First band meeting

Since my former band "chao" was ended due to Say-kun's business, Yossy the bass and vocal girl and I thought we could do something new. Yossy invited her co-worker Aki-chan and I invited Naoki, my first band guiterist ("chao" was my second band). 4 of us got together for the first time.

We just jamed for an hour. Since Aki-chan (she will be the vocalist) liked the song "I can do better" by Avril Lavigne. We tried to play that one. After an hour jamed, we went to an icecream shop "Häagen-Dazs" and ate icecream and chat what we would like to do.

Naoki picked out a song of "Maiagaru" by Onmyoza (this is one of his fav bands). Since everybody will be busy for a while, the next practice will be on 19th Sep :).

Finally it arrived

Goodness! I finally got my substitute PC (>_<)! Waited to long!!!
My PC was nearly dead I think 2 days ago. I only successfully started it up twice that day and even that time it shut down a bit after it started up.....

Got my PC yesterday yay!! Will sending my old one to the person who will fix her for me tomorrow.

Cutting Onion Without Crying

Since I live with my parents, I get to cook just once a week (Monday supper and Tuesday lunch) which is very lucky since I do not like cooking very much.

Anyways, since my Mom seems to have less energy today, I fixed lunch today. Made Yakimeshi (fried rice).
I used 1) onion 2) carrot 3) green pepper 4) scallop. My mother told me to use scallop before it got old :).
So I cut onion, carrot and green pepper into small pieces and saute it and put scallop then rice.

By the way, I believe cutting onion makes you cry doesn't it?? Well, it does to me. I think this is global.....? Anyways assume it is and today, I did not cry when I was cutting the onions!!!
I watched a TV show a couple of weeks ago. It was a quiz show. In the question, there was a quiz that
which one is not correct to prevent you from crying when you are cutting onion. There is one that does not work.
1) Have piece of onion in your mouth when you are cutting onions
2) Plug your nose when you are cutting onions
3) Cover your eyes when you cut onions

Do you know which one is the right answer?? 3) Covering your eyes does not work. Did you know that?? I have narrowed my eyes when I cut it before and I thought it worked... but the thing (I forgot how it is called) permeate through nose mucous membrane (wow big word... (@_@) than eyes!!!!

So today, I tried not to breath from nose when I was cutting the onion and I DID NOT CRY!!!!! It does work!!! You should try it too!!



[Today's Japanese]
Above pictures. The left one is onion in English right? And the right is green onion.
I was wondering why these two have similar name even though it does not look a like. But maybe those 2 are some kind of family ne, I think. In Japanese, those 2 does have similar names.
Onion is "Tama-negi" and green onion is "Negi". You see? the "negi" part is the same just like the onion part is the same in English. "Tama" means ball sort of in Japanese. So.... ball shaped negi is onion......

In English Onion seemed to be the base and in Japanese Negi (green onion) seemed to be the base.... would it be something to do with which one is used more or something? or.... which one is harvested more.....?!?!? muttering........

PC troubles....

Awwww.... it's been only a couple days since I started this blog and 2 days ago my PC started to act weirdly again..... (;_:). I had pretty similar symptoms about a month ago. I took my PC to a "Pasokon Kobo" which is a PC repair and selling (original PC with relatively low price) chain in Japan.

They could not find any false. They even said that they could not see the symptoms. I had 2 fans renewed and get the PC back. Then after a couple of days later I had the same symptom again!!! So I gave it a try to bring my PC to one of my friends, a German friend who lives very close to my house, who were to be really good with PCs. THEN, he found what was wrong and repaired it for me =D!!! And a month passed, it started again (==;. Restarting again and again sort of (not that bad yet). Since my computer genius buddy is back to Germany to see his family.... (TOO BAD Stephan!), I called a person who made the PC for me 7 year ago :p! I know~ I know~ it is pretty old ne..... I was almost buying a new notebook though... he said he could save my PC girl, so I am going to send the PC back to him for repair. Oh please fix it right *cross my fingers*.

So, this blog might be a bit slow for a while. Not sure it all depends on my PC girl condition. Will see......

[One little Japanese lesson for today :). ]

When you do something for the last try, like you do it without expecting too much from it. We say it "Dame moto de" in Japanese. It is kind of slang form I think... comes from "Dame de moto moto". Which means give it a try without expecting too much.
"Dame" literally means "not good". "Moto" would mean.... hum maybe "equal to the start"?? Hope this makes sense........

In the above sentenses, I gave it a try to bring my PC to one of my friends (I am not so sure if this English sounds natural. Forgive me English is not my first language so :p) if I say that in Japanese, I would say "Dame moto de tomodachi no tokoro ni PC wo motte itta (I went to bring my PC to my friend's without much expectaion)".
Well that is it for today!!! Mata (see ya)!!

Robert and Fabien from Germany

Finally be able to upload some pix of Robert and Fabian!!

Robert is one of my customers from Germany. He bought a CD from my shop JapaNeedz in March I believe (I checked it and yes it was March 12th that he purchased a MiniMoni CD from my store :)). I usually send my customers ship out notice on ship out with some questionnaire and he kindly replied to that email and I found out that he had a plan to come to Japan in April!

So he came to Japan =D.



This one above is the picture of his friend Fabian me and Robert (from the left) in front of Hiroshima castle. Pretty different from western castle, isn't it =D??



Fabian tried out a old Japanese battle clothes in the castle. He seemed pretty liked that one!



Robert showing me the pictures he took at Shukkei-en garden (and this one was taken by Fabian :p). The Shukkei-en is one of the famous place in Hiroshima as well for beautiful Japanese style landscape. I do not go there so often but when I go, I get really relaxed and feel good in the nature garden.



After Shukkei-en, we went to a burger shop (not sure if that was McDonald or Lotteria) and ate and went to a Book Off, a second handed books and CDs chain in Japan. Robert bought so many CDs and DVDs of Hello! Project. Attending to the Hello! Project concerts is one of the main reason for Robert and he actually attended many concerts and bought concert fans, posters and etc at the concert (the above picture is a part of his collection)! Glad Robert and Fabian had good time in Japan.... even though, they missed the plain back home once...... (they eventually made home of course ;D).

Robert is now into studying Japanese and purchase 2 Japanese learning books the other day.
"Minna no Nihongo Shokyu 1" and "Minna no Nihongo Shokyu1 Honyaku & Bunpou Kaisetsu" the first one is with basic explanation and quiz and stuffs and the second one is grammar stuff in German.

This book seems pretty famous for Japanese learner, some say those are the best and some say it is a bit boring so I am not sure. I guess it depends on people's taste. Well, good luck to Robert on his study!!

The second feed! Happy Birthday to Carla!!!

Today is my best friend Carla's birthday =D.
I sent her an email this morning, at that time I did not even know that I was going to open a blog on this Blogger today. Well, I did not even know that I open a blog account on anywhere actually.

After I finished my first feed, I received an email from her.
She mentioned about her blog having new pictures taken from a couple days ago. I was writing to her that I also just have opened a blog account today. And then I went to check her blog pictures and looked at her blog address, it seems SO FAMILIAR _______.blogspot.com/

I checked my blog address and looked back her blog, and noticed that we have an account on the same blog service!!!

Here comes some old pictures for you Carla. Maybe Ryan would enjoy them too!!

A picture from Christmas 1989 <--- LOL!!!!









I think this one was just before we finished the last semester in 1990.

This one was taken when I went back in 1992 with my mom ne ;)!!

Well, Happy Birthday Carla!!!!!
Sending lots of love from Japan!
xoxoxoxoxoxo

Nozomi

The 1st feed

The first day and first feed on Blogger =D!!!
The reason I opened this blog is basically for my shop :p.

I have a shop on eBay named JapaNeedz, selling many kind of Japanese stuffs :).
But before that, I had blog named "Peep at Japanese life?" about 3 years before on British platform called 20six. It was such a fine blog and I made a lot of friends there. I think it was in 2006 or 2007 that they made some major change on their system. It made us, 20six users inconvenient to use the software..... :(. Ever since, I stopped....

The reason I started my eBay store actually related to that blog.
One day early in 2006 I believe, one British friend of mine on 20 six asked me to buy and send him CDs of his favorite Japanese band.
He told me he searched everywhere in London for the band CDs but could not find them anywhere. Then he thought of me, a friend from Japan on Internet (cool, eh?).

I got the CDs for him from Amazon.co.jp and forwarded them to his house. It made him very happy. He even wrote about the CDs on the blog and uploaded the picture of the parcel =D.
Back then I was not working since I was ill for a while, then thought about selling things on auction site abroad since the CDs made my friend so happy. So I started my store.......... :).