Overdue August / September Update!

Its been some time since I last posted an update on what I have been up to, mainly due to a trip to the UK, a wedding and having my arm in cast for months following a careless slip on our living room floor! The upside of this, I guess, is having had plenty of experience of the Japanese hospital system.

I also passed a milestone recently, having been in Osaka for just over a year, the time has just flown past! There have certainly been many ups and downs over the year, but overall its been an interesting experience and I look forward to seeing what the next year has in store.

Anyway, here is a selection of photos of various things of interest over the past couple of months:

Peaches kindly sent to us by my wife's grandparents.

A firework display held alongside Yodo river, this one is a Pokemon ball!

If you look closely you can see Doraemon's face.

A Zen garden in Kyoto, built by a poet.

Osaka Science Museum, they have a rather bad cockroach problem!

The Lotus pond outside the museum.

The museum also has this interesting tunnel of gourds!

An old electronics store in Nipponbashi.

A summer festival in Kyoto

Miffy MP3 Player

I've been desperately trying to save money recently but its proving rather difficult, especially when I keep finding things like this:

 

I mean, who could honestly resist buying a Miffy MP3 player and Speaker / USB dock set? Not me for one! Just look at the thing!

Luckily, my birthday is coming up so I didn't end up having to pay for it myself and after pleading on bended knee I was allowed to open it early. The figure itself is the MP3 player and detaches from the base and can be connected to a PC or Mac by itself. The base part is the dock and speakers, the sound quality is surprisingly good and the centre lights up when switched on. The whole thing is about 9.5 cm tall.

The controls round the back, the on switch is the left arm.

Miffy boxed.

The base boxed.

Incidentally, if you are thinking of buying one, look online and you will save a lot of money. We first saw this in Kiddyland but when checking online we found it for less than a third of the price!

I Heart Famicom

By popular demand, here is a picture of the Famicom games I acquired at the Banpaku-Koen garage sale:

 

From top left, the games are: Burgertime, Ninja Jajamaru-kun, Challenger, a game I am yet to translate, Excitebike, Dragonquest 2.

So as not to bore any non-game geeks, I have decided to post all Famicom and game related information from now on on another blog which you can find here:

http://iheartfamicom.blogspot.com/

Its very much a work in progress but should be fun!

Unleash your geek!

Yesterday I had the intimidating task of buying a suit to wear to interviews. Having always avoided the need to wear such restrictive clothing in the past I was not looking forward to this chore but knew it had to be done so set off for Namba trying to put on a brave face. The first shop we entered was promising however, shop assistant was ever so helpful and took my measurements making suggestions all the way. I was thinking more positively at this point, that was until he told us what the price was, around £530! He had mentioned the price ranges to begin with but had failed to mention that this particular one was in the upper range. We did try on a couple of cheaper suits, one of which was fairly nice but decided to look at other shops to compare. The next store we tried was Comme Ca, a really nice store with very helpful staff. The clothes are very stylish and not too expensive, and I ended up bying a very nice suit for much less than the other store, I might have even changed my mind about wearing suits!

After that ordeal I thought it was about time to unleash the geek in me and head over to Nipponbashi (or Den Den Town) an area well known for its electronic goods. Its a haven for geeks or otaku with many video game, anime and comic stores. My aim was to purchase a second hand Nintendo Famicom, one of the original Nintendo consoles, commonly known in Europe and America as the NES. It has been a long time dream of mine to own one of these consoles, ever since I first saw pictures of one in a magazine whilst on a family holiday to Devon back in the eighties. Alongside the console I bought a copy of Ninja-kun, a game I also used to play in arcades as a kid under the title Ninja-kid. After a few failed attempts at getting the thing working, using the tried and tested method of blowing into the cartridge and switching the console on and off, I was taking a nostalgia trip back to more innocent days and underused brain cells.

Famicom

Ninja-kun

Screen from Ninja-kun