This week was fairly routine in a lot of ways: going to class, going to the lab, attending a lab seminar, doing my usual stuff. Some different and interesting stuff also happened, though, and it’s always the different things that feel like they’re worth writing about. Sleep continues to be a problem.

This week I did some digital colouring for the first time in a long time. I took some line-art that Anastasia had given me and coloured it for her according to another reference picture. This actually took a lot longer than I thought it would, because I needed to change the line-art a bit, and add in some mesh clothing, which was a bit of a pain. The final result is ok, but not great… looks like I’m going to need a bit more practice if I’m planning on getting back into doing some of this.

I also went to the city office again to pick up my alien registration card. That’s right, I’m officially a legal alien in Japan. Hilarious! On the way to the city office I talked to a little old lady on the bus named Tareko, who spoke no English. It was really hard, but a lot of fun trying to stretch my Japanese that I’ve been learning in class to an actual self-introduction situation. ^^

I’m finding that I’m running into some of my classmates who live at my dorm quite a lot in the mornings, so I suspect I’ll be travelling with them quite regularly. This week it was Ignacio (Mexico) and Tariq (Bangladesh). It certainly is novel having such an international class! Everyone really joins in the discussions and contributes to the class, so it’s a lot of fun.

Speaking of transportation, this week on the way to university I did see someone with pink hair on the train, then immediately after leaving the train saw a little old lady with blue hair. Only in anime my ass.

I also spent a bit of time in the lab this week looking at the lab’s webserver, trying to figure out if I could install PHP on it (since it just has Perl at the moment). Now, I’ve made a bunch of websites, but I’ve never really got into the server side of things… I left that up to other people who were actually interested in that sort of thing. Ultimately, I think I could probably do it, but I don’t know if I would be able to restore things from a backup if I completely screwed up, so I might be stuck with basic pages for a while. Sigh.

I’ve been badgering Takeshi, one of my labmates, this week into making arrangements to give me (and anyone else in the lab who wants to) a tour of Akihabara, a famous district here in Tokyo. It’s kind of like the Mecca of anime, manga, electronics and the culture that surround them. Takeshi is an anime fan as well, so I’m looking forward to him being able to show me around a bit.

Yesterday I went with a bunch of my friends from language class to Shimokitazawa, which is a district quite close to my dorm. We wandered around looking in on shops and generally getting acquainted with the place. It has a lot of little shops (some with fantastic Engrish), but also a bunch of bars and things as well. The general vibe of the place is that it is full of young people and was kinda fun. I’m sure I’ll be going back there a few times during my stay at the dorm.

Oh, and this week I saw the new Naruto movie and Shoot ‘Em Up. I think both of them fall into the category of movies that don’t require terribly much thinking, but are fun anyway.