Happy Chinese New Year for everyone!
Well, I actually just found it out today. Today me, Pamela and Chaminda got together to go to the Nagareyama Recycle Shop. Many people have heard about japanese throwing perfectly working television sets on the trash, and other people picking them up. While that might well have been the truth during the boom years, it is no longer so. Either the people who throw things away decided that selling them would be a better idea, or someone had this great idea of scouring other people’s trash for sellable things… all in all, we have the recycle shop, also known as second-hand shop, or “sebo”.
Anyway, the shop was pretty interesting, with lots of tea sets, used clothing and used furnitude. There were some rare gems, like a set with an earth globe together with a sky globe. I would buy it, but I have nowhere to put that at my place right now. So I bought some furnitude, and a wallclock featuring a medieval europe map behind it.
Also there was a 1m high Darth Vader doll, but it was 150.000 yen (and my monthly stipend is 180.000 yen… :-()
After that, we went to pamela’s to have some tea and chat. And then Chaminda and I went back to the lab. On the way, we decided to stop on a very small chinese restaurant. The owners were so scared of seeing two gaijin coming in out of nowhere, that they even forgot their “irrashaimase”s >.< . The food wasn’t great either, but there was a calendar of nude japanese girls that became the center of our discussions for the night. *^_^* Of course, that calendar had the name of an auto shop. Autos are Autos, even in japan.
Changing the subject a little, I found this nice little online webgame: Urban Dead. You are thrown in a city with a zombie plage, in the best “evil dead” style. Your goal is to stay alive as long as possible, while a zombie horde will hunt you for your brains… BUT! if you die, you’ll become a zombie yourself. The game has no MOBs, both zombies and humans are players. It is simple, yet seems quite nice.
Right now the zombies are gathering to invade all the malls in the city. They have already taken all but two of the malls, one is being sieged right now, and the other, the las t one, is the only place where the humans were successfull against the zombie attack. The zombies crave for vengeance!
If you start to play that game, tell me 
January 29th, 2006 at 5:51 pm
Que coincidência. .Hoje eu assisti com o meu pai Star Wars Episode II ATTACK OF THE CLONES . O meu pai não gostou muito do filme porque the “Invincible Villain” - Darth Vader não apareceu. Aliás, desde o Episode I ele não faz mais parte do filme nessa nova versão. Será que não seria este o motivo da pessoa se desfazer do Darth Vader no Recycle Shop?? Percebi que os japoneses adoram o Darth Vader . Ele deve ser o “Grande Samurai do Espaço ” … - Que a Força esteja com vocês !! :0 )
January 29th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
The best I got from a quarterly Sodai-gomi was an audio setup and a VCR, both were working fine. However, that was not anywhere near Tokyo, but south of Kyoto. I think the recycle shops are much more popular here.
Now for the incident with the restaurant. Most old Japanese are easily overwhelmed by encountering more than one foriegner at the same time. The best way to get to know people, is to venture alone.
One more thing. I met an old couple in Kashiwanoha kouen, they knew you well :-).