Toys!

A few days ago I got Tekken 5. What a great game! I'm especially enjoying trying to get Bruce to do all those fancy moves I saw in Ong Bak. Some of the cut scenes are hilarious, something I sorely missed in Tekken 4.

Today, we picked up a new recruit to take him to his apartment, which is in the same neighbourhood as ours. We were meant to pick him up at a bus stop at a train station a few stops from ours--not a particularly big station, so you wouldn't think it would be that hard. Of course I was missing one crucial bit of information: he was half-Japanese and half-Filipino, i.e. I couldn't just look out for a white guy with some bags. Anyway, he had flown in from DC, a 13 hour flight, and was immediately put on a bus. We're to the southwest of downtown Tokyo; Narita is to the southeast and across the Bay. That means this guy sat on a bus as it traversed nearly the entirety of the metropolitan area--and I doubt traffic was particularly cooperative. What a cruel, cruel first day in Japan.

After that we went in to Shibuya, and after some pho we bought a computer tablet. Kate's using it for some artsy fartsy messing around in Photoshop, but it works wonders in combination with the Japanese IME. The IME comes with a kanji recognition system, which is well-nigh impossible to use with a mouse, but works pretty smoothly with a tablet. This lets me translate mail at about three times the speed. Great toy!