This is what happened to me tonight, just replace "fireworks" with "Swedish furniture giant", and "taken away from" with "taken into". I went, ladies and gentlemen, to IKEA.
To most of you, that will mean very little. "So what, the guy went to a furniture store. Next he's gonna tell us about the time he went to Saitama to see the Urawa Reds football team play Bayern Munich". And you'd be right, since that's what I did last Monday, and I do intend to tell you about it in a while, if I can manage. But I digress.
For an Älmhultian [Wikipedia: "Älmhultian" - noun, refering to person or artifact originating from IKEA-ville, which up until the mid-21st century went by the name "Älmhult"] who's spent some two years in Japan, it's as close to a religious experience as you can get in this secularised world of ours. Instant recognition overpowers all the senses as you walk through the door, and until you leave, you just can't help but going around smiling like a retarded person. Not that I know anything about the smile-ratios of retarded people, but I hope they smile a lot. Never is looking at stuff you've grown up around more enjoyable than when said stuff is airlifted 7000 miles to end up in a huge building out in Minami-Funabashi.
I had hotdogs. They were almost as cheap as they are in Sweden; something of a miracle all its own. And they tasted fine, oh, so fine. I paid for them in the traditional... Wait, no. Here's where you start to see the changes. See, I paid for them with my commuters card, the Suica. For those of you in Sweden, the obvious analogy would be referencing the "Cash-card" of a few years back, with the only difference being that people use Suica to actually pay for stuff. There were other, more subtle differences too, but in a last-ditch attempt to keep the one reader who made it this far interested in what I have to say, I shall let them slide this time, and instead present you with:
Due to circumstances partly within and partly without my control I spent a rather fine 25 minutes (!) at a train station out in Chiba. At first, I was annoyed, but then, I noticed there was sky around, and my duty to look at it.
Continuing with the photo theme, I present you with a big building in a big part of a big city. It is a place where they keep many stores, among others the one which provided me with a Yamanote-line clock the other day. Currently, all time in my room is told along the lines of which station that little train is arriving. Right now, it's approaching "Nippori minutes to Takadanobaba". It's a fine system.
By the way, I really did go to that football game, but it wasn't really much to write home about, as it were. Urawa managed to win against a Bayern Munich whom I'm sure were giving it their all. Just that the 15 players in the team all had a bad day at once, including Olli Kahn, about whom a fine piece of music has been composed (sadly, permalink is unavailable at this time, head there fast for the full experience!). Said Olli let an own goal slip between the posts, but it was deemed inadmissable on account of a defender breaking the rules in scoring the own goal. You'd think that you couldn't really avoid an own goal by making one more error, but such are the rules. And they say people can't wrap their heads around cricket.In the week or so since the last post, I've also been to Saitama to say hello to Japanese people I know, Swedish people I know, and sing songs I very much don't know in karaoke. It was a grand old time. It's also been a little busy since my girlfriend got herself a gorgeous new apartment only four stops away from Shinjuku, in Kouenji. For those of you following the long-distance Japanese class, that translates as "Temple of the expensive yen". Seriously.
Which leads me nicely to my final point. As has been known for some time, money can by happiness. I just never knew they sold it at IKEA, and only charged 290 yen for it. (For those not so well-versed in Swedish, please use your imagination)
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