15 - Hokkaido

Right-o, this is gonna be a long one, I expect. Fortunately I have a long time to work on it. Today I’m going to tell you all about Pete and Steph’s magical fantasy trip to the distant, snowy land of Hokkaido. Obviously it wasn’t all that snowy in the mid-summer, and ‘fantasy’ isn’t a word that describes it all that well either. But a great trip it most certainly was, and I shan’t be forgetting it all too soon.

TUESDAY

Monday was a day off, we decided, to prepare for the journey ahead. We packed, sorted everything out, printed off Steph’s itinerary (regardless of whether we would be following it all that closely) and took an early night. I think. Honestly I can’t remember if we managed that or not. Something tells me I was up until 3am playing Borderlands.

Oh well. We set off Tuesday mid-day, arriving in Sannomiya at about 10.30 and Kansai International around 11.15. This gave us a good hour and a bit to check in to our domestic flight and run ourselves through the dreaded gauntlet of airport security.

Except, it turns out that there’s only one domestic flight company that runs outta KIX, and that was ours. Peach, it’s called, and is every bit as saccharinely pink as you are probably imagining. And it has its own building, some sorta repurposed shopping centre thing. And you know what this means? It means check in and security are dead, dead easy. We arrived at Kansai International with an hour and a quarter before the flight. We arrived in the lobby with just over an hour left.

I love domestic flying in Japan. It is ace. Compared to the UK, where you get the full security just for going from East Midlands to Manchester. Or, as was my most unpleasant experience, changing in Manchester from Heathrow before going on to Edinburgh. When the only contraband they’re gonna find would have been given to us BY THEM. Not so in Japan. For a country so rigid in their international entry rituals, they are exceedingly relaxed about letting people fly around in their own airspace. Like, you’ve already passed the trustworthiness test, so you’re all good. Your bags go through the x-ray, you walk through the metal gate, and you’re good to go. It really is as easy as it sounds. And the staff! I have never met such polite folk in all my life, and that’s polite like they actually mean it rather than polite like they have a really thick, probably quite stuffy mask on. Even in x-ray, when the one guy working the machine stopped my bag to look closer at the jumbled mess of wiring within, he then took it off the conveyor on the other side and handed it to me with a smile and a ‘Sorry for making you wait.’ I get the feeling that even if I WAS carrying something illegal, they would have apologised for the hassle of arresting me.

So, in the air for about two and a half hours. Electronic devices off, folks, during take off and landing. I spent the time I had on the Kindle, which can deactivate its wireless. That’s okay, right? I’m pretty sure it is. Nearly finished Song of Susannah, will be on to The Dark Tower in no time. Need to buy it first, though, electronically.

We arrived in New Chitose airport at about 3, maybe 4. From there we took the train to Sapporo for an early dinner. I remember the train well, with its weird, yellow, 80s wallpaper and British voice. I remember a certain embarrassing photo being taken of me while a slept on a train just like that. Forgive and forget, that’s what I say. Anyway, Sapporo was cool and crisp, not like a certain humid in the extreme city I could mention, which starts with a K and doesn’t rhyme with ‘strobe’ even though it looks like it should. The air was clear, the wind was strong, it was good to be alive. And to make matters even better, the Sapporo Beer Festival was in town. Not that I had any beer while I was there. Instead, we went to old favourite Fuu-getsu, an okonomiyaki place which makes the stuff at your table. We both had potato-mochi-cheese, because that’s totally not what we have every other time we have okonomiyaki. After that it was back on the train (same line, same direction) to Otaru.

I remember Otaru. I remember the ice sculptures down the canal, and the candles. I remember snow deep enough to lose yourself in. I remember the bridge…

It was nice to be back, but out of winter the little seaside town didn’t have quite the same magic as I remembered. It was quaint, yeah, and chock full of memories, but it didn’t really have anything to do. Cheap karaoke, but we didn’t have time for that. So Steph and I retired early to our hotel room which, yes, totally used to be a bank vault.

WEDNESDAY

It would have been a late start on Wednesday, as we weren’t expected at out next hotel until the evening, but I ended up awake at 7am for the hotel’s free breakfast of bread and coffee. I’m always of two minds about coffee these days. On the one hand, if drunk correctly, it can be a wonderful pick-me-up on days when I feel like sleeping. On the other, if drunk incorrectly, it leaves me feeling sleepy but also buzzing, which is unpleasant. I think on Wednesday morning I may have tiptoed eerily on the line, but still left the hotel ready to go.

We spent the morning up Mt. Tengu, named after the long-nosed demons that are said to haunt it. We didn’t see any tengus, but we did walk around the peak, feed some chipmunks (or whatever they were, we couldn’t decide) and look at some shrines. It was a nice mountain, a little resort-y to properly praise it as a really good place to visit. And it ate the day away enough to get us hungry.

We arrived back in Sapporo around 12, ready for lunch at Subway. We had originally planned in some time for shopping around, but I have navigational skills of a blind man with no short term memory and so most of that time was spent walking in one direction, realising we weren’t going the right way, and walking back again. I did get a look at Sapporo’s Anime and Manga Academy, which sounds awesome but probably isn’t. It’s like when your teacher announced that you’re going to be studying Studio Ghibli movies that term, but by the end of that term you’re so sick of Spirited Away and Boring no Totoro the class has actually managed to take the fun out of your passion. It’d be like that, I reckon.

On the coach this time to Toyako-onsen, down in the south of Hokkaido. I didn’t realise until I was there that it being south would make it hotter than Sapporo, but I realised as soon as we got there. Boy did I realise. The coach trip was about the same as the flight, about two and a half hours, and although wireless transmissions and phones were a-okay that time on the bus was somehow less bearable than the plane had been. I reckon that this was because you only have two stops on a plane. You don’t have to push a little button when you get close to where you want to get off, which is made problematic when the place you want to get off is a sparsely populated bit of road that you’ve never been to before. The last half an hour or so was a bit tense, I can tell you, as we crossed our fingers and hoped that soon the bus’ electronic voice would inform us that the promised Sun Palace-mae stop would be upon us soon.

Okay, just had a quick break there, so if this next bit seems a little disjointed I apologise. What, read it through and pick up my train of thought, you suggest? Bah! This stuff comes as it does, I won’t sully it with redrafts!

So, Toyako-onsen, then. Lake Toya is a pretty awesome natural spectacle. The lake was formed however many thousands of years ago when an extinct volcano crater (a huge one, about a half mile across I think) got flooded with freshwater which then receded. A few thousand years later the volcano decides it’s not quite as sleepy as it thought and has one last go at puffing out some magma. The result is a new, much smaller volcano peak in the middle of the crater which, when it finally does settle down, becomes covered in wildlife (somehow, we never figured out how the deer swam across to the island) and foliage and becomes Nakanoshima, the island in the middle. Tokako-onsen is a natural hot spring town on the shores of Lake Toya, and was where we were staying. We arrived about 7pm.

Our lodgings went by the name of Kawanami, a traditional-style ryoukan with its own hot spring bath. Naturally heated, it assured us. I have to admit to my cynicism about the place when Steph first told me about it. Traditional? Middle of nowhere? What manner of place was this that she was taking me! It sounded a little too much like some place where the owners meant well but didn’t quite have the money to renovate some place from the 60s leaving it a bit dank. I was wrong. Kawanami is a really excellent little place, with big, airy rooms that look directly out onto the lake (daily fireworks in the summer, another fortunate coincidence), and friendly staff to boot. The baths were free to use almost all day every day, and there was even a hireable private bath if you were nervous about getting naked with the other visitors. Steph and I used the much sneakier, less expensive method of going at about midnight, when no-one in their right minds would want a bath. The only problem was the food, which was served at the usual mealtimes for an added cost, and which was VERY traditional. Nothing vegetarian, you see.

That first night was pretty bad for food. We ended up walking about town searching for somewhere, anywhere which did vegetarian food and wasn’t shut, and ended up in this posh little shop about a 15 minute walk from our lodgings. The waitress, bless her heart, was obviously not used to vegetarians, and gave us a scathing look when we asked to see the menu before deciding on the place. We paid her back for that by accidentally eating well past the closing hours. The food wasn’t half bad, though, and although it was pretty darned expensive you got a lot for your money. Steph praised the de-bacon’d gratin and I had to admit to quite enjoying the Megasalmon vs. Giant Shrimp meal set, despite not really being one for seafood. Home late, bath later, then sleep.

THURSDAY

We awoke kinda early. Not that early. Kinda. Early enough for breakfast to still be breakfast and not lunch.

Speaking of which, breakfast was served by the convenience store across the road from our ryoukan. We also bought ourselves a lunch, which we eventually ate by the shores of Lake Toya. I don’t remember being in a good mood that morning. Actually, I don’t remember either of us being in a good mood that morning. Don’t ask me why, though, I don’t remember that either. Anyway, about midday we took a gaudy boat across the water to Nakanoshima, which doesn’t have a whole lot on it except for deer and a small museum. Oh, and a couple of swans, which the island warns visitors about approaching but offers food to let them feed the things. More than once I watched on, horrified, as a Japanese family attempted to feed the birds from their hand and got chased away for their charity. One boy even got bit for real, but he didn’t seem to mind all that much. The deer were a bit frantic as well. The store offered food to feed them, too, and they went mental for it. There was this one deer, went by the number of 54 I think, who would beat the others with her head just to get at the biscuits. Naturally, we did our best to not reward this barbaric behaviour, throwing them to the small fellow who kept to the back of the ruckus. We stayed for a couple of hours, wading in the shores and watching the waves, before heading on back to the mainland.

From there we had a number of possibilities. There are all manner of touristy things to do on the shores of Lake Toya, but we decided that, with dinnertime approaching, we wanted to do something shorter. In the end, we rented out a small rowboat (which I discovered too late was too small for Steph’s nerves) and rowed about on the lake for just over an hour. It was nice, being out on the water like that, and I didn’t feel as ridiculous as I would have done had we rented one of those swan-shaped pedal boats instead.

The sun was setting when we returned to shore, and the shops closing down for the evening. Dinner that night was at a little pub-like place in town that did some ace Korean food, which we have learned is quite easy to de-meat-ify. I had something that was called a chige, a spicy soupy thing, as well as a beer. It was well-earned, I think.

Before bed we went out to the shoreline to watch the fireworks which, though no Kobe summer extravaganza, were well worth it. It really does show that Japan is so far ahead of the UK in its fireworking, that even a small-scale event like Toya’s just-another-summer-day could out-do anything I’ve ever seen in the UK, Bonfire Night or otherwise. We had planned to see the fireworks from a boat on the lake the next night, but decided against it when it was it was the gaudy boat again, lit up by what was sure to be a ruinous amount of electric lighting.

FRIDAY

We did a lot of walking on Friday. It was our last full day in Toyako-onsen, and we spent it at the Volcanic Research Centre a little south of the town. Turns out (I hadn’t known this) that there used to be another town in the area, but it was buried under lava and mud when a volcano suddenly sprung up out of the ground back in the early 2000s. Much of the town that wasn’t utterly destroyed was preserved as a memorial, and an epitaph, a marble pillar, was raised in dedication to the lives lost. ‘The town may be gone,’ it read, ‘but the heart remains’.

Steph and I took the 2 hour trail that led from the bus terminal up into the hills, over the cold, dead lava and past the two craters that, we were told, were still partially active. It was an interesting walk, every now and then you’d catch your foot on some half-buried concrete mud-wall or part of someone’s house. It was a long one, though, and when we got to the end of the path we found ourselves out in the middle of nowhere, with only a couple of dilapidated old businesses and a tourist shop that sold ice-cream and Gintama swords. A truly bizarre combination. We took the bus back to the terminal building, and then a second bus out to the north towards a fabled pizza parlour.

I didn’t mention that bit, huh. Our original dinner plan for Thursday. See, on our way down towards Toyako-onsen Steph had spotted a big blue sign that had happily declared that ‘Pizza’ was nearby. And thus the idea had been planted in her head, and we know how successful a parasite an idea is. Thursday night had begun with a trek up the highway towards the pizza sign, along the bug-splattered pavement for maybe four miles, until the pavement just stopped and left us nowhere to go. We turned back, and ate Korean food.

Well, on Friday we tried again. Steph does love her pizza, after all. After some mind-burningly complicated research we found a bus line which ran the reverse route to the one we had come to town on, and fortunately found a bus taking that route shortly after. We even asked the driver if he would be stopping by that area, and he said yes. Because, when you get down to it ‘by that area’ is pretty vague. We got off the bus at a campsite at the bottom of a hill at the other end of the highway, paid our fare and began to walk up the hill. I can’t tell you how it was that we eventually made it to the pizza restaurant with the name that was so very long, because part of our route may have been a little but illegal. Semi-legal, shall we say. Let’s just say we walked a path only the very desperate would be willing to take. And it was hard. Boy, was it hard. I could barely feel my legs by the end of it, had lost all feeling in my dignity. And was the pizza worth two days of walking and a bus ride (plus the taxi we took home)? No, it wasn’t. But then again, nothing would be. The pizza was tasty, and came in many hundreds of different varieties. The décor was tasteful, and the place was airy. The poor waiter insisted that he attempt English, even when we replied in Japanese, and even suggested that a pizza each was too much for our tiny bellies and instead offered a half-and-half split. Nice of him. It wasn’t enough, though. He also seemed keen to rush us out of there, despite there being nobody else around. My theory is that the restaurant is a free bus ride from the New Windsor Hotel, which is posh with a capital P, and perhaps they didn’t want two sweaty foreigners ruining the fake-foreign atmosphere. We didn’t complain, though. After all, it was genuinely good food.

Dessert at the convenience store, bath and sleep.

SATURDAY

This is gonna be a short one, I’m afraid. We got up early on Saturday to check out, and then spent a good long while out in the sun waiting for our bus back to Sapporo. Another 2.5 hours in transit, leaving my legs feeling like they were made of lead. I’ll tell you this, though, Steph and I totally got right back into Dragon Quest 9. We helped each other finish the story in multiplayer, but still found plenty to do after the last boss bit the dust. Now we’re kinda racing each other to finish all the extra quests, and I get the feeling Steph’s pulling into the lead these days, as I have a computer to attend to now that we’re home. That game, though. That game is something else. It’s so awesome, I haven’t seen anything like it. Oh, wait, I have. That’ll be Shin Totomono which I talked about last time, and it’s a bit rubbish. It’s so easy, so very, very easy. I don’t feel a part of it, y’know? I feel like a spectator, having to press X to continue the story every few minutes. I’m keeping at it, but it’s a bit of a let-down.

Yes, yes, that’s all the gaming news for now. Back to the story.

Sapporo, then, at about 10.30. Lunch at Caprichosa, or however you write it in Roman letters, which has always been a winner with us, and then a quick look around the city before our bus at 4 to Furano. We ended up (quite by accident, I swear) passing through the Pokemon Center and taking a look inside, which I had been trying to save for our day of Sapporo right at the end. I do love that shop. It’s so brimming with enthusiasm for itself, and not in a way that makes it unlikeable. I didn’t buy anything, saving that for the last day, but it did my heart good to be in the presence of Pikachu soft toys and lunch boxes with that ugly purple frog Pokemon on them. We looked at games, we got some truly hideous puri-kura done, we got on the bus.

Another 2.5 hours and we were in suburban Furano, a town known for its lavender, apparently. And, quite by coincidence, a belly-button festival. We arrived in town as the festival was reaching its peak, but no way were we sticking around to watch it when we were as tired as we were that night. An oversight on the itinerary meant we only had 30 minutes to find the guest house, so we bit the bullet and taxi’d it there.

Our lodgings for our stay in Furano went by the name of Pinocchio, and again managed to surpass my very low expectations. We were a little later than check-in time, but the owner was very understanding and showed us right to our little apartment, pausing only to comment on how big I was. It was a spacious place, bigger than our own places back in Kobe, and more functional. Oh, and the ceilings were higher, much to my delight. It was a great little place, and we slept well. Dinner, though, was at McDonalds, being one of the few places left open at the frankly appalling early hour of 9.

SUNDAY

Urgh, busy day. Busy, busy day. We awoke early to begin our trek down the road (no tree cover, and the sun was agonisingly hot that day) towards the Furano Cheese Factory. Our booked attempt at cheese-making was at 11, and we got there with plenty of time to spare. Though how I made it without crisping at the edges is beyond me. Seriously, agonisingly hot. In the end, though, the Cheese Factory was totally worth the walk. Making the cheese, an easy mascarpone, took very little time, and the women overseeing our attempts were strict on any divergence from the recipe. I guess they didn’t want us fluffing up our cheese and blaming them when it turned out to taste bad. I didn’t really know anything about mascarpone cheese before, and certainly didn’t realise it would be a sweet cheese. Steph suggested we get scones at Mister Donuts that evening, which sounded like a good idea. Lunch for us was at the Cheese Factory’s pizzeria, however, which WAS good. It didn’t offer a whole lot, but both pizzas were veggie-friendly and very cheap, much like that little Pizza Hut in Fosse Park. We caught dessert one building over in their ice-cream unit, which stuck stubbornly to local produce and left us a choice of milk, grape, pumpkin, corn and cheese flavours. Corn wasn’t bad, but the cheese stuff… Not again. Never again.

We wasted a bit of time riding the tractor they had out front, awwing at babies and catching dragonflies before moving on. Our second stop for the day was a 2 o’clock appointment at Yuma, a horse-riding centre half way between cheese and Pinocchio. It was a nice enough place, the horses seemed well-looked after (you can never be sure in Japan…) and the staff were friendly. But I’d forgotten how difficult horse riding is. We were taught well, but it was a bit like driving again only with your first lesson out on the roads and with minimal explanation. I think I must have thoroughly ticked off my poor horse with all my swerving and half-hearted instruction. His minder didn’t seem too taken with me, either. I was glad to be off once it was over. I think if I ever ride a horse again, I want to be sure I’m doing it right before I start, y’know. It was like the horse could sense my inexperience (scratch that, it totally could) and ignored me. I’d have done the same. But if I knew what I was doing, maybe it’d be different. Still, I don’t regret going.

We both agreed that a rest at the lodgings would be the best thing for us, so made our exhausted way home for a lie down. Our original plan had been making clay ocarinas, but that was out of the question in our state. We reawoke closer to 6, which was dinnertime. So, it was back into town, and the belly-button festival.

Japanese festivals are funny. I’ll just get that out of the way first. They are funny, funny things. This festival, for example. You know the reason they do it? It’s not because belly-buttons are magical, majestic things that are to be revered, any 5 year-old could tell you that. It’s because geographically, Furano is the ‘belly-button of Hokkaido’, so the festival is a celebration of the town rather than the human anatomy. And what better way to celebrate your beloved home town that to stick a massive hat on your shoulders and walk around with your shirt off and googly eyes on your nipples. The main event was the parade, where companies, clubs and even school teams would dress up and dance their way down the street, usually with plenty of paraphernalia to advertise their place of origin. We even saw the women of the Cheese Factory dressed in cow-print kimonos dancing around. It was entertaining, but the town had picked a bad time to advertise itself to you master Peter, who was starving, and needed food urgently. I may have passed out against a vending machine at one point, while Steph was away taking photos. It made the whole thing very difficult to like.

Anyway, we ended up in this teppanyaki place which either had staff with short-term memory disorders or had learnt that vegetarians like extra meat on their food. Regardless, we had to pick pork out of our food, but it was still really good food. Really good. And I had a beer which I totally deserved. You know, Sapporo beer mugs (or ‘jockies’ as they call them, and not in reference to the head-riding vampires of Left 4 Dead 2) advertise that Sapporo beer is available nowhere else in the world except Hokkaido. Just goes to show how head-in-the-sand Japan can be, I’ve had a Sapporo beer in a pub in Edinburgh before. Also, it annoyed my how this big queue grew up outside the shop, and the customers in line decided to blame the SHOP for being popular. Really ticked me off. If you want to eat right away, go somewhere else! It’s your own fault that you picked the place with the queue, you can’t shift THAT one onto the management! So don’t complain about how you’ve gotta wait. Get here sooner, or get lost!

Absurd…So after dinner, we walked on home via Mister D’s for dessert, and stopped into the Geo on the way. Geo in Furano is absolutely awesome, let me tell you. Tonnes of books, tonnes of games, and used clothes! I’ve never seen a Geo that sells clothes, before! And good ones, with funny captions on them! Or people’s names… Steph bought a hat and a top, and I bought a Best of Hatsune Miku CD which is stellar. Hah, every time I type her name the computer assures me that I’m being dense and meant to type ‘Hatsune Mike’. Idiot. We crawled home close to ten, ate cheese and scones (far, far too much sweetness) and went to bed.

MONDAY

Monday was a day of shopping. We got checked out around 9, and lugged our way back to the town centre ready for the bus at 10. Yet another 2.5 hours on the coach (thankfully the last time) and we were once again back in Sapporo. We actually arrived earlier than we expected, earlier than check-in would allow, so we headed off for lunch at a nice Korean place in one of the station’s gargantuan shopping centres. It wasn’t as nice as that one place in Toya, but it was good.

Our final resting place… Maybe I should rephrase that. Out last place where we would be sleeping was the Sapporo Cross Hotel, a swank establishment with free breakfast and a humidifier in the room. It also had a bath with a view of the city, not that you could see it because baths, by nature, are steamy. We dumped our stuff and set out into town. Let’s see… we swung by the Pokemon Center first of all, it being the most important part of our trip. I bought a small shoulder bag like what is fashionable among guys at the moment (Steph assured me it was very metrosexual, which I had difficulty accepting as a compliment and almost caused me to change my mind about buying it) and a Bulbasaur keychain that I tied onto the strap. Steph received a couple of badges of her favourite Pokemon, a metal keychain of the female protagonist and a memo pad with the Sapporo Pikachu on it. A good haul. Next was Vintage Village, a kind of retro, misc. goods store that I likened to a more tasteful Don Quixote. Apparently there’s one in Motomachi here in Kobe, which I may have to look at. I bought a funk-tastic new hat there, which keeps the sun off awesomely. I also treated myself to a new set of headphones to replace the ones carelessly snapped not so long ago. Together, my new purchases look aMAZing! In my head, at least, I look like a guy from Jet Set Radio. I probably look like a right muffin in real life.

Dinner was a complicated one. Steph fancied Thai, and I didn’t mind, so we began hunting for Thai restaurants in the area. There’s a big food district to the south of the main Sapporo centre, and there were apparently 4 Thai restaurants in a five minute walk of each other. Tch… The first one we checked had closed down and looked like it was going to be demolished. The second was nowhere to be found. The third, which we eventually settled on, was underground. That threw us for a bit. We couldn’t check the menu from outside, and the waitress was clearly very distressed by our coming. We didn’t need to hear her to hear the ‘Foreigners! What do we do?’ she was frantically signalling at the chef. She needn’t have worried about out Japanese skills, but… When I mentioned that Steph didn’t eat fish and neither of us ate meat her face went white as a sheet. Much conferring later the team eventually decided on a three-part specially constructed meal that was totally safe, and very tasty, but did little to fill us up. We left feeling very embarrassed.

Ice-cream from Lawson’s on the way back to the hotel, baths and finally sleep.

TUESDAY the SECOND

Our flight back to Kansai wasn’t until 12 again, leaving us plenty of time to eat our fill of the epic breakfast the hotel served. Bread and cereal was a given, but the potato salad, soups, curries and a hundred other things that have no right to be served at breakfast were not. It was really excellent. Good coffee, too. We checked out not long after and made our way to the station, where we finally bought some souvenirs for our teachers. (Did I mention that souvenirs are an expected tradition here in Japan? And that I’m bitter about it?) Another train ride to New Chitose, about 45 minutes, and back through security. Easy peasy, just like before. And then we were home.

Back in Kobe we spent some time at the arcade, playing the drums and flipping some tables. That table flipping is just awesome, I feel it more every time I try. I finally had a go at the ghost at his own funeral mission, and took great joy in flipping a coffin so far it made a cat airborne, and then watching the body fall out of the coffin, stand up and go “Yay!”. It did my heard glad, so it did. I also tried once again to demonstrate how awesome Hatsune Mike is to Steph, by way of the awesome Project Diva Arcade, but once again I think I failed. She seems to think you have to be a thirty year-old computer programmer or a ten year-old school girl to appreciate the electronic idol, and for the most part I reckon she’s right. I won’t go into why I think Vocaloid is a musical revolution worthy of deep study today, but I could. Then we had a curry for dinner, which was superb as usual.

There we go, all done. In conclusion (vivid memories of old history essays as I wrote that), Hokkaido is awesome. It was great to see it in the snow, but snow really is only one side of it. It also has lakes, volcanoes, and all kinds of other things to spare. It’s a big place, after all. Some day maybe we’ll go back, and when we do we won’t be at a loss for things to do.

Just a few closing words about Wednesday the second, while I have the chance. We didn’t do a whole lot, resting up before today’s first day back at school. Yeah, one short summer holiday, eh. I woke up about 12, which means I was awake for a total of 7 hours. In that time, I think 4 of those hours was spent playing Left 4 Dead 2, and the rest was spent watching E.T. Twenty years on and its still one of the most magnificent films I have ever seen.

I downloaded L4D2 again because of rumours that Valve had done a bit of work on the old beast, but in truth it was the first time I had played it. I was a little disheartened to find that, though I had bought the original at around the same time on the basis that the original campaigns would be worth playing as well, 2 contains all of the content from 1 plus a whole ton of extras. Oops. Oh well, L4D2 is amazing, and I only wish for a chance to play it with people I actually know some time, not just weird guys who call themselves Protection and say “i swanner ur gay”. I guess that’s what I deserve for playing an English-language game in East Asia.

Now comes a week and a bit of nothing to do at school. I’ll be spending my time poster making ready for next month, I reckon, as well as maybe studying some JLPT. I saw my notes magnetised to the filing cabinet by my desk today and was disheartened to realise that I don’t quite remember what they mean. I’ll make do. Anyway, that’s it. That’s all.

Thanks for reading. Really, this one must have taken it outta you.