Tomorrow is the day my month of Japan is coming to an end, and I thought it’d be appropriate to write a little post about stuff I will miss with this magical country. It is also a good excuse for taking a break from having to shave off more kilos from my luggage to comply with the 20 kg limit friendly SAS gives you…

The English metro voice
- The Next Station is Harajukuuuu

Anyplace is sleeping place
- Japanese people have a nack for taking a nap anywhere. In the subway, in the café, on the street and in book stores. Everywhere.

R->L switching
- Lock ‘N Loll!

Engrish

- No smorking, preesu!

Synchronized Starbucks ladies shouting out drink orders in perfect sync.
- Hitotsu chooocoreetu ratteeeeeeeEEE!!

Nagasakian school childrens fascination with us tall gaijins, and their burning need to try out their English skills with vocabulary such as “herro!”, “wea yuu from?” and “yuu big!”, and afterwards classmates calling them cool (“kakoiiii”) for being brave enough to communicating with white giants.
- They so brave!

(Female) School uniforms
- who can say anything against the utter cuteness of the sailor uniform?

Vending machines

Hit and miss sometimes. This turned out to be jelly on can.

- They stand on every street and is waiting for those 10’s you have stuffed in your pockets for lack of space in your seemingly insufficient wallet.

All you can drink
- for the price of two beers in Sweden there are places which will let you drink all you can for two hours. A loosing deal for japanese when us westeners catch on. Sweet.

Bread on can
- Yeah, it does exist.

Bicycling cats

- It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?

Cosplayers

- Cosplayers in Japan is A-OK. In Sweden: not so much. Sorry(?).

Food

Meronpan: why is this not available in Europe?!

Kaki: see above caption.

Okonomiyakismiley

- Okonomiyaki, ramen, udon, fried stuff is all pretty great.

Taito Station!

- I may not be a degenerate gambler, but blowing off a couple of hundred (read: thousand) yens on a Taito Station sure is a lot of fun.

General notes and observations:

In Akihabara, every store – no matter how innocent it may look – has a basement with porn.

The Japanese loves them corners: they have corners for ATM, drinking, smoking, vending machines, sleeping, karaoke, etc – and most of the time they’re not even on corners, but in between!!

Japanese people _don’t_ like it when you hang in the ceiling of the subway train. Yeah, totally.

You can be a real jerk in public and later say “Abunai! Neko desu!” (=”Watch out! A cat!”) and all is forgotten and they love you again. This is how we got out of the previous paragraphs turbulence.

Japanese people are friendly and will lend you a cloth if you spilled something. Sweet.

Japanese people are in general 7 years older than they appear to be, and believes the same about us: “You onry 20?!?! So young!”