Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the letter 'M'

Posted on 2005/05/29 01:53:33 (May 2005).

[Tuesday 24th May]
All the highlights of today began with the letter 'M'. In the morning, after complaining about not being able to have a "proper" breakfast (i.e. the same sorts of things I would have back in England), as if by magic, two jars of Marmite popped through the letterbox. OK, actually a delivery man turned up and we opened the door and had to sign for them - they wouldn't fit through the letterbox, but metaphorically speaking they popped through the letterbox. Oh joy of joys! I can never thank Chie's friend Tomoko-san enough for sending these, what an absolute angel!
After the sheer delight of a couple of slices of (thin!!!) toast with Marmite on, we headed into Hiroshima for a spot of shopping. I'd decided to buy an MP3 player, and in the end went for the V@MP VP-425. If looks could kill then... well, this would be an MP3 player you wouldn't feel particularly threatened by. OK let's face it, it is pretty ugly. It was the feature set that sold it though - that, and the price. I can listen to (and record) FM radio with it, it has 256MB of built-in memory but can also take SD cards, and it also has dual headphone sockets, so Chie and I can listen to it at the same time. All for 12800 Yen (about 65 quid). You can't say farer than that, even if it does look like it was designed by a particularly boring civil servant on a dull day in the 1980s.
After buying the MP3 player, we went to a little Japanese sweets cafe where I had some rather nice Mochi. Don't particularly remember much of the day after that - I guess we just went back home and had dinner there at some point or other...

Question: Does it have a radio tuner too? It looks cool... I was checking out some players here in taiwan but they are rather expensive (mmm they do have 20GB of space that has to be said)...

Posted by Lox at 2005/05/30 12:39:04.

Yes it has an FM tuner... Although there are apparently only three FM stations here in Hiroshima! Still, it is quite cool being able to record radio as I listen, although I suspect this is one of those features I will hardly ever actually use in practice...

Posted by John at 2005/05/30 04:54:21.

Cool tech purchase sir. I wonder if you can get any GaijinFM on it?

Posted by Rob Lang at 2005/05/31 15:21:57.

Yea - strangely one of the radio stations in Hiroshima is sort of half in English. Not sure if this is designed to address the ex-pat population living there (there's an American army base nearby) or if it is intended to help Japanese people learn English. Unlike England though, there seems to be no real chance of picking up foreign radio stations - in the South of England you could sometimes get French (or perhaps Belgian) stations, but there isn't any of that sort of thing here. I guess Korea is the closest country, but even that is a bit further away than France is to England.

Posted by John at 2005/06/01 14:36:12.

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