crazy crazy

So last night I was pretty bored, so I tried to get a group of people together to go to the 300yen place (300 yen for 30 minutes of all you can eat all you can drink fun) but of course everyone had other plans, or were too lazy, or had already eaten. fail. So me and my other buddy Ethan went to Sapporo station and we just ate at this curry place that was pretty good.

Japanese curry is strange. The more I eat it, the more I like it. Which is really funny because the first time I had it I really didn't like it very much. But now I can't stop eating it!!! On a side note, I was at Jusco today, and I found these cake thingers about the size of my fist for 60 yen!! That's so cheap for a ball of chocolate cake that actually tastes soo good. Needless to say I am addicted.

So while we were eating we got onto the topic of DDR. Now not many people know what DDR is, it stands for dance dance revolution, a game that you use your feet to play. It originally came out a long time ago, so it's been around for awhile, and like most fads has really lost its shine, but its still really fun every once in awhile. So we finished eating and we headed out to find this arcade my friend said that he had found before and ...we got lost.

Well not really, we just couldn't find the place. We knew 2 things, it was close to Sapporo station, on the 9th floor of the building, and it was above an electronics shop. yay. After 30 minutes of roaming around looking like foreign morons we finally found the place and played a few games of DDR. This was fun and bad. I say bad because A. I am not in the greatest shape, and B. because I haven't played DDR in a long time hehe, so after only a couple of songs my body was attempting to inhale 6x as much air as it could and I was dead tired. But it was still a lot of fun.

Today, I had soccer practice in the morning (so much for sleeping in zzz) and in the afternoon my friend was picking me up so that we could go buy a rice steamer YAY WIN!!! Now I love rice. A lot! So not having ample amounts of rice in my diet has really been crushing my style, but that's going to change now. Anyway, the actual trip of going to get the rice steamer was pretty fun, so I'll share it with you.

My friend Kenji has a car, so he picked me up around 1:15, and the place we were going was about 45 minutes away, or 30 if you drive like Kenji. I'm usually pretty calm inside a car, even if the driver pulls some iffy moves, but this was on a whole new level. We were weaving through cars, switching lanes in intersections, and passing cars through double center lines like it was nothing. It was slightly alarming, but Kenji said he was a good driver and had only been in one accident...lol.

So we finally get to the place, and kanji backs the car up into the spot. We get out, and look at the back, and notice that it is...directly up against the concrete barrier that he was backing up towards. He said don't worry about it, so we just went inside the store.

The place was called 2nd street and it dealt with used goods. The cheapest new rice steamer i could find was 5700 yen (60 USD) so I was willing to find something cheaper, even if it was used. Kenji also said the place was really clean, which it was. So we looked around there and the cheapest we could find was 3900 yen, which wasn't too bad.

He said there was another place close that was the same, so we decided to check there as well, so we hopped back into the car and headed on over.

On the way however I learned probably the most shocking thing about Japan that I have ever learned. You can actually run away from the cops. And I don't mean leave the country run or anything like that, Kenji said that the law states that Police really aren't allowed to chase you in a car unless they are sure they can catch you, and they aren't allowed to chase you for any more than 5 minutes.

The reason this conversation came up is because we went barreling through an intersection. We were probably 50-100 meters from the intersection when the light turned RED, and kenji decides to floor it and try to make the right turn. (Japanese streets are opposite americans, so think of a right turn as being a left turn (aka you have to cross lanes)). So, we speed up into the intersection to attempt to make a right hand turn. Now this is a really huge intersection, each direction has 3 lanes, so it is pretty large.

We zoom into the intersection and kenji starts to make the right turn as he taps the breaks a bit as well, calmly mentioning the fact that Hokkaido drivers are the craziest in Japan...yay. The tires start screaming as the car begins to slide to the right as we get into the middle of the turn. The car is shaking like mad and I have to admit I was rather alarmed at this point but kenji seemed to be pretty calm. We finally get all the way around and into our lane and I was happy to have made it through safely. In the ensuing conversation i found that out cops aren't allowed to chase cars etc, so you can tell where the conversation started hehe.

I ended up buying the 3900yen rice steamer, and am happily eating rice and curry right now. yum