Hell Is Other Blogs

Hello a welcome to yet another blog installment of Phil MacBanus' Japantime Fun-Blog. Now since last time, I've actually done pretty much nothing. Except for go to Pachio-co again for nomihodai and then get some karaoke on immediately after that. That was fun as I assume you can imagine, but for the sake of some of the people I went with, I will not go into anymore detail than that, but we did have a good time. Oh also we didn't have electricity for like 4 hours yesterday and that was pretty awful.

The reason I wanted to do a blog today, even though I didn't have much to talk about, is to mention some of the differences between America and Japan. Now I know people know about the obvious differences such as they drive on the other side of the road and speak Japanese. There are little things though that one might not even care to think about until he or she was here. For example in Japan, you turn keys the other way to lock and unlock them, and the position of the deadbolt is opposite. Vertical is unlocked and horizontal is locked. Also, in America it is quite common to pay only with credit and debit cards, but in Japan only a few places take cards. Toilet handles to flush toilets point down and many public toilets have two types of flushing so that water can be saved if a big flush isn't needed. In Japan, expiration dates are down the hour that they will go bad. Also the fish is so fresh here, that you can't even smell it when you walk by the fish market.

I found yet another difference while going to all the stores I went to. It seems in Japan that generally things that are cheap in America are more expensive here, and things that are expensive in America are cheap here. So like I couldn't find a shirt for less that $30 when I was shopping. To be fair I haven't yet looked over every single store yet, but since Japanese people care more about fashion than we do in America, it is not surprising. Also fruit is more expensive here especially melons, which I guess are very popular. You can buy pre-cooked meals in supermarkets for as low as $3. There are probably more things I'm forgetting, or really I'm just too lazy to keep thinking about them.

Well yeah Japan is crazy different, but not so different that I'm suffering or anything. The people here are insanely nice and very understanding of my limited Japanese skills, which become less limited everyday. I think that's all a feel like writing for today. I might go to the second hand store tomorrow and pick up a famicom; they're only 500 yen.