ton of stuff happened yesterday!!

1. went to esperanto club; next meeting (in march) is "hina no matsuri", aka "doll-collection showing day" and 4 out of 6 of us will wear kimono! we don't have our own belts and things but the one lady who does tea ceremony says she'll bring them for us.

2. with the same club members we're going to some (old) person's house to have a flower-viewing (hanami) party!

3. on the escalators in sendai station (big train/bus station that doubles as a huge shopping mall) some random older guy asked me about my bag -- but he stopped talking when i misheard one of his questions (he said "where are you from, germany?" after i said i bought the bag in germany, but i misheard it as "where in germany did you buy the bag?")

4. went to the secondhand bookstore and bought 3 manga volumes (BL) and 3 teen novels, 2 i read in english years ago (A Series of Unfortunate Events) and 1 i thought was a random shoujo novel with a funny name (あしながおじさん, long-legged mister) but upon checking it later, it's actually a translation of an american novel from 1912! the cover is literally sailor moon: a blonde long-haired girl accepting a rose from a shadow-man with a top hat. i felt that for the most part i should read novels i've already read in english, or at least are somewhat familiar with the topics of (ex. Helen Keller) to make learning from context easier... and these books are only 100 yen so it's fine to try reading and then toss them.

when i went to go pay, the cashier miscalculated the price as 1,000 yen instead of 400 but i thought it was funny because she didn't really apologize and absolutely didn't get upset about it. in sweden if the cashier makes a mistake they actually pay you money. some other cashiers in japan do stuff like freak out and apologize fifty times if your vegetable bag breaks or your little tallow packet falls out of the bag or something.

5. met up with the friend i made at a community event, though he was really late since he misunderstood my email; we looked at a cat café but it was super expensive so instead we went to a manga café for the first time! this guy also hadn't been to one before. they had "set packages", basically it was cheaper to pay for 3 hours (850 yen) than 2 so we did that. you can stay there up to a WEEK (15,000 yen); they have a shower room that's separate from the bathroom.

one floor had entirely shoujo manga, one floor had entirely shounen manga except for a couple shelves that had (straight) porn manga. there were also a few magazines. you could get free soda and "umeboshi tea" (literally green tea that's had a fermenting plum floating in it; my wife and i think it tastes gross but apparently japanese people LOVE it) but we didn't see any normal plain tea. they also had seat cushins and small fans you could take and use. my friend told me this was actually a really small manga café, usually they even have stuff like karaoke and bowling in them. the bathroom was kinda disgusting (the person before me didn't flush the toilet) but it was the first one i've seen that actually had a hand-towel for you to use, though i wouldn't've used it.

you could smoke inside the café and we unfortunately were seated near the one person who did. the bathroom had ads inside for food/drink/manga to do with the "café", and then it had ads for what WASN'T in there (ex. "we have ZERO volumes of hunter x hunter, and don't have one piece from xx to xx volumes! we're ordering them in and will get them soon!"), and then they had creepy ads for what looked like female escorts or actual prostitutes or something... and my wife said when she was wandering around she found that the business on the other side of the wall of the café IS some kind of escort service.

they also had wifi and computers with internet but i didn't try that. i wanted to find manga by Go Nagai but couldn't, and my friend couldn't find what he initially wanted to read either, they also didn't have any BL/GL for example. i picked up a bunch of random manga volumes and they all sucked, then i read "Blue Giant" which has a main character from Sendai and it was REALLY REALLY good!! this japanese guy goes to germany, without knowing any german or anything about germany, in order to make it as a jazz player. they have various stuff that's like, only if you've really gone to a foreign country will you have felt this ("the foreign grocery store!" etc), plus the kindness of humans even to strangers who can't speak their language (like i've been feeling everywhere here in japan), and the books are actually written mostly in english, either "katakana english" or english with japanese translations so it's a REALLY easy read. i'm definitely going to pick it up at the library or something and read the whole thing.

it's good to go with a japanese friend the first time like i did, because the staff clearly had never served foreigners before, spoke absolutely zero english, and how things were done were confusing even to my japanese friend, like we didn't know where to put our books when we were done (put them back ourselves? wasn't there a space for it?) and when we asked, they were like "there's a space up there..." except there was no SIGN for that space or anything so we had no clue!! but in general it's not a good place to go to with friends because you can't talk (i'm not sure there was a real rule but the staff were whispering and no one else was talking), or rather you don't end up talking because you're reading. oh and there WAS someone snoring while we were there despite that we came at like 18:00.

oh and overall, if you read really slow like i do (i read 2 volumes in 2 hours) it's not worth it to go there - just buy 100 yen volumes at the used bookstore instead.

6. in the grocery store at around 23:00 two girls asked us if we were tohoku university students, i said no i'm miyakyou, they asked where we're from etc and one got excited saying she used to have a swedish friend from miyakyou. then she invited us out to dinner for the next day (= tonight) and even offered to drive us home because the weather was shitty, but we declined 'cause it's really not that far to walk. we exchanged LINE accounts and hurrah!!

7. i think the old lady cashier we get a lot maybe overheard that conversation and "learned that we actually can speak some japanese" so when we went to pay she said "oh you guys are out late this time!" and i said "yes, we met with a friend" (はい、友達と会った！), she replied "oh, so it's because you met with a friend eh?" (そっか、友達と会ったんだね) subtly correcting my grammar. Then asked where we're from and said be careful, don't catch a cold!! ;_;