So I finally have internet

Yeah for internet!!!! I'm so excited that I have internet now you don't even know. Especially after all the stuff that's going on here in Otaru in the last couple of days. :) Internet here takes like a month. It's ridiculous! If you go through NTT it's 2 weeks but you have to pay some sort of $200 fee to 'activate' your account, and no that doesn't seem to pay for installation, modem, service call. Nope. They couldn't explain to my satisfaction just what the heck that $200 was for. So I said 'screw you NTT' and went with Yahoo (owned by Softbank) instead. Upside you just pay the monthly fee, downside is you have to wait a whole month for it to be installed & set up. So the guy was supposed to come between 1~5 pm last Wednesday to set it all up. Jumi was supposed to come & talk to him in Japanese for me. Only the guy shows up at like 11:30 instead which totally threw me off & Jumi was still in class so I was having a weird conversation with him. Then he went to get the key from the international office for the utility room so he could check that I had phone service. I thought he was supposed to have the modem but he didn't. Apparantly I was supposed to already have it (as if!) so about 2 hours after he left the modem showed up. Jumi helped me get it all set up and we hooked it up and tried to use it... only the modem didn't work. Piece of crap!!!!! So we called Yahoo (well jumi did) and they told her that they would deliver another one on saturday. I hate waiting for deliveries, especially when I don't KNOW when they are coming by. So I ended up waiting 'til about 3 on Saturday for the guy to show up with the new modem. But it worked so I was happy. :)

Yesterday I went with An to go see Always 2 which has just come out in Japan about 2 weeks ago. :) It was very good! But we got there about 5:00 and we missed the 1st showing & had to wait until 8:10 for the next one so we bummed around the mall a bit & ate at this 'chinese' restuarant. I'm telling you american chinese food is like 100x's better than japanese chinese food. Blech. Snot noodles, that's what they feed us, snot noodles. Reminded me of natto. And then we popped over to Lady Borden's to get some ice cream, and ran into Daiso to look for Barney a white board (they were sold out), and then we did the best thing ever!

We went & used one of those instant picture maker things. They have them all over japan in game centers but I've never used one before because I can't read the directions but now I know how to use them! Yeah!!!! So we took some silly pictures and then we got to use this station on the other side to put borders and sparkles and cat ears and stuff on the pictures. An picked some really small sizes for the photos tho' so most of them are about the size of the pad of my thumb, then some 1x1", and then 2 1x2" pics. The machine even offered to send (56k size) copies of the pics to our phone e-mail so that we could use them as wallpapers and such. So if I can get it to work I'll post them up here. Of course the quality will probably suck. Lol.


Then we went & saw the movie. In Japan you actually have to sit in an assigned seat that comes with your ticket. If you come early, or there's not that many people you can tell the cashier where you want to sit. It was really good! New characters & everybody ends up happy in the end. Just what I wanted to happen. Although I understood almost nothing of the dialogue and was whispering to An about it occassionaly when I couldn't figure out what was going on. Afterwards I was sooo tired it was like 11:00 and we had to take the train back & then we stopped at Sunkus to pick up some onigiri for Jin-chan (an-chan) and some chocolate for Barney because he was very nice & signed for my book when the delivery man came so I didn't have to wait around for it all day today. Yeah!

So I woke up this morning and it was SNOWING and it's kept snowing until after lunchtime. It was disgusting because I got all covered in snow on the way down and my pant legs got all wet. But after class it was crepe day in the lunchroom and we all got to have them. I had chocolate & banana, so did Seghir & Karolina, Pierre had strawberry and mandarin orange. So good! They only do it like once a month. ::sigh:: I wish they had the stuff here so we could make our own. Afterwards we went outside and had a snowball fight outside the caf. Soooo funny, I came out to go to the int'l office and got nailed by Pierre in the face. So I got him and Seghir and then Seghir went to buy some gloves, Karolina came out and we started all over again. LOL. We also got Gian, Eagle, and Ren as they wandered past on the way from lunch and Pierre attempted to get Takai sensei. That was hilarious because he came walking up to the caf, saw us, froze, and then ran like hell. Pierre almost got him too, he only missed him by about 6".

After that we were thorougly frozen and my gloves were soaked so I bought some hot cocoa to keep my hands warm and headed off to the int'l office to get directions to the immigration office so that I could get my re-entry permit for christmas time. :) Then I headed back to the dorms. All in all it's been an interesting day so far. I don't think I'm going to enjoy walking up & down the hill in the snow tho'. It'll be awfully slippery for something with that steep of a grade. And I don't have any boots! I want some tall knee high boots with flat heels so that I can look stylish & also keep my pants from getting wet in deeper snow. Lol. Probaby won't get any though, my parent's idea of boots involve big ugly ones with rubber fronts. If I asked them for boots I'd probably get the ugliest things ever seen, I'd probably get hipwaders or something. So anyway enjoy some pics of the 1st snow in Otaru & my time with An.