MY LIFE IN JAPAN a blog from kyoto for friends and family

I just got a new cell phone...in fact they paid us to do it. The law in Japan is changing and phone companies can no longer give away free phones through electricity stores, or something like that, and in some strange way I dont fully understand this led to the phone company, willcom, asking all its customers to come in and trade in their phone for a newer model. Sice Yukie is a student, I was able to get a pocket pc, which is a small computer that happens to have a phone attached. It runs a mini version of windows, has lots of software, including a very cool japanese english japanese dictionary that has a handwriting recognition feature that must be used to be believed. It can read my handwriting, which if any of you know what it looks like, is damn near impossible. It works like a charm, and it was better than free..they actually end up paying us about $85 for it in the end...the catch is we have to keep the service for two years, which was our intention anyway. But even if I cancel the service, I still have the cool dictionary and toy.

Aside from that, the only newsworthy item is our work on the contradance workshop. I spent the day cycling around and putting up flyers. I really hope people come. a few people have said they can't make it...We did have one piece of extraordinary luck. We happened to be walking around in Katsura, which is the west part of kyoto, way out of our way, because we were early to visit our deaf friends and we stumbled into a great second hand shop, the best in kyoto, and we found a portable dvd-cd "karaoke"-type machine that seems to have been part of some kind of language learning program, but it was just what we needed. I can carry it around and call and play music. It is very light, and very colorful...It is quite unlike the usual piece of electronics. It looks like a child's toy, in "Playschool" red, white, blue, and orange and round speakers that look like Mickey Mouse ears. It has a conspicuous handle and is deceptively light. But it functions like the real audiovideo equipment, with fancy jacks in the back and great sound and video. I am quite surprised it isn't a more widely known "toy", because it was no more expensive that devices that provide the individual functions which it combines; my guess is that is was a specialty item made as part of some kit, that had other materials with it, and it wasn't sold individually or maybe in stores at all. Supporting this belief is the fact that it came in a vanilla white box with the words World Family Video in plain letters on it...no graphics or anything. I love my new toys...