If you race around a round track and average 50 mph on the 1st lap, how fast must you go on the 2nd lap to average 100 mph for both laps combined?

Blogger is scheduled to go down for maintainence this weekend, so it is being really sausage-y right now, it was a huge pain to even get to the "create new post" page.

Whining aside, exciting news from Japan begins now. First of all, I have not been killed by a North Korean nuclear bomb, I was a little worried about that for the past week. Second of all, I finally found the "Okazaki Shinken Bank," which is open till 9 PM (Kyu Ji) every weekday. Here I was able to fill out a form, wait for 10-15 minutes, and then recieve yen for selling them my traveler's cheques. I only exchanged $500 worth, but the process took so long, I'd rather not do it 6-12 more times, so the next time I go I'm exchanging a truckload of money, and just keeping the cash in some safe place.

Third, and most important: MARS VOLTA CONCERT TICKETS GET!! Screw the language barrier, nothing stops me from seeing my favorite hispanics in concert. Fittingly, I met someone last month through the Mars Volta's fansite (which I spend far too much time at), who has been studying Japanese for 4 years, and has helped me greatly with certain aspects of my adventure time party. Using his translational abilities, he deduced that you buy concert tickets in convenience stores. This is a very strange concept to me, but it couldn't in the end stop me. He figured out that to buy tickets to the Tokyo concerts, one needs to use special machines at "Lawson's" convenience stores, and to buy tickets to the Nagoya show, one needs to use actual physical communication with an employee at a "Circle K" or "Family Mart" convenience store. This latter method was especially problematic.

The solution, obviously, was not out of my grasp. My classmate Christian, who knows Chinese and can read kanji, went with me to Lawson's, and after a solid 10 minutes of entering touch-screen commands, with a little assistance from the store employee, the machine produced a receipt, which the employee took to the mysterious back room, and came back with my ticket. The Circle K ticket-buying process proved to be more interesting, however. My Mars Volta friend sent me an email which said in Japanese everything one would need to say in order to buy a ticket for a Mars Volta concert in Nagoya. Today, I went to the Gakuseika (Student Services) office, and there a kind woman let me print out this email. I took it to the Circle K by my apartment, said "Sumimasen" (sorry) to the man working behind the counter, and handed him an email. After several entertaining minutes of miscommunication, the man, who was extremely friendly and helpful (everyday I go into the store and he says "Thank you bery much" as I leave), handed me my ticket. Score.

The tickets ran me a solid ¥6700 each, a bit more than $50. Thank you for the gift, Grams. The Nagoya concert is on a friday and near Okazaki, so that is perfect, but the Tokyo concert is on a weekday. This will require me to spend the night in Tokyo and miss a day of school, but then again, life is all about making sacrifices, isn't it? Mom, your friend in Tokyo sent me an email when I first got here offering me hospitality whenever I came to Tokyo. Hopefully, she is still willing to be hospitable, because free room and board with is better than money-costing room and board on your own in a mysterious foreign city.

A few other random thoughts etc: Today I read an article that announced the release date for "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" the movie. It is set for 7/13/07, and the article casually mentioned that this was a week after the release of the 7th book. What? This got me immediately worked up. Had I missed such an important announcement in my absence from Western Civilization? I frantically ran a Google search, and came up with a few articles which predicted that the book 7 would launch on 7/7/07, a "perfect" release date, what with the numbers and all. However this was all just speculation, and all that is known for sure is that nothing is official. Dang.

Nintendo just announced that they will have 3 COMPLETELY FREE events in Japan, including one in Nagoya on November 3rd, which I have off due to holiday, where the public will be allowed to demo the new "Wii" system. So, to all you who were laughing at me because you were gonna get to play Zelda first, I say the jokes on you.

Finally, I know fully know both major Japanese alphabets, the Hiragana and Katakana. The katakana are used to spell foreign words and names, which conveniently make up roughly 10% of the entire Japanese language (most of the imported words are English). So, for those who are curious, leave a comment on this post and I will spell your Japanese name in Katakana and Romaji (roman characters, to show you the pronunciation) in my next post. A quick note: Mac computers have Japanese character support built in from the get go, but Windows users must install language support onto their PC. You can do this from the "Control Panel." The process will require the disc you used to install Windows (or any Windows install/upgrade disc).

With that, I must leave, for I must get some rest before my big backgammon game with Julian in 7 and a half hours (also, I have a test tomorrow in class). As always, it has been a delight. Next post I will also post pictures from the Nagoya, which I am visting on Saturday for the Samurai Festival. Ja, mata (see you then).