Week 8 in Japan: Jazz club and Purikura プリクラ

        My eighth week in Japan, coming your way now. As you may or may not have noticed my last blog was like three days late so I'll start off telling you about Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and why they I was too busy to blog.
        First off this past week was very busy with homework and studying. We had a day off a week ago because a professor took a day off so to make up for it and to get ready for midterms there has been a lot to do. Other than that on Monday I went to jazz club for the first time. I used to play bass a decent amount especially through high school but stopped playing competely in college and the summer after. The club went from 7-9 but it's pretty laid back so people come and go as they want and need to. We had a drummer, piano player, trombone, saxaphone, guitar, and me on bass. The first song was pretty rough because I had kind of forgotten how to read sheet music so I got lost a lot while we played. The next couple songs were better though. One song you might know that we played was "Georgia On My Mind".
        Tuesday I met with Ryouen (featured in previous blogs) to do an interview for a good friend of hers in China. It was some project that needed an outsiders opinion on a couple questions. The questions were first off: "How do you find success?" second: "What kind of success will you pursue?" then a few others like "What's are the advantages of the U.S. education system" and "What's the shortcomings of the American education system?" the shortcomings were easier to name. I made up answers on the spot so I can't remember what I said now but just think of the smartest thing possible and that's probably not what I said at all.
     Wednesday my friend Kaori and I met to help her with her English. We went to a "burger" place thats name translates to "Surprised Donkey". I put burger in quotations because in Japan it is called a burger place but to my surprise there are no actual hamburgers being sold. Just burger itself with rice, curry, or cheese or something. It was tasty but much different from American style burgers. Don't get me wrong though they have McDonalds here in Japan so you can still get your burger fix if need be.
     Next I'm going to skip all the way to Sunday which was the best day of the week for me. At noon I met with my friend Marina who I know from my part time job and a class we have together. First we had lunch at a really good Italian restaurant called Nove. It was really delicious, very tasty, and yummy. Next we went to a the biggest mall in Akita called AEON to do some shopping. The main thing we were looking for was a winter jacket for me. The thing is having talked to Marina in the past I knew she liked to shop and she has cool style so I asked her to help me pick out a new jacket. At first we were not finding much because I didn't really know where to start or what I wanted other than something warm that covered the top half of my body. However since I truly wanted her help and advice I told her we could pretend like I was a rich or famous person (both is good too) and she was my fashion coach who needed to buy clothes for me or at least help guide me because I have no real fashion sense (the last part is true). From there things went better at least in my eyes. We looked at lots of different jackets. I ended up getting one I really liked I'll probably be wearing it in future pictures so keep your eyes open, not shut.
      While at the mall we also decided to do Purikura. I had never done it before but I had heard about it. Basically it's like a photo booth that we have in the United States accept better in every way. Purikura is taken with a really nice camera so the pictures turn out really nice and then afterwards you can edit them. The biggest difference about Purikura is that it will automatically make some changes that are supposed to make you look better. The two things that are most noticable to me are that your eyes are bigger and your skin is more pale. It was 200 yen (total, not per person) to do one session and I guess it's normally 400 yen but it was a special deal for some reason on that particular day. So you go in take six pictures and then edit them afterwards. The editing process is a little annoying because there are tons of options but you have to make decisions really fast because there is a countdown timer. I made the mistake of choosing a bunch of small pictures with the same pics on the photo slab twice each. Oh well. Lastly It's worth mentioning that at the end you have an option that I think is very popular and that is to send the pictures digitially to a phone address. It doesn't cost anything extra and you still get the physical copy. The problem was neither of us had a phone address that they allowed so we just got the physical copies. Somehow only having the physical copy feels less real to me in some ways. I'll maybe scan the picture later to get better quality but for now I have pictures that I took with my Nexus 4 of the picture. If you go to Japan I highly reccommend trying Purikura, I was kind of reluctant at first to do it but somehow it ended up being extremely fun for me haha. The experience alone really was worth the money.
      This was a long blog post so if you made it this far thanks for reading and please check back again next week. Here are some pictures that I took:

 I went running on Thursday and Sunday at 6:30am. Crazyness for me to wake up that early but it's pretty great to see the sunrise. My friend Richenmin and I run from the apartment to the park. I feel like sunrises are special and worth waking up for... on occasion.

 A grocery store that I normally don't shop at has a giant bean stock leading to a castle in the sky. I'm a fan of Jack and the Bean Stock.

 Here are the pictures. The whole thing from taking photos to having them in your hands I think takes around 10 minutes. The dollar is for scale and cuz merica'.

 Part of what makes this fun is that it happens pretty fast so you kind of improvise as you go. The one on the left here is my favorite. I asked what a good pose was and that's what she came up with. Gonna use it all the time now o(≧▽≦)o