Put it in the Curry

As I write my project work is finally all finished and I've thrown away anything related to it! Much relief. I went in on Tuesday morning feeling a little bit apprehensive, but somehow once we got started my performance-y instincts kicked in and I actually had fun with it. The fact that we were in a lecture-hall-type classroom and I got to speak through a microphone and use a pointy-stick to draw my audience's attention to pie charts probably added to this effect. Hurrah for toys! Apart from the group I was in, which talked about Fashion Sub-Cultures, I also saw presentations about New Year Gifts, Karaoke, Host Clubs, a brand called Comme de Garcons and mobile 'phone novels. Much of this was interesting, well presented and allowed me to gain knowledge on subjects I had little or no idea about before, so it was definitely worth showing up.

I spent most of the rest of the day wallowing in the satisfaction of completion of this worth-10%-of-final-grade-but-takes-over-a-month-to-do-for-some-reason milestone, mainly in my room vegging out while watching morning television on YouTube. Of course, since it was Japanese morning television ("Hello Morning" to be specific) it had all sorts of cute and bizarre humour, and I could vaguely justify it in my mind as being some kind of revision.

"But what about Wednesday, Cal?" I hear you ask. Once released from morning lessons I took it into my head to do something absolutely essential but that I'd been putting off for some time - getting a re-entry visa. To give a bit of background my student visa entitles me to stay in Japan until December 2011, but it gets voided if I leave before then, so I need special permission to come back after going home for Christmas. So far this makes reasonable sense, but unlike most things relating to living in Japan which can be applied for at a local ward office, re-entry visas are available exclusively from the Immigration Bureau, which is located way off the beaten track, almost in the sea, in fact. I suppose I can understand that mentality - immigrants sometimes arrive or depart from the port, so put the place dealing with immigration near there, but I don't see why there can only be one. Furthermore the nearest landmark to navigate my way there was the city's race track, and I can't imagine walking past shambling semi-corpses with that expression on there face of "If I back just one good horse I can get my life back on track" is really going to encourage people to settle here on a more permanent basis.

Now that you're familiar with my thoughts on the Immigration Bureau as a concept, I got there by taking an underground train to an overground train station, where the best thing to do would have been to catch an overground train to another station, then take a train on a different line to a stop not far from my destination. Or so I thought at one time. I could in fact have taken another underground to somewhere almost as close, but in fact I didn't do either of these, but tried to walk there, navigating with a map and the position of the sun. I got lost once or twice but managed to make it there, where the actual process for getting the visa was refreshingly quick, simple and painless. And since I'll never have to go back there I'd call the entire operation an unwarranted success!

In other news the electronic water heating device in our kitchen recently broke, so I have to use an old iron kettle on a hob to make tea now, which is surprisingly pleasantly nostalgic.

Some roadsigns are no help at all