last entry on here

i had to realise that i'm a lazy person. i don't write often enough and the less you write the less important it gets to you. but, of course, i'm still taking pictures which i would like to share. so if you're interested in that, here's the address to my tumblr where from now on i will post pics (and hopefully more often):
http://anajasin.tumblr.com/

and if you're interested in graphic design/art/design, here's my other tumblr:
http://isltn.tumblr.com/

thank you for reading till now!
see you there or somewhere else,
♥

that apartment thing again and new year's fortune paper slip

first something that upset me so much yesterday that i cried in public (which made my groceries-shopping quite difficult).

through an ad on one of those foreigner in japan websites i had found a canadian girl that was searching for a roommate. on sunday we finally met to get to know each other. she had already found a british girl, but was open to share an apartment with two people as well. everything went fine and so yesterday morning we went to an real estate agency together. the british girl seemed nice too and we started our hunt for a apartment.

the more we saw (we went to another agency as well), the less we felt confident of finding something that came even close to be ok and not totally overpriced. also, my senses wouldn't stop tingling, but i ignored them ... until (back at the first agency), the canadian girl's bitchiness reached a peak and i couldn't take it anymore. we exchanged some words, quickly leading to my decision that this would definitely not work and the sooner we parted the better. so i left that place, honestly glad to not have to put up with that girl anymore, but at the same time devastated because now i was back at the start of finding a place to live, which at that moment seemed impossible to me. and also, i'm not used to being attacked out of the blue by some emotionally unbalanced, rude stranger. yes, wahwah, but i just felt awful.

so, back home (after that awkward shopping trip), i threw myself to searching through those gaijin websites and i actually found some very promising stuff. i'm pretty positive one of those will work out, some already replied and asked when i wanted to see the apartment. phew.

but now to new year's eve (a bit late)!

to my deep disappointment, there's no firework on new year's eve in japan. instead, people go to a shrine and pray for the next year to be a good one. we (moto and me) went there a little after twelve (freeeeeezing cold!) and joined a swelling stream of people heading to the shrine. turning the last corner, we suddenly stood in the middle of a little festival, lots of people wrapped in thick jackets, a sweets and food area and of course a huge queue leading to the front of the shrine.

the queue leading to the front of the shrine

there was a stand where you could shake a big wooden thing and depending on which stick fell out of the hole on the bottom, you would get a slip of paper that tells your fortune for the next year. of course i had to try that! it took me forever to shake one of those sticks out, probably holding it wrong. finally i got it and moto translated it for me. my fortune for 2011 is a bit ma ma, i think there's five different levels, probably mine was nr 3. moto's was 2, so a bit better. i don't remember much, only thing that was very clear was that i should not travel west this year, any other direction is fine. so no visiting my family this year.

it also said my studies and my business situation would be difficult, but it will work out. hope so.

fortune!

mini shrine on an island near the big one

 the next day we went there again and the queue was even longer!

back to recent events: i hope that i will get some real work soon at the office, till now the only thing i did was making copies, scanning wedding magazines and, not to forget, clean coffee cups, the rest of the day i had to myself. not what i call a fulfilling job, but i can't complain, at least at the moment. better this than cleaning dishes in a bar all night. and maybe it will change soon. it has to, at some point ... right?

    

goodbye to kokokumaru, posing birds and china-street in kobe

soooo, i haven't made any real post in a while. i was really not doing much since from dec 29 to jan 04 everybody was on holidays and so moto and i mainly spent that time at his place.

tuesday 28th was my last day of work at kokokumaru. they sorted through all the books and stuff, i wasn't really much of a help and so the only thing i did was carrying bags full of old magazines and paper downstairs. takahashi san gave his books (a collection of old japanese medicine packaging (a rarity, the publisher doesn't exist any more), one containing all his work, the one that he and makiko made about the doll who was missing a leg and and a book about all the fonts he created) to me as a present and said that he really enjoyed having me in his office and that i could visit him anytime. aaah, so sad, i really didn't want to leave!

after everything was sorted, we went to have the new year's and goodbye dinner. and since makiko is leaving, too (she's going to tokyo, after working for kokokumaru for 11 years), it was a double-goodbye.

at the restaurant i saw something that 1st made me want to throw up immediately and 2nd made me sooo happy that i'm vegetarian. takahashi san ordered a lobster kind of thing. what came to the table was the lobster ripped in two halves, his legs torn out and the raw flesh wrapped around them. and it was still alive. this may seem like a perfectly normal thing to a japanese, but to me it was one of the cruelest things i have ever seen.

but anyway, the rest of the evening was very nice and then we finally said goodbye. müüüh.

and now to some pictures! on dec 30 moto and i went to kobe, his hometown, which is about 40 minutes by train from osaka. on the way we stopped in rokko to eat waffles in an original dutch wafelhuis. oh, they were good!

in kobe we took a futuristic train to one of the artificial islands in kobe harbor to get to a birds and flowers garden (kobe kachoen). the birds were flying past our ears, sitting on peoples outstretched arms and posing elegantly for the cameras.

on the way back moto and i received a lot of bewildered looks while we were trying to capture the ride in what in the late 70s was the future and which still is pretty impressive.

we didn't have that much time left, so we quickly walked through some otaku-stores (stores selling dolls, figurines and other useless, wantwantwant stuff) and china-town-street.

this was kobe. coming soon: the new year and the prophecy, that traveling west is really a bad idea for me this year.


   

reflection

what am i doing here? what do i expect this to become? if it's not making me happy, should i change it? or just wait? i wanted to travel, see new places, meet new people and now i'm stuck waiting for things to turn out good, craving for a tiny bit of safety. i'm not done traveling. but i don't want to lose the chance of starting an independent life either. i can't always rely on my family's money. so what's happening now is not an adventure, but the real life hitting me in the face. i'm waking up. i didn't want to, but i have to. now.

and now, two hours after posting this, i get the mail from the design agency that i can start on tuesday and they will pay my rent and transportation! life, thank you.

   

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!