ダニエルの冒険

In Japan they love using charts in the mornings. They assemble the charts while describing a piece of news. The most interesting news is always about famous couple’s relationship troubles.

“Iris” was on the news yesterday.

Here we see her beside her “TOY BOY” with 不倫 (“adultery”) in a heart in the middle, along with ４０歳差 (“40 year age gap”).

And here we see that she’s married with 3 children to Peter Robinson.

The presenter reminds us that they have been married for 40 years (結婚４０周年) and that they are an “ideal couple” (理想の夫婦).

Finally we are presented with the “secrets” (秘) recently discovered: a confession of unfaithfulness March last year, and a suicide attempt.

I finally got a phone sorted. I wanted to use my Irish iPhone but the mobile companies here weren’t having any of that so I ended up buying a new one. The girl in the SoftBank shop was incredibly helpful and after a lot of various obstacles owing to my non-Japaneseness, I finally ended up with a new iPhone. It’s a 16GB 3GS, like my Irish one, but I got it for free. Normally you either pay for the phone up front, or pay for it bit by bit over 12 or 24 months. In their current “iPhone for everybody” campaign, you pay for it every month over 24 months (1920 yen/mo I think), but they also give you a 1920 yen discount every month, so it ends up being free. However, I paid for the iPhone up front and will get that money back through the discount over the next two years.

I ran into quite a bit of bureaucracy when trying to get it sorted. For example, if you don’t have 90 days on your visa you can’t enter the contract, and I had 87 when signing up because I had been here for 3 days already and the tourist visa is 90 days. This means that if I had arrived and immediately done my alien registration, then hurried along to the phone shop, I could have done it without any trouble. In the end I needed Satomi’s dad to put his name down on my contract to cover them in case I skip the country.

It’s a relief to have constant internet access back, and since then I have filled up my schedule until Monday! SoftBank gave me about 4 or 5 different passwords for different things when I signed up and I’m having trouble figuring out which ones go with which services, but soon I should have it all figured out.