I'm officially an alien

So I've finally gotten my Gaijin card, which is kind of like a green card. It allows me to get things like a cell phone or internet (hopefully I will get soon). Here is a picture of mine. Notice the top right next to Nationality: it says Texas. I don't know if they were looking at a map of the US circa 1825 when Texas was still a sovereign nation. Anyway I was still able to get a cell phone with it, which makes me feel a little more at home here.




I got a brand called softbank. They have the best options for English phones, and their commercials all have Brad Pitt and Camron Diaz... butt thats not why I got it...

Also having a cell phone in Japan makes people look at you a little differently. If you walk around the city most people just assume that you are a tourist. But when you do things like pull out a cell phone or ride on a bike people realize, "hey this guy actually lives here."

These are some pictures of downtown Osaka I took last week before the Ben Kweller concert. Thought I'd put them up here...

Seriously how many bridges do they need to cross this river...

Downtown Umeda Osaka on the river.

Its election time right now in Japan. Which means I'm even more confused than usual. Instead of putting commercials on TV openly questioning the honesty and policies or your opponent like all other democracies, Japan hires people to put speakers on top of their cars and drive around yelling and screaming things I don't understand. All I know is it wakes me up in the morning and I try to figure out which politician it they represent so I can make sure to never vote for them, even though its 100% impossible for me to ever get voting rights in Japan.

Anyway here was a huge crowd that was watching some Japanese guy yell things, I don't know what it was about but about every 30 seconds the crowd would break out into thunderous applause.


Yesterday me and some friends went to a public park in a town called Kobe. Its about 30 minutes west of Osaka.

This was the park, it was the biggest open space I've seen since I've been in Japan. Seeing a field with this much grass was kind of shocking.

It was a cloudy day but it kind of created a cool looking scene on the mountains with the fog...




After the park we went back to my friend Nayan's place to play some Wii sports. It was tough to play Wii with 4 people in a Japanese size apartment but we did it. Then we ordered two medium pizza's from domino's which ended up being $40 and seriously the medium pizza's were only a little bit bigger than a personal pan pizza.

I'm listening to the mavs game right now, they are down by 5 with only a few minutes left, geez this sucks...