Hello!

Howdy, everyone! I'm back! I know you have all been eagerly awaiting my return with bated breath. What did you bait yours with? Hahaha...sorry.

It has been a crrrrrraaaaaazzzzzzzyyy several weeks! Mostly good, but definitely wild!

May 21-June 6: Bro's visit

I left work an hour early the day of Bro's visit (I was taking nenkyuu, but I always feel like a bum when I cut out of work early) and took a train to meet Bro. It was so exciting to meet up with him in the hotel lobby! The next day, after a Japanese breakfast buffet complete with salad and many other interesting breakfast foods, we headed to the big city to change trains and head north. It was a gorgeous day for a train ride, and I was happy to see that the landscape decided to put its best foot forward for our guest!

Over the next several days, we crammed more into our schedule than normal humans should attempt! We made multiple visits to my islands, hit the sights in Soya, traveled random places, visited a ton of restaurants, and made several visits to the arcade in town! We smoked a bunch of the games! By we, I mean Bro. I didn't do much smoking, although I did get a high score finally on one of the games. That was exciting! Bro was actually the one who figured out how to play the aforementioned game, and he wound up getting a ton of high scores on the game! It was a hilarious game where you have a big screen and in front of it, a table. Now, your character on screen is angry about life. To get a good score, you beat on the table, and before 60 seconds are up, you give the table a mighty heave. It has hinges or something, so it doesn't go too far. This heave sends the onscreen contents of your table flying. The goal is to hurl the contents as far as possible, and to inflict as much monetary damage as possible. It really is incredibly fun! I'm just waiting for the next time I have a bad day... ;-) Bro also completely defeated a claw machine! It was pretty amazing and hilarious!

By the way, it is really easy to spend a lot of money in a Japanese arcade, because coins come in high values. Every time you drop one coin in, it is about a dollar. You don't really notice, because it's just a coin. Dangerous. But crazy fun!

Thus ends part 1, because I need to go to sleep! More later!