Thinking Outside the Box

I'm back in Canada, as some or all of you may know but I'm not going to talk about that just yet. I'm gonna talk about Japan again. More specifically my trip to Tokyo last month. We arrived at the Shinjuku highway bus terminal EARLY on Friday morning. At 5:30 there are people out and about, but not a whole lot is open except convenience stores and the bus station. We asked around a bit and found the station we were to catch our bus to the amusement park from with a minimal amount of trouble. There was a bit of time to waste until then so we grabbed some food from a local conbini and sat to rest a bit. We arrived at Fuji Q Highland somewhere around 9:30 if I remember right. A little tired, but looking forward to the day. We hit several rides, the most exciting being FujiYama rollercoaster! The track was so long that there are three sets of cars on it at any given time. The haunted hospital was really great too. Three stories of creepily-decorated rooms and VERY in-charac...

We interrupt our irregularly unscheduled programming with this brief segue into um...strange vocabulary. So this week has been a little odd. I packed up most of my stuff and mailed it off yesterday. On the plus side, it cost quite a bit less than I was budgeting it to. On the negative side, I had to fill out tons of flipping forms just to send them! I can understand the postal service wanting to be sure they aren't going to lose your stuff, customs wanting to know what they're transporting and the government salivating to slap taxes on everything when it arrives, but this was bloody ridiculous. The night before I spent a goodly while carefully taping and labelling everything with clear TO and FROM addresses. So when I get to the post office the lady kindly informs me that I have to fill out another form for EACH BOX with exactly that information, plus the contents and value of each. Also, I had to fill out a second address in the event the package couldn't be delivere...