not for very long, only about half an hour. I explored some of the grounds. Finally found the gymnasium, and the swimming pool, hidden away from plain view. Took a walk around the baseball pitch. Was paranoid that a security guard would come and shoot me. I’ve been watching too many American dramas recently.

Pretty certain I have everything I need. I haven’t packed yet, but I’ve made a list of things I need, and I’ve looked around and located the items, so I should be all set. I just need to make sure I don’t forget to find one of those 20x20cm plastic bags at the airport for my liquids. All liquids in containers under 100ml, I know, I know. I’m not taking much, anyway. If not, I have a 20×30 plastic bag, which they probably wouldn’t accept. Bastards.

Right. So. The time is 22:18. I plan to be out of the house by 12. Gonna catch a limousine bus from Osaka city to Kansai Airport, which costs about ¥1500, should take about an hour. Get there in plenty of time – enough time so that I come before the check-in time actually starts. Get my boarding passes, skip baggage check-in as I won’t have a suitcase, whizz through security, then sit in the waiting room and enjoy the limited edition seasonal sakura latte they’re now selling at Starbucks. Then board the plane, two hours later get on a limousine bus from New Chitose Airport to downtown Sapporo, check in at my hotel, maybe have a wander around if it’s early enough, then go to bed.

That’s my plan. And it better happen that way. I’ve no reason to suspect it won’t. The only thing I haven’t done which is weighing on my mind was to select specific seats to sit in. But I don’t think that’s mandatory. I just get incredibly anxious at anything concerning airports. I hate airports. I hate them I hate them I hate them. The actual flying is alright. Just the organizing of the tickets and the insurance and the waiting at the airport and being stuck behind a slow person in security and wondering if you’re going to make it to your plane on time.

I always get irrationally nervous when going through the security gate. On the way back from Denmark in 2013 the gate beeped when I went through it. No idea why as I don’t think I was wearing anything metal. Then the male security guard patted me down. Was that a mistake? Did they think I was male? Or in Denmark do they treat gender equally so that it doesn’t matter if a woman pats down a man or vice versa…? Well, whatever.

Enough babbling.

I’m not taking my laptop with me this time. I’ll be moving around a lot, barely staying in the same place. So any blogposts for the next week or so shall be very compact. I have however located an internet café right round the corner from my hotel in Sapporo though, so I may or may not get the opportunity to relax while I type up a better description of my day.

Goodnight. I hope that the next time I update will be in Sapporo, and not back in my dorm room in Osaka, disgruntled with my poor organization skills.

I also hope I don’t drop my phone down the toilet this time. That would be a downer.

Day 157: Shout out to Michael Mando 木曜日・2015年2月19日

Sapporo’s a similar size to Brussels, Belgium, apparently. I think I can handle that. It looks like a really nice place. Snow is probably too much to hope for this late in February, though. One last full day to sort out everything I’m going to do and every place I need to be, then I’ll be off on Saturday.

I can’t really remember what I did today; it all sort of disappeared in a blur. It’s not like I wasted it watching videos, no. I still haven’t cracked. But it’s all a blur of Word documents, travel sites, so on and so forth.

I watched the latest episode of Better Call Saul. Only three episodes out so far. It’s super frustrating, as I’m used to watching TV shows in one big binge session. Especially if it’s a good show. I can usually marathon an entire season in one go. Well, I probably wouldn’t bother with it if it was bad, anyway. But Better Call Saul is great, so far. And to make up for the lack of episodes, I started rewatching Breaking Bad, casually. This all sounds contradictory to my previous statement that I didn’t waste all day watching videos. That part was true. I waited until the evening after I’d made my spaghetti bolognaise to watch any videos. I just meant to watch it casually, but because the show’s so addictive, I wonder if I’ll end up rewatching all five seasons. Well, it was either watch Breaking Bad while I was eating dinner, or watch Silence of the Lambs, so out of those two, I thought Breaking Bad would be easier to watch whilst eating.

Apart from that, I’m just really nervous that I’ve missed something out, concerning plane tickets, or hotel bookings, or anything. It would suck if I got to Kansai Airport and discovered I forgot to do something so the tickets were rendered invalid. I’m pretty sure I’ve done everything that needs to be done. It’s just that Peach Airlines wouldn’t recognise my bank card details so I had to pay for the tickets in a convenience store, which I’ve never done before, and I hope I did it right. Never had to do that in the UK. I also didn’t pick any seats, as that costs extra, but I’m worried in case it’s something mandatory (I don’t think it is), and then for that stupid reason they might not let me board. Or at least, not let me on the plane until everyone else was sitting down. That would suck. Not as much as being told I couldn’t go to Hokkaido, though.

Still. I’m looking forward to getting out in that fresh air. Looks like the weather will be good for flying on Saturday.

It’s a pity I didn’t think to stay overnight near Lake Toya, as there’s a famous hot spring near there. Such a shame. Well, seeing as this hopefully won’t be my last visit to Sapporo (as I still have the Snow Festival to see to at some point in my life), maybe I can do it some other time. This trip will mainly be about Hakodate, as it’s quite a way away from Sapporo, and I may not get another chance to go there.

Oh, hang on. For some reason, the image of the South Park version of Matthew McConaughey being sucked into a vortex just popped up in my mind. I guess because I only just realized that was an Interstellar reference. That happens to me, sometimes. I have unexpected epiphanies about certain actors in certain movies.

Well, that last thought probably made no sense to you whatsoever, unless you watched episode 4 of South Park season 18. “Handicar”, it was called.

Oh! That reminds me, I had another epiphany today. I saw Michael Mando in Better Call Saul. Not sure this is really a spoiler, he just plays some token bad guy, but I recognized his name in the credits, and I was like, where do I know that guy from? So I Googled him, and I remembered that I’ve actually met the guy. He was at Manchester MCM Expo 2013, signing video game posters. He’s the voice of Vaas Montenegro in Far Cry 3. I queued up for an hour and a half to meet him, dressed as Roxy Richter from Scott Pilgrim vs The World. He was really sweet, and we had our photo taken together. He signed a poster for me. Well. Not for me. It was for my then-boyfriend’s sake.

I know my cosplay is super half-assed. And that I look really fat. Shuddup.

I’d tried playing Far Cry 3 on agh, what’s the word… not campaign mode, the other one… co-op mode? Ugh no, the one where you just do all the shooting practice… I think Call of Duty has it as well… freeplay mode? Fuck, it’s been so long since I was near a gaming console. I’ve forgotten all the gaming terminology. Wow, now I really feel like playing video games… but anyway, back to the point. Yeah, I tried to play it, but because it’s FPS (first-person-shooter), and I absolutely suck at shooting games (I never completed Half Life because of it), I gave up. I was at my then-boyfriend’s house, and he rolled his eyes at me after I gave up after camping behind a fence for like 30 seconds.

I think we also tried playing Resident Evil on the same day, but I gave up 3 minutes into a freeplay co-op game, because if you didn’t already know, I am scared shitless by zombies, and I would freak out every time they came sprinting in my direction. Then some of them snuck up behind me and I was like NOPE NOPE NOPE and quit. Speaking of Resident Evil, its name is Biohazard in Japan. I think there’s a Biohazard ride in Universal Studios Japan. I’ve gotta go there.

Unfortunately the trip to Hokkaido will also be a reminder of my ex, because in the anime Lovely Complex (set in Osaka, by the way), they all go on a school trip to Hokkaido, and Otani and Koizumi go to Hakodate for the day. I told him to watch Lovely Complex because it was one of the funniest (yet emotionally feel-worthy) anime I’d ever seen. Still is. I haven’t watched a lot of anime since, so it still comes out on top.

On the subject of video games, my younger brother will also tell you that I get so absorbed by video games (probably due to the interactivity), that I have huge physical reactions every time something scary happens, which really annoys him. When he was playing Bioshock and I was watching him, and those people come running out of the darkness, I would jump out of my skin, and he’d be all like, “it’s only a game! It’s not real!” I’d do the same whenever I was trying to leap from platform to platform in Portal 2, and I’d lean back really far and then extend my body forward as if I was actually attempting a jump, and make faces as I do so, and noises. My heart would actually beat faster out of nervousness. If the TV monitor with the game footage hadn’t been there for context, I’d probably have looked like a madman. No wonder my brother hated it.

The same for whenever I was too scared to move from my spot in Tomb Raider, the rebooted version, in case a guard found me and strangled me. I took an age for me to complete Tomb Raider on easy mode. Kind of embarrassing. Again, more of a shooting game than a puzzle game. I suffered due to bad maneuvering. Portal and Portal 2 were alright, though. You can take your time to solve the puzzles. The only problem comes when you have a time limit.

Anyway. Enough about video games. Time for bed.

Day 154: Spring Break! 月曜日・2015年2月16日

Hooray! No more lessons until April! (I think.)

I got my test back for Civilizations. It wasn’t TOO bad. I scraped a pass, I think. I’d already given in my report for Religion but I attended class anyway to see what it was like, and it was its usual bollocks. In Calligraphy, we had to go up to the front and do presentations in front of the whole class, talking about what we’d written. I had 心遊 (kokoro asobu – playful heart) and 温故知新 (onko chishin – learn from the past).

And that was it! FINALLY I can relax.

By the way, the deadline came and passed for me to hear if I got accepted at that job interview, and I heard nothing back, so I decided oh well, I might as well go on holiday. So I got online, and I did the fastest ticket ordering and hotel booking in mah whole lyfe. So it’s official – I’m going to Hokkaido on Saturday. I’m getting on a plane and taking a domestic flight to Sapporo, 1496km across the country. While I’m there I’m going to go visit my friend Steve from Sixth Form, who’s doing a full-time work placement in a really remote area, near Lake Toya, which will be a day trip. There’s a bus from Sapporo to the lake once every three hours, and the journey takes two and a half hours. I’ll stay in Sapporo for three days then move hotels and go to Hakodate for another three days. It’s too bad I wasn’t in time for the Snow Festival, but it was during exams, so what could I do.

But yeah, I leave on Saturday. I booked a holiday 5 days before actually leaving. Living life on the edge.

Day 118: Reunited with the batting centre! :D 日曜日・2015年1月11日

I went to a Japanese sports/entertainment centre today! They’re the motherfucking best. Do we have something like that in the UK? Maybe, but if we do, it’s not as good. Haha.

I think there’s one near campus, like a monorail stop away, but we (Rachel and I) took the monorail and then the Hankyu line so that we could meet her friend Hachi in Takatsuki-shi, which is somewhere between Osaka and Kyoto, and we then took a shuttle bus to the sports centre. A HUGE one, with four floors, and then an open deck on the roof for outdoors sports.

It was only ¥1480 for unlimited playing time, and then at some point you can pay at any of the food places for all-you-can-drink for two hours at ¥290.

First, we went rollerblading. I haven’t EVER done rollerblading, FYI. I did rollerskating as a little kid, maybe 5 or 6 years old, and I was shit at it. I wasn’t actually too bad at rollerblading today. MUCH better than I am at ice skating. Though I did fall over a grand total of four times in the hour I spent zooming around the track, and I’ll have bruises tomorrow, but mainly I fell because a little kid would abruptly fall in front of me and me suddenly swerving would be too much for me to handle and I’d overbalance. But it’s also MUCH easier to get back up again when rollerblading. It was really fun, and I’d do it again.

A lot of what we did is a blur, because it included a load of arcade games (including that game where you bash the drums, as well as DDR, and racing games, and shooting games), and ping pong, and basketball, and soccer… but at some point we were able to do karaoke. Only for a mealy 43 minutes, but still, yay. Still not as much song selection as I would have wanted. I’d wanted to attempt Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” (then Azealia Bank’s “212” to compensate as I’m not much of a fan of Igloo, for various reasons), and Macklemore’s “Can’t Hold Us”, but once again, I had to resort to Nicki. Who I don’t mind, these days. I’ve gone from hating her, to laughing at her, to liking her ironically, to actually kind of enjoying, to genuinely liking, to loving, to finding her a goddess. That’s the power of karaoke, haha. They did have some Eminem songs though, so I’ll learn those for next time. I want to do Maximum the Hormone songs too, as they rap.

We all sung along to Ari no mama no (Japanese version of “Let It Go”), of course, as well as “Rolling Star”, which is meccha natsukashii (really nostalgic). Much fun, so sing. It was over too quickly.

Japanese karaoke had better hurry up and update their songbase because I want to fulfil my hiphop quota, as an awkward white girl.

And then after that, we went to the roof, and I was so happy because they had batting arenas, and I’ve not played in one since I was in Fukuoka, two and half years ago. I fell in love with baseball then. The satisying CRACK of when you hit swing the bat and hit the ball hard, even more when you hear the CRACK and you see the ball fly off towards the top back of the net, meaning you’ve scored a home run.

…Or was it softball?

I’m googling the difference now. Either way, there were bats, and balls, and I now have a huge blister growing on my left thumb. I remember my host dad gave me baseball gloves as a gift when I visited, and I wish I had them now. I didn’t think to bring them to Japan, even though there are batting centres here. I could do with them.

Okay, I’ve Googled, pretty sure it was baseball. Which is the most popular sport in Japan, by the way. Though soccer’s recently been growing in popularity. It’s a good thing I live in Manchester. Makes for a good conversation starter.

Anyway, I spent forever on the different levels of speed at the batting centres, donning a baseball helmet and picking up a steel bat (the main thing which made me wonder if it was softball or baseball, as I can’t tell the difference, having neither sport in my home country, only “Rounders” or cricket), and after a faulty start I managed to hit the ball almost every single time, scoring maybe 3 home runs out of 40 hit balls, and the others being somewhere forward. One of them I hit up, which bounced on the safety net above my head and then crashed back down on my helmet. Good thing I was wearing it. Hachi cheered me on and said I looked like a baseball player, yay. I looked particularly butch today, like the softball player in that YouTube video “The Six Lesbians You’ll Date Before You Die”.

If only I could receive some proper training. Then I could get better, and join a team, and I’d never stop playing. That’d be a sure way to get fit. And I can feel my biceps coming back, yay~

I can’t remember everything we did after that. All I can think of now is that we went to a sushi belt restaurant afterwards, I had about ten plates of sushi, tempura udon, orange juice, and a crepe with strawberries… gaining back any weight I managed to lose, haha.

I was pretty dead on the way back to campus. But if I think I’m dead now… hah. I’m not going to be able to move tomorrow. Tomorrow is reserved for lying in bed and gaining back my strength, and if my muscles don’t ache too much, I’ll do some exercise. I downloaded a load of fitness apps this evening, to help me stay on track. That’s another thing I should do tomorrow – work out a meal regime. Exercise is easy enough to work out and move around your timetable, but cooking requires planning. That, along with me needing to save money. Nuuu.

Right, no more going out for a while.

I think I’m going to see The Hobbit with Aiko-san this week though. Meh. And I know it’s late, but you know how it is… Japan coming behind. Though it’s been out since before Christmas. I guess we were both busy. And apparently the new film sucks. I wasn’t expecting much I guess. I liked the first Hobbit film, a LOT, but the second one really dragged, and apparently this one’s not much better off.

But anyway! Back on topic. I need to save money. I really hope I get that job I’m applying for. And I’ll find out between the 13th-18th whether I’ve gotten an interview for that security job back in England in September.

Unfortunately, the Snow Festival trip to Sapporo probably isn’t going to happen. I’ve seen loads of photos of people who are up there now, and there’s still loads of snow, but the festival is right slap bang in the middle of exams. A horrible shame. But I guess if I don’t go to the snow festival, I can maybe go in March, when it’s closer to spring and hopefully see all the beautiful Hokkaido flowers, as well as properly get a chance to explore Sapporo without a time limit. I really want to visit Hakodate too, and that’s gonna be a weekend trip in itself.

One of my kohai (juniors) from sixth form college is in Hokkaido, also doing a year abroad in Japan, but not on an exchange – he’s with a charity group. I wonder if we’d meet up?

But anyway. That’s enough writing for tonight. I can barely move my arms. Definitely time for bed.

Oyasumi.