Why is shopping so hard?

Its been a couple of working days and one free day.

Friday I woke up kinda early around 10...hahaha, to go to Yokohama station and do some shopping and looking around there. Also joined the local dry cleaning area, they gave me this membership card which says in English "Let's cleaning!" hehehehehe, I'll take a picture of it when I can. So I went to Yokohama and walked around the areas. There's always the 7 floor Yodobashi, full of electronics but I resisted the urge to walk in and spend a couple of hours in there :). Instead I walked further out from the station (I'm still a little bit scared of walking too far from the station, particularly when its only me and my awesome sense of direction) and walked into this department store which Geoff had told me to go see. I can't remember the name, except that the letters were in green and it ended in "ie".

Anyway, this place was quite large, had about 8-10 floors, thankfully and also unfortunately the first 5 floors were all women's clothes. I don't get it, I see men wearing semi-trendy things...where do they get them from?! I'm a Nova teacher though, I only shop at UNIQLO, hehehe. So it all seemed overwhelmingly women's clothes until about the 6th or 7th floor. I also ran into a floor which was all electronics, and spent a fair bit of time there :). This was also the place where I'm gonna be buying all my blank DVDs!!! Previously I hadn't found a place where they sell cheap DVDs, the general price seems to be about $1AUD per DVD; these must be the decent quality ones. Anyway, I found a spindle of 50 for around $25AUD so I'm happy. The top floor was all music, and I think there was a music school inside as well. THIS WAS WHERE I SAW THE ROLL OUT KEYBOARD!!! Ok, its not that cool, but at the same time it is. Taking a picture would have been ideal, but I don't like revealing my foreigner status everywhere I go, so whipping out a camera in a department store to take pictures of merchandise is the quickest way to getting strange looks. Anyway some of my Nova students reckon I look Japanese. So this keyboard...there's a plastic box on the right hand side which possibly retracts the rubber keyboard, but it was layed out on display. The box has a built in speaker and the keys are all rubber. Its pretty hard to play because the sensors are not everywhere on the key, only in a certain spot so the sounds don't always come out. So you can just roll it up like a long rubber mat! If it was any better, and maybe a little cheaper (around $200), I might've gotten one just coz its so convenient and cool. I still might, if I'm stupid enough, or rich enough :)

Ok so Friday I bought a couple of things, by the time I got back I was so sore and tired carrying around stuff I'd bought during the day (Em/Fando, its London all over again). I got home around 6:30-7:00 and just spent the rest of the day in. Besides most of the things that people do at night are go out for dinner and/or drink.

Saturday was a pretty good "Monday". Good days at work are when I don't have to teach lower levels, just because I find it easier to interact and teach the more advanced level students. And ENTHUSIASTIC students. People who are really interested in learning are really easy to teach, you don't have to struggle to get them to interact in the lesson, which is also harder with lower levels because they are a bit shy about using their English. Oh, strange fact: when one Japanese person in the workplace can speak better English than others, none of the others will even try to speak Japanese for fear of being compared to or appearing inferior. Oh well.

Today (Sunday) was a much harder day. Out of 8 lessons, 3-4 were level 7B (2nd lowest level), and not as many students were enthusiastic today. But my last class ended well because I didn't really teach the lesson very much; the student instead had lots of questions to ask about language in the workplace, because he's going overseas next year to work in different countries. It was great, we talked about casual and informal language, polite and impolite, direct, indirect, etc.

Went shopping after work and found that some things are ridiculously expensive, or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. I bought 1 clove, that's right, 1 clove of garlic for $2. Three tomatoes for around $3.50, and I can't find any NORMAL mushrooms!!! There were some weird-looking mushrooms (giant ones with stalks as thick as a chair leg, and others that looked like flowers, or poison depending on how u see it) so I didn't buy any for fear of making a big mistake if I decided to make an omelette later on. 3 onions for around $3.50 as well...I'm starting to think I won't cook, maybe its cheaper just to eat out! :):) Anyway tomorrow promises to be a good, short day. Start at 1:20, finish at 5:40. My roommates have been asleep since about 9:00pm, its crazy. Simon apparently hasn't had much sleep the past couple of days, and Joash probably still has a little bit of jetlag.

I'm off. Hope everyone and everything is well :)