Round 1

Merry Christmas to our friends, family, loved ones, and casual perusers of this blog! I hope your holiday was as special as ours was non-existent. Ryan and I both had to work on Christmas Eve and Christmas -- that's what we get for living in a country where Yuletide exists only as an excuse to maybe eat cakes at some point during the day.

However, I did manage to celebrate the tail-end of my Christmas Eve by eating pizza and watching Michael Jackson: This Is It with my co-worker, Kristi. (There's an English movie on every Friday at 8:30, but we never know what it's gonna be until that night). And then on Christmas Day, Ryan and I went to Round 1 Arcade to bowl and sing Karaoke.

Speaking of Round 1, allow me to show you some pictures!

A Doraemon claw machine -- or as they call it, a UFO Catcher. You think these are big prizes, you should have seen the five-foot Baby Mickey that was in one of the machines. And yes, it's basically impossible to win these things. Good to know some things are consistent between countries.

Guess I spoke too soon! Here is the little toy kitty Ryan won me out of one of the aforementioned machines. But the enormous stuff really IS impossible to win.

An Evangelion Pachinko machine. Remind me to make a post some day about Pachinko, Japan's fantastic gambling obsession. It's basically like pinball, except one hundred times more pointless and futile.

A catcher machine filled with little ice creams. You could just buy ice cream of similar size for like 200 yen, of course, but why do that when you can pay 100 yen a try to MAYBE win ice cream someday?