Remember how I wrote I painted a box blue for no reason. Then I painted my face for no reason. Snapped. One, two. Painting my face and snapping pictures of myself used to be one of my favorite past time events 10 years ago. Not so much these days. I know what I look like, sans makeup as well. I washed my face and returned to bed.

First and foremost; I found the exit. I don’t remember where I found the exit though. Or why I needed to find an exit. But I found it. This made me happy.

I also tried a new sushi place. It was ok. Not the best place I had been to, but not the worst. Nothing to write home about, so I won’t write about it on the blog. // On the right – one of the super-duper big trees at the uni campus. Which I don’t have to see again until September! Hooray!

Even in sunlight the light inside the classrooms seemed dull and dark. This is what studying does to you. Remember to be grateful for your summer vacation kids! // On the right; it’s Gokiburi-hoi-hoi-time. Or in plain English; you buy little hotels for the cockroaches with sticky-tape inside of them. The roach goes into the hotel to eat, and ends up spending all time until eternity stuck on the floor. Poor guys. We don’t actually have much trouble with roaches where we live, but all of a sudden the temperature went up a whole lot in a matter of a day or two a couple of weeks back, and two small guests found their way into our house. (Welcome to Japan!) But fear not, we have top service and plenty of options which our guests can choose from, including The Bellagio, The Venetian and Caesars Palace. The Bellagio, located right next to a small crack in the wall seemed to the top pick for our summer guests. The other hotels seems to suffer, not a single guest have visited them for weeks. Bad for the service industry, good for us.

Quirky flower shop in Mintato-ku. I wanted to buy one of those deliiiish-looking basil plants you can spot in the front of the picture there, but then I remembered I had to enter the overcrowded highway to hell, *cough* the Oedo line *cough*, and the chance of bringing the plant home in one piece during rush hour made my heart sink. I would end up torturing the small thing, which I had already appropriately named Herr Basillusk den 18. (Yes, this implies that I might have killed of 17 basil plants before contemplating buying this one. No comment.) Pictures getting my newly acquired basil plant stuck in the train door floated vividly through my mind, and I opted out of buying it. On the right; I reached Shinjuku without the basil plant, but with enough time to snap a picture part of the skyline.

I tried a fancy new drink from one of the automated machines. Think of Kiwi fruit. With all the kiwi-seeds intact. Then think of yoghurt. Then think of them together. Yay? Nay? It was actually far more delicious than I anticipated. I might have to take the train to this station again just so I can buy another box of juice. On the right… recognize this guy? I finally got to go to the Studio Ghibli museum again! More pictures and text about this will come.

It’s Saturday. But I forgot to post this on Thursday, and I am in holiday-mode, so I am posting it now instead. I was looking through the archive, and I can not believe it has been five years since this picture was taken. Jeez. Time flies. I guess five years have left me with less eye makeup and less lipstick.

Holiday makes everything go slow and I am not sure if I like it or not, because I end up doing a lot of random things at random times (hence the box I painted for no reason, or my face I painted for no reason, or the doodles I doodled for no reason..). In any case – I decided to learn how to make snowflakes. The real deal, with six points! (Not the silly ones with 4 or 8.) I found a video by Vihart and I had to try it myself. Nothing like festive christmas decorations in July.

Yes, I am aware that I have posted pictures from this temple (Hasedera) before. Yes, I know this might make me fall into the post-too-much-too-soon-trap. This is the trap that makes girly bloggers (especially the Norwegian ones, for some odd reason or another) post five, six, seven, eight or forty-six pictures of their own face from the same photo shoot, and all of the pictures look almost alike. And viewers get bored. (Every time I see a post like that, I keep thinking how much better the post and the pictures would look if I was presented one or two of the best photos from the set instead of fifty shades of boring in the same blog post. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I have ADD or ADHD or OMG. Oh wait. I went off on a tangent here. Back to the post. Sorry about that.) I know variety is the spice of life and all that jazz, but one of the main reasons I started blogging was to… *dumdumdum* document my life *insert sad violin music here*, so bear with me, here are more pictures from Hasedera in Kamakura. Because I went there. And I have pictures to prove it.

Tokyo consists of 23 different central wards packed into one, called 区 (pronounced “ku”) in Japanese. Because most of my daily life the past months basically revolved around eat-sleep-school-delete-and-repeat, I hadn’t been around to more than 3 different 区s in the middle of Tokyo for several weeks. This was naturally quite a sad and terrible state to be in, and it made me feel boring and dull. Remedy: trip to Kamakura. Because they have this magical thing called the ocean in Kamakura. I reminisced about seeing the ocean in Norway as a child (and played more sad violin music inside my head) and felt quite sorry for my ocean-less self. (I also saw the ocean back in March of this year in Norway, but for some odd reason this didn’t enter my mind as relevant when it was time to indulge in self-sulking.) But on this particular day in May, 2013, I would no longer be ocean-less!  Climbing up the hill inside the Hasedera temple area you can see both beach and never ending ocean! Seeing the ocean from top of the hill was like seeing a watering hole in the middle of the desert. Ok, not quite, but you get the picture. It was N-I-C-E! And beautiful.

Apart from the fresh air that made me all kinds of giggly and high on life, I also saw a bunch of tadpoles that all went away when I picked up my camera and tried to snap a picture of them.

And we saw serious statues…

…and happy statues…

…and more oceaney goodness! (Ok, I know oceaney isn’t a real word, but it should be.)

Super wheel-chair accessible, of course! Just like the rest of Japan. At least it was really pretty.

No day trip is complete without a mandatory walk through a bamboo forrest. Pretty, no?

Exams are definitely over; yesterday I painted a box light blue for no reason (not worth taking a picture of), then I painted my face with a ton of makeup and snapped pictures of myself (I do have pictures of this), washed my face clean (no pictures of this though), concluded that I could not spend my days applying color to random stuff including my face, I had to get out! Of course I did. Jajamensann.

I walked to Shinjuku, got caught in a thunderstorm (I DID bring an umbrella, thankyouverymuch!),  and got soaked in the rain. (Seriously, it was raining sideways, it made me feel like I was back in Bergen, Norway. Yay. Or nay. Hmm.) I escaped into Isetan with wet hair and a dripping umbrella. (Isetan is a high-end department store. No, I mean HIGH-end department store. As in, even in the their food section on the B1 floor is presented like jewelry on silky little pillows. Mmm. Tasty jewelry.) Surprisingly, I did not receive that many nasty looks from the shop clerks despite my unfashionable appearance reminding myself of a drenched cat. I walked around and considered spending 1600 yen (that is like… 100 kr for you Norwegians) for a loaf of dark bread. This was only because I was excited to see a loaf of dark bread. My first spotting of dark bread in months, possibly in all of 2013!!! I concluded that I should manage my money better, and went and bought a bottle of Cava instead. Good girl.

I went home and preceded to drink the bottle of Cava. The Cava had the unfortunate side effect that it weakened my fine tuned super-motor skills just enough so I could officially become a member of the avocado-related-injuries club when I managed to slice into my thumb removing the stone. Bummer. But kind of cool when I realized that it must have been YEARS since I cut my fingers the last time. The irony was that as I was cutting the avocado, I actually thought about avocado-related-injuries. Now, this lead me to an albeit small, but yet enough to make me gasp, existential crisis. Because O-M-G – I thought bad stuff didn’t happen if you constantly thought about it very hard. (For example, this is why I freak myself out whenever I go on an airplane. I visualize how it will crash into the ground, and by doing so and being aware of the possibility of me plunging to my death in a metal tube, It will not happen in real life. Makes total sense.) And now, I cut my hand while thinking about cutting my hand. I have to rethink my entire being now. (Good thing it is holiday-time.)

After a rather unexciting night cursing avocado-stones and how impractical bandaids are (like – how DO you shower with bandaids?!), I finished up with a similarly unexciting breakfast, cottage cheese and blueberry sauce. Or, actually, for being in Japan it is quite exciting. I was stoked to find cottage cheese here in the first place, and the blueberry sauce actually almost tasted like Norwegian blueberry jam. Score!

I love kaledioscopes.

I think I might have found my first decent and yummy Spanish restaurant in Tokyo, El Pulpo in Kagurazaka. They specialize in Spanish seafood. The mussels were huge(!), fresh and moist, the pate was absolutely delicious, the olives were decent quality (compared to what you usually find in Tokyo), and even the shrimps were moist and not overcooked.

I have been trying to find decent Spanish restaurants in Tokyo for quite some time, but a lot of places have totally let me down and made me almost irritated that I left money in their establishments. I have been using tabelog and reviews on several social networking sites in Japan, but I guess that Japanese people’s idea of good Spanish food is overpriced, overcooked and and overcomplicated, and incredibly small portions compared to the stiff prices. I just can not believe how decent ratings several Spanish restaurants have gotten despite the sub-par food. This goes against other types of cuisines I have tried in the Tokyo area, I have found decent, tasty and correctly priced French, Italian and even Mexican restaurants. I don’t know if I have just been really unlucky with the Spanish restaurants I have tried, or if there is some kind of Japanese curse that seems to target Spanish restaurants specifically. Every single place have been consistently bad. Except for this one. Finally something decent! I will definitely be back to El Pulpo very very soon.

(I should mention – It can not be compared to some of the Spanish food I have had around Europe, but my expectations for Spanish food in Japan have dropped so much that finding anything decent is a mere bonus for me at this point.)

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