chistmaspresent failure, job interview, a monster at uniqlo and lots of mine! mine! mine!

today's christmas eve! yay! not that i'm religious or anything, in fact i'm atheist, but it's just nice anyway. it's a bit strange without my family, but i've got moto, so that's ok. we tried to find each other some presents and we gloriously failed. we even had some ideas and also searched the whole city back and forth, but since we both wanted to have a perfect present, we now ended up not having anything. haha.

this week i had a job interview at shimada design, whom i had applied to months ago and who i also met in frankfurt at an exhibition they had designed (less and more - dieter rams). my boss called them last week and told them about me and so i went there on tuesday at 8 pm (strange time). we could communicate thanks to a volunteer interpreter, since they don't speak english. it went really good, and they said even though there was the communication problem, they still would like to employ me somehow, maybe part-time. woooooh!! i hope it'll work out. and they gave the catalogue of the exhibition in germany to me as a present. :)

speaking of germany: what a f*ckin disgusting racist shit country. a friend of mine tries to find a new flat in düsseldorf, but since she is half black, people seem to prefer giving their flats to people living of social welfare rather than to her, who works as a well-paid webdesigner. it's making me sick.

k, now to the more random part.

first, a rather unusual collaboration between the clothings store uniqlo and the game monster hunter 3:

on tuesday, while doing some shopping, i found this mini lampstore, right next to a mini sweetsshop.

and this morning on my way to work there was this guy feeding gulls on a bridge at doutombori river:

mine.mine.mine.

sunday in sakai

a little sunday walk in sakai.

rubber ducks, hungry carp and the whole uncertainty the future has to offer

uuuuuuuuuuu, this uncertainty! it's killing me! my boss finally told me in a japanese way that he won't employ me (that means he didn't really say anything). so now i have to find a job really fast and takahashi-san isn't much of a help. first he suggested i should ask for a job at the german consulate (for whichever reason) and then he said he would call another agency to ask them if they have a job for me and he still hasn't told me if he reached them and if so, what they said. muuuuaaargh. it's really difficult to find something in osaka, most of the bigger agencies are in tokyo (of course, where else).

and also, there's the huge problem of me not speaking japanese. maybe i should go to one of those totally overpriced japanese schools for one or two months, cause what i did til now was those free lessons three times a week, which is some help, but by far not sufficient to actually communicate with people. and now the evening-course is over. we had a farewell tea-party yesterday evening which was really nice.

last week i walked through half the city to register at the ward office to get my alien registration card. i had to do that within three months after my arrival, now it's already been two months and i started to feel a bit uneasy about it, so i finally went there and after some minutes of the poor guy trying to read my handwriting everything was ok.

on my way back i walked down matsyamachi-suji ave. this street seems to contain only three things: japanese collector's dolls, cardboard boxes and tons of plastic toys that the world really doesn't need. but it looked very nice, hundreds of little rubber ducks and frogs and masses of other colourful things, all sleeping in their cardboxes.

my boyfriend (let's just call him moto) and i spent the whole weekend at his place and on saturday we went to daisen park by bike. most of the leaves have already said goodbye to their trees and so the ground was covered with red and yellow. we met some very interesting creatures as well.

fooooooood!!!

and now something totally unrelated that i've been wanting to show you for a long time. my boss's mousepad:

amazing, right?

   

blueberry popcorn on a geman christmas market in japan and other trivia

two months! yay! and i didn't even realise it until today. this month went by even faster than the last one, but it feels a lot longer. the more you do, the less you think about the time passing and your memory fills up with so much you later think it must have been at least three times the time it took to do all that.

last sunday my boyfriend and i went to a german christmas market to get in the christmas mood and to find some european sweets for this season. we didn't really succeed on that, there were lots of sausage stands, glühwein and a lot of oktoberfest gingerbread hearts, all of this so immensely overprized that in the end we only got some multi-flavoured popcorn. which is delicious, but my bf says popcorn is supposed to be salty, so i have it to myself. hehe.

grand prize to the person that knows why i wrote it like that.

blueberry, strawberry and caramel flavoured popcorn. omnomnom.

we also went up on the roof of sky building (a huge skyscraper). from there you can even see the ocean and in the evening, when the sun sets, osaka begins to sparkle from all the lights.

yesterday evening i went to the album release concert of jrock singer/guitarist miyavi. i saw him last year in munich, which was one of the best concerts i have ever been to. but there were so many little wannabe emo girls screaming and jumping around. this one was really different, of course there were many girls, but also a lot of guys and some not-that-young-anymore women. the crowd wasn't screaming or dancing or anything, but they were listening to the music with what felt like admiration and great respect. and miyavi proved to be truly worth of that. it was only him and his drummer and it was just great. his music starts to live and breathe when played live and even though i have listened to his songs over and over again, it still feels like something completely new and unique.

ah, btw, the new my chemical romance album (danger days: the true lives of the fabulous killjoys) has been released two weeks ago and it's AWESOME. this whole concept album thing is working so well that i started to believe in being a part of this post-apocalypse-like killjoy-world sometimes. by browsing some pics i found the guy who did all the pictures for that, his name is neil krug. i really like his work, his website is neilkrug.com.

have a nice week!

   

jackets, a long walk, autumn leaves and talented people

i feel that lately i didn't really put anything personal up here (= trivial things like clothing, likes&dislikes and so on). soooo, i'll just throw random stuff at you and you'll have to filter out what interests you. ha!

since it's not really warm here (although i feel it got better again), i had to buy some jackets cause, being the intelligent person that i am, i didn't take anything like a woolen pullover or even just more than one old sweater with me from germany. there's just one little problem: the sleeves are way too short, it's so hard to find something that at least covers most of my arm (not to speak of the trousers, it's simply impossible to find something that is even close to long enough (for those who don't know: i'm 1,80m tall)). but, after some searching, i got me a puffy down jacket from uniqlo and a very pink sweater from my favorite store, which again proved that they have everything i'm looking for.

last thursday my boyfriend (who doesn't like to have his name in the www) and i went to arashiyama, which is close to kyoto, to enjoy the autumn leaves. and even though it was a regular working day, it was pretty crowded. but luckily, the leaves are usually above the people, so that didn't really disturb us.

we also went to see ryoanji temple and it's famous rock garden (being an ignorant person, i didn't know about it, but i'm not a buddhist, so whatever). they say, the longer you look at it, the more your imagination makes out of it. which would actually be really nice, it's just that you can't do that without people trying to squeeze past you so they can take pictures. which, of course, i did as well.

since my bf seems to have difficulties in estimating distances (only in kyoto, he sais), we walked A LOT. also, arashiyam/kyoto seem to have banned any conbinis (convenience store) , we didn't eat anything but some sweets until five pm and so, by the end of the day we were both standing in the train back to osaka (of course, all seats were taken) and felt like the walking dead. we have to find some way between doing absolutely nothing and killing ourselves by sightsseing.

browsing through the illustration annuals at the office, i found this really great one: otaniryuji.com

and i found this page as well, this is just insane: fredrikodman.com

not insane but i love it

k, enough randomness for today! tell me about the things you recently discovered or that you like!

    

how to cure luxurious discontent and autumn leaves in mino-o

there's a good cure against arrogance and the thought of not having everything you want.

every time i walk through the park between the subway station and the office, i see a lot of homeless people. they're living in selfmade huts at a corner of this park, made out of sheet iron and plastic bags and this is almost the town center. i saw them washing with icecold water at a temperature at which i was wearing a woolen dufflecoat. in the morning they sometimes dry their clothes on the guard rail of the small artificial lake. and a few days ago i saw one of them sitting by the entrance of the subway (it is a bit warmer there), eating raw meat out of aluminium foil and really don't want to know which animal that was, the ribs were pretty small. 

and i bet there's people living under far worse conditions. so, everytime i start to think "ah, my apartment's so cold", "the food's so expensive" or "i wish i wasn't an intern anymore", i just think of the people living in ogimachi park and my problems shrink to embarrassed little dustflakes.

ok, now from the unpleasant to the pleasant. 

last tuesday we went to mino-o, which is in the north of osaka, to admire the colourchanging of the leaves. we were a bit early on purpose, cause next week the place would be so overcrowded with people trying to capture the beauty of autumn with their mobile phone cameras. 

there's a nice path/street leading through the forests by the side of a river, passing some temples and shrines and ending at a waterfall. i really enjoy how in japan each season is celebrated with some traditions like special food or decoration. people here seem to be a lot more aware of the nature surrounding them. not that in other countries people don't enjoy autumn leaves, it's just that here the fascination you had as a child for some things doesn't get lost or buried under the stress of daily life.