Alexander Quist

Since I’m now a free man, I’m also a bored man.

I poked around but I didn’t find anyone that was going to do something particular so I thought I’d start something by myself. I decided to go to IKEA just for fun, since I’m Swedish and all.

So I asked around but everyone was either sleeping or too tired to come so I went alone.

After a very confusing and long train-ride I was finally there… well, the train didn’t take very long, but I had bad luck when I changed trains so I had to wait a lot. I think I was spending more time waiting for trains than riding them.

I spotted IKEA even before I had stepped out of the train. As you might know, IKEAs are usually quite big…
After walking for 300m or so I was there.

This is probably the biggest IKEA that I’ve ever visited, but most are quite big so it wasn’t really a shock.

Since I wasn’t really interested in buying anything I just walked right on through.
It looked just like any other IKEA, and of course the furniture’s were the same.
I had quite a few laughs at the names of the products, like “Plastis” and “Bästis”.
I also realised how weird it is that all names are in Swedish.

I ate some meatballs just for fun, even though I wasn’t even hungry.
I also bought some Swedish stuff, like Knäckebröd, Ahlgrens bilar and Ballerina kex.
They had a shop near the exit that only sold Swedish products like this.

The train ride home went smooth, since I now knew this route. It’s hard to explain but it was also easier to ride in this direction.

So here I am in my room again, I think my friends are going out partying tomorrow. I have yet to decided if I wanna join them… I’m too tired

Tomorrow I’ll probably go to another Hanabi taikai, this time it’s in my hometown. YAY~!
I don’t have to spend an hour or so in an overcrowded train.
Heck, I can even watch it from the roof of my hotel.

And the day after that (Sunday) I’ll probably be heading to Kyoto, lets hope I can find someone who wants to come with me.

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Today was our last day of school…

One of our last exercises was to write some things about our trip, what we’d done and so and on in Japanese.

It wasn’t very easy, but we managed to get something together… then in walks all the teachers on our school, and we’re supposed to read what we’ve written in front of everyone >.<
That was without a doubt one of the worst “speeches” that I’ve held in my entire life… luckily everyone was just as bad as I was.

Since all of us got really nervous and such we kind lost touch of the situation… and before we knew it school was over and everyone was going their own way… out of each others lives.

Farewells are a really funny thing…
I didn’t really get close to anyone in my class, and I won’t miss them… but it still feels really weird that I’ll never be able to see them again.

Ah well, enough emo… Now I free until the 10th of August when I go home, so I’m going to plan what I’m going to do. At least I’m going to try to get to Kyoto, Hiroshima and Disney land.

Not much happened.

I didn’t feel very good at around lunch, but once I got home and got some rest it got better.

Then me, Jonas a Lily went to a tiny bar near our hotel to have an unofficial farewell party for Jonas.
I meet a Japanese man who was fluent in English, so I had a little chat with him, it was great fun.
After a few beers we were hungry so we bought some french fries from a local convenient store… then we headed to karaoke for one hour.

All in all… it was an epic night.

Today we went to the The imperial palace instead of school.
So we had to get up early…

They had hired an English speaking guide, she was a bit hard to understand sometimes but it was okay.

It was really hot though…

I don’t really know what to say about it, I think I’ll let my pictures do the talking.
But I can say that it felt pretty unreal to be in this beautiful place, especially when there were skyscrapers all around…

After that 2 of my friends went to Akihabara, but I was just too tired…

I totally failed when I was going to change trains on the way back… I took a detour on, emh, 4km, when it was a 200m walk… it’s a long story.

Then when I got home I found a fellow swede by the tv so I joined him, because I was just too tired…
We both felt that we should do something better on this rare occasion, when we’re in Tokyo… but we were both too tired.

After a while he dragged me to the store to buy some tea and honey since he had a bad throat too.
But we took a small detour to an arcane, where I kicked his ass in a few games :p then we went to the store…

After seeing the dangerous “30% off” I bought something too eat, even though I’d already ate some noodles.
But meh, it was only around 240¥(~14kr).

Then we went home, I ate what I’d bought. Then I proceeded to do my laundry… which I’m still working on, I’m just writing this meanwhile I wait for it. Lets see if the evening has anything in store for me… I doubt it.

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Today Jonas and Lily had came up with the idea that we should dress up in yukatas and… do something.
For Jonas sake I said I’d come along.
For some weird reason they decided that we should go to a museum… going to a Hanabi taikai is one thing, then you’re far from alone. But in a museum you’d be pretty much all alone in your yukata… at least there were 3 of us.

So it was me and Jonas representing Sweden and Lily and Chang from China.

After walking to the museum… and getting a lot of stares and giggles… well, we finally got there.
Then we realised that the exhibition that we were going to see wasn’t open until next week, doh.
So what do you do? Well… there was a zoo 200m away. So we thought, why not.

So we walked around a bit, and took a lot of pictures on both ourselves and the animals.
Walking in wooden sandals really isn’t that great, even thought it’s not as bad as I first thought… because of fucked up clothing and unstandable heat we took quite a lot of breaks.

After 1.5h they closed and we walked to the station again, there we found a Japanese restaurant that we had dinner at. My food was pretty expensive, but at least I got quite a lot, for once.

After some more painful walking and a few painful minutes of standing on the train we finally got home… I immediately threw away my sandals and my yukata…

After resting for a few minutes I got bored and went down to the common area with some sweets.
There I meet a lot of people who draged me to karaoke.
I wasn’t in the mood since I was really tired and I was having school the next day… but I thought that I might not get another chance so I joined them.

It was pretty cheap, it was 2000¥(~110kr) per person, and then we got a room for the whole night, and we could drink as much cola and beer (etc) as we wanted.

At 1 o’clock I went home, since I have school tomorrow…

I wonder if my voice is going to be alright tomorrow… this whole karaoke thing was more screaming than singing after a few beers… and I have a cold… Ah well, it was worth it.

Good night, it’s now 2 o’clock.

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After getting a few hours of sleep I woke up at 13:30… well, my alarm woke me up.
I got ready and then headed out to a Hanabi taikai (fireworks festival) in Asakusa, we were 2 Frenchmen and 3 Swedes.

And today I was stupid enough to wear my Yukata, a got a lot of stares when we went to the train. But once we got there it was okay, I was far from alone. There were a lot of more yukatas here than in Yokohama, especially on the male side.
But I still felt pretty stupid, since I’m not Japanese.

I didn’t really let it get to me that much though, because I thought I looked okay in it at least…
it was a bit hard to move around in, but not so bad…
When I was siting there I was thinking… what did I gain from actually wearing this yukata?
And… I have no idea.

Anyway, going back to the festival… since this is japan; it’s really crowded, and finding a seat is pretty much impossible.

After a minor disagreement on our chosen location we actually split up in 2 groups, Sweden and France.
They stayed where we were and we went to find another location.

After a while we sat down on a bridge… but that wasn’t allowed, apparently. So our search continued.
After walking like… a long way. We found a free spot under a highway. We were so surprised to find such a large area free that we asked 2 police officers if it was actually okay to sit there, it was too good to be true after searching for more than 1 hour.

We sat down, ate some Yakisoba (fried noodles), which was really good actually.
The other 2 guys then went on to buy some chips and drinks.
It was actually pretty cozy.

We had a descent view of the fireworks, the highway blocked our view at the top, but most fireworks didn’t reach that high.
But it seemed like there were some other fireworks more to the left… I have yet to really confirm this, but it seemed almost as if they were firing from 2 places at once…

The fireworks were really cool, but I still think I prefer the ones in Yokohama.

When it was over there were some minor chaos, by all the thousands and thousand of people that were going home. But luckily this is Japan, everything was under control. There where cops everywhere… and most roads had been shut down so you could walk on them.

There were quite a line to the subway, but there were trains leaving like every 2-3min so it was okay… and they squeezed quite a lot of people into everyone

After getting home I was really tired, and had some blisters from my wooden sandals… but Jonas still managed to drag my to a local bar.

It was pretty cool, it was the complete opposite of the one in Shibuya. This one only had 5 seats…
A bartender that was neatly dressed and barely talked at all. But I liked this one too.

I had a beer and Jonas had 2, then we payed and left again.
It was more or less a fancy place and we had to pay as much as you’d usually do in Sweden… i.e a lot

I then went home… and failed to sleep since I was coughing madly.
It’s so ironic, it’s hot as hell outside but I’ve still managed to get a cold from all the over-use of AC.

A few people from my hotel were supposed to go partying, so I went down to the common area to check it out.
There were a lot of people there who were “warming up”, so we had a few beers and such.

But then it turned out that they were heading for a gay club… A few thought it was a cool idea and caught on.
But me, Christian and Markus disagreed and went by ourselves to Shibuya…
But Markus was too drunk and was accidentally left on the train went we went off… He then woke up in someones yard at 3AM… and he had no idea where he was
But don’t worry, he managed just fine.

Anyway… so me and Christian meet up with one of his classmates, a danish guy.
We then continued to Shibuya… but since none of us had really been there before we were kinda lost, and had no idea were to go.
After walking around for quite some time me and the Dane spotted a small sign… and for some reason we both got a feeling that this must be a bar or something so we went to check it out.

And right we were, we found a dark room in the basement.
The interior was pretty cool.

But what really struck us was this awesome bartender… he sure was a one of a kind.
First we thought he looked a bit weird, the Dane made a small joke “This bartender is probably the one who pours one drink for the costumer and one for himself”… and right he was ^^
We seriously had a toast with the bartender.

As you’ve probably noticed by now, not many Japanese people know English very well. But this bartender had lived in New york for 10 years so he was fluent in English. So when he was not serving drinks he was chatting with us about… everything.

We also talked with 2 Japanese twins, a guy and a girl. Their English was on par with our Japanese, but we usually managed to understand each other… he even bought us some champagne.

Later on that girl passed out on the counter. Then the bartender asked us “You wanna fuck her?” and we said “What the fuck..?!”, “You don’t know what fuck is” then he pointed at her and said “Take, take!”

At around 4:30 we started to get hungry so we said our thanks and left for McDonald’s… but the Dane refused to go into McD, which I thought was kinda stupid, where are you else supposed to find somewhere to eat at 4:30… Well, duh, I forgot this was Tokyo… We found a Italian restaurant…

It was located more or less in the middle of Shibuya, so it was pretty expensive, but meh…

it was really weird, this was also in the basement so they had no windows. So we sat there, there were waiters… and other people eating. It didn’t feel like 5 o’clock in the morning at all.

At 5:26 we caught the train home. And I went to bed at around 6:30…

Nothing happened yesterday so I didn’t bother making a post

Today my class was supposed to go to Tokyo Imperial Palace, but for a number of reasons we went to what we swedes call an “experiment-hus” instead… almost like a museum.

So we were really disappointed and a few student didn’t even join.

Sure, they had a few cool stuff… but it’s wasn’t worth the trip.
So right now I’m pissed off that I lost one day of school for this…

Warning: they are quite big
And you might have to install Quicktime if it doesn’t work.

• This was the opening act
• Fireworks #2
• Fireworks #3
• Fireworks #4
• Fireworks #5
• They managed to make figures with their fireworks, here’s smileys and what I think is an octopus (They also made hearts, cats and spirals etc)
• This was one of the last fireworks… or maybe the last one, can’t remember.
• It gets a bit crowded sometimes at the subway…
• Like… wtf?

For some unknown reason my Gallery just refuses to upload a few of my pictures… so here’s a few that I managed to upload at least, I’ll give it another go later on.

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Not much happened today, but it was still pretty nice… to just relax.
Even though it’s Monday we didn’t have any school, it’s a national holiday of some sort.

Today me and Jonas went to a department store to look for yukata’s for ourselves.
After some minor confusion we found a store, but we were to afraid to go in… after standing there for a while I was more or less sucked into the store by one of their sellers… and 15sec later I was wearing a yukata, damn she was fast.

After some minor confusion and a lot of laughter (and a lot of compliments) we had bought a yukata each.
They were only 12.000¥ (~675kr), and then we got a yukata, a belt and a pair of shoes… the whole package!

So now we’re ready for the next festival!
It’s going to be really embarrassing, but I’m still looking forward to it… and you guys can look forward to the pictures :p

Later on I was bored, and some people were going to go get something to eat so I joined them.
We went to an Italian place and after that we went to an arcade… and here I am, my whole day went by just like that.