July 17th, 2004 (Saturday)

Drill Land for the Nintendo Gamecube. One day you will be mine... But not soon. This is from the game section of the local BookOff, a retailer of anything entertainment. Comics, video games, DVDs, what have you. They also BUY said items. Before moving it:s always a good idea to cut your dead weight and sell off the junk you don:t need and/or don:t want to carry up three flights of stairs.

I remember a different cover for this game... Maybe it:s just me though. Captain America has a special place in my heart. Right next to the space for VHS tapes. But enough about games. I sold 16 pounds of assorted old and practically worthless comic novels, or "manga" as some of you may call them. I call them that. Typing "comic novels" feels weird... BUT! the moral of the story is that no matter what you call them, they will only be worth 760 yen when you sell them. And then I went home to clean. Hard-core cleaning and packing. There was a picture of the box, but it was as boring as the manga I sold.

Breakfast of champions and starving foreigners in Japan. It:s not hard to make, just cheap and filling. Chili, rice and an Aquarius bottle filled with water is probably a good indication of how I live my life. ...(I don:t know, but pretend I said something GREAT and just nod your head.)

July 18th, 2004 (Sunday)

And now for something less LiveJournal-ly! It:s a ladder with a sign that says "KEEP OUT". Hahahahaha I should send this to Tokyopia.com! OMGF, ShibuyaDog is DA MAN!

BUT! It:s the ladder keeping people out of a corner. Which by itself is not the reason I took the picture. About 3 feet to the right of the ladder is an internet cafe. Not Manboo, so I didn:t take a picture of it. I:m faithful like that. The reason I didn:t go to my Manboo that I couldn:t afford to take the train into Shibuya. Ticket there and back would:ve been a total of 280 yen. That plus the 400 yen to use the internet for an hour while drinking 10 cups of Coca Cola would destroy my earnings off the manga I sold off the day before. I like my Manboo, and I took this as a sign NOT to get online and NOT use the internet cafe by my station... But I really wanted to get online. Before this, I spent 4 hours cleaning. After it I will spend a few more cleaning and watching cartoons. It was a busy Sunday in no way whatsoever.

July 19th, 2004 (Monday)

Woke up bright and early to sell a box of... stuff. Stuff which could be sold for a profit in this crazy, crazy Japan. It weighed a good 35 pounds and was carried 100% by good old DonMarco. From my old apartment to the station is a 15 walk, then the train to Shibuya, then the walk from the Shibuya station to the Mandrake where I was heading to "lighten the box... and MY SOUL!" Mandrake opened at noon that Monday. I got to Shibuya around 10:15. Fortunately, a McDonalds table offered to carry the box for the 100-minute wait I had ahead of me.

OMGF, I finally got a Sega Saturn Multitap! Or Multi-Terminal! Or whatever it is called! I have been searching for several weeks for one. And we are talking at least 15 stores and several different parts of Tokyo and Chiba. Nothing was found until that day, in that Mandrake. So now, 6-player Guardian Heroes and 7-player Bomberman games are a GO! Bought with approximately 1/15th of money made from the contents of the heavy box, so getting this was the closest thing to splurging I:ve done in two months.

After Shibuya I went north to Akihabara, to sell the rest of the box:s contents. Most are in this picture, so you can imagine that the box was pretty light right about now. Bought over 20 months back, I present the last known picture of DonMarco:s copy of Marvel vs. Capcom 2. There are two very important things I should mention so you see things the way I do.

1 - I am a BIG fan of this game. Put in about 300+ hours on the Dreamcast version and over 100+ hours on the arcade version. Pictured is the Playstation 2 version. A Japanese game for a Japanese system I don:t own. But since 1 in 3 friends I:ve had in Japan have Japanese PS2s, it was okay. It:s only got about 50 hours of play-time on it.

2 - I needed the money, and at the new place would probably never get any REAL competition. I heard "It:s a game to be watched, not played", and almost jumped up and stabbed him in the eye with my sneaker.

So I returned hope later that evening. Backpack filled with a new game which cost about what I made selling a box of manga two days back... I dropped my bag somewhere not in this picture and waited for the cartoons to start. I got a call from my Dad in Belgium an hour later and finished the last of the chili, this time with a serving of spaghetti. It was down-right GOOD, if you will excuse the lack of bold. Tuesday I had school and a few last-minute things to straighten out, and Wednesday the moving truck would come.

July 20th, 2004 (Tuesday)

There were free burgers at McDonalds. Some 24 years back, the first McDonalds opened in Japan. It may have been 23 or 26, I don:t really remember. I do remember the Free Burger coupons they were handing out though. I only got about an hour online before I left my school computer lab and treated Chuck with a free burger. And then I used the internet at his place.

Instead of going home, I was called up by sporadic accomplice/friend Seth. His birthday was close and I was to attend a private little get-together. We are talking like maybe 10 people MAX. Or at least when I showed up, 2 hour and 15 minutes late. But to be fair, I had to go through Shinjuku station and then ride THE SLOWEST TRAIN IN TOKYO for about an hour to get to his place.

Leading me back from his place, Seth pointed out this. It:s pretty cool. The middle one being flattened and the others all fine. It:s not everyday you see a half-finished job in Japan.

Tired and confused, I bought a child:s ticket TOTALLY BY ACCIDENT... A 160 yen ticket instead of a 310 yen ticket. The three little lines in the center of the top of the ticket mean "small" or "child:s fare". Japanese kanjis are flexible like that. This kanji is also on toilets, elevators, mailboxes and CD players. My CD player, at this time, was packed... Everything was packed...

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A child:s fare I could ride for half the adult fare, but at what cost? Not my shame. Sigh.

To be continuuuuuued!!