Happy birthday to me.

So, yesterday was my birthday (yesterday because I am in the future). Sadly, as schoolpsychnerd is away and we don't have any money at the moment, I didn't do anything. I made pasta and sat at home and playing WoW. However, I've been promised a more exciting celebration when we have more money.

Another note: the apple juice we can get here is delicious. I don't know if it's locally-made or organic or what, but it tastes just like biting into an apple and is apparently 100% apple juice. Though I can't read the packaging, so for all I know it has 30 different additives and Japanese labeling laws still let you say it's 100% juice.

We interrupt your gaming to bring you JA

So, Yamasaki-san showed up out of nowhere and said that I needed to go down to the car registration place. I was a bit worried until he mentioned that they had made a mistake and needed to fix it, so offf we went. It turned out that they had left the date of last inspection off the card, so they gave us a new one, apologized profusely, bowed like 12 times and then we left.

Also, all official dates are written using Imperial dating. Our car was last registered in year 19, which confused me until I remembered what that meant--year nineteen of the 平成 era, dating since the accession to the throne of Emperor Akihito in 1989.

Also, Yamasaki-san told me that there's a kaitenzushi restaurant in town, so maybe we can go there for my birthday. Kaitenzushi means "turn-table sushi"--it's the Japanese name for places with conveyer belts where you pick what you want and pay by the plate. A lot of traditional Japanese sushi restaurants are very intimidating even to Japanese people, since they rarely have menus--you order what you want and the chef makes it for you, or you tell him "Omakase" and he makes you whatever he thinks you'll like. They also tend to be pretty hostile to women who aren't dining with a man, whereas kaitenzushi places aren't...and thus get all the business. There's a lot more of them opening nowadays than traditional restaurants.