More Old Friends

Posted on 2008/03/23 01:03:18 (March 2008).

[Sunday 16th March]
We had intentionally not planned too much for the daytime today, knowing from past experience that often the second day after a long haul flight can be a complete dead loss. Actually though, for once I may have actually largely avoided jetlag - I'd managed to get a pretty decent night's sleep, none of the usual waking up at 4AM and then not being able to get back to sleep. I think I may have finally hit upon a winning formula with that short sleep in the afternoon of the first day followed by a busy evening plan to ensure I don't end up going to bed at 8PM and then falling into the usual 4AM trap.

Chie popped out in the morning to sort out a mobile phone for our stay, whilst I stayed at the hotel for a bit of a longer lie-in. When she got back we were both hungry and so went for an early lunch at Capriociosa - another chain restaurant we had quite liked while we were living in Japan.

After that we went out for a bit of shopping, and I bought myself a USB 1-seg tuner. 1-seg is a mobile digitial TV standard in Japan, aimed particularly at the mobile phone market, but also to a lesser extent for laptops etc. I was suprised to find that there was at least one tuner which worked on the Mac. I know I'm only going to be able to use it while I'm in Japan, but I'm keen to know if I can get at the data for a couple of pet projects I've had on the back burner since I was living in Japan. The great thing about 1-seg compared with regular digital TV in Japan is that the data is unencrypted - which makes it much easier for people like me to mess about with it. What I always wanted to do while I was living in Japan was come up with a piece of software that would help make it easier to read Japanese subtitles / closed captions

Later on in the afternoon we headed down to Shibuya to meet Chie's friend Kayo-chan. She'd been a fellow Gyosei student, although was in a different year to Chie, so we'd mostly known her after Chie had graduated, when we were living in Pangbourne. We had a delightful girly chat in a burger place (chosen fairly at random purely on the basis of having a spare table).

Later on still we had another meet-up arranged - this time with several other of Chie's friends from Gyosei (and one from Reading Uni) - Yumippe, Asuka-san and Yuki-san. It's interesting to me that among Chie's friends there seem to be these different groups - these three are Chie's more sophisticated / grown-up type friends. We met at a restaurant in the Kokusai forum - a large building presumably used for conferences etc, not too far from Tokyo station. The restaurant did Kyoto style cuisine, and seemingly catered to a fairly health concious, refined, and above all female clientele. Anyway, it made for another very pleasant evening out.

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