2004-04-01

Got out of a meeting this afternoon. I think my dept. head might be feeling kind of bad that I had to sit through all these long, all-Japanese meetings so he's basically given me a free pass the rest of the week. SCORE!

Because I suddenly had the afternoon free, I headed into Chiba with John (the American guy missionary). Chiba is allegedly the provincial capital and is about the midpoint between here and Tokyo. I looked up on the 'net and the 2004 population is about 900,000--so it's a big city. We went shopping and in typical guy style--came back with NOTHING. I wanted to browse some music stores to check out cheap guitars, which is like trying to find good Indian food in Eastern Washington. Speaking of Indian food, there's an Indian restaurant in Chiba! I will have to check that out sometime. I would have on this visit but I was critically low on cash. Anyway, I projectile vomit on Japanese music stores. I GUESS if I had about 1000 dollars to spend I'd be fine, but I'm looking more in the $150 range and there's NOTHING. And don't plan on coming to Japan to buy shirts in the department stores. I was looking at the standard business-class shirts, which were priced at over 10,000 yen which is over 100 bucks. I think the place we were shopping was pretty upscale, but I was still appalled at the prices. Silly rich folk.

Good news waiting when we came back from our failed shopping excursion: The gym is open! Bad news: My basketball game has fled in the 4 or so months it's been dormant. I'm going to have to spend at least two weeks just getting my mechanics back. And the gym is in not so good shape. The floors are slippery, so playing defense is roughly akin to roller-skating on a glacier.

Shopping in the big city is rough. I'm out for now.