Travel Journal – Monday 26/4 – 2010

Sick, Shabu Shabu and better internet…

This day will be very, very brief. One of the reasons is because I’ve been home for most of the day trying to fight my gastric catarrh or whatever it’s called¹. We got up in the morning and the plan was to go to this Sea World amusement park thingy but after the unexpected drinking we did yesterday my stomach was in major turmoil and I had a hard time not puking.

When I wasn’t able to finish my breakfast I decided to send Drak alone. I gave him Aya’s number and some instructions about how to go there and then I went to bed and slept for about 4-5 hours. When I woke up my stomach had somewhat settled so I ate and took some medicine. As the day preceded things got better and after negotiating a little with Higuchi’s secretary about the price of our stay and such I went to Akihabara to find a router and maybe a replacement battery for my laptop “Linsuss”.

Linsuss has had some problems lately with her battery I suspect. She can run on her battery if it’s charged a 100% and then when it reaches 60% or less, she will just turn herself off without a warning. I suspect the battery is slowly dying, since that seems to be a common problem with older laptops. Linsuss though is only about 2 years old, I bought her just a few months before I went here two years ago.

After some searching and asking in Akiba I quickly got the answer that they didn’t have the battery I wanted. It might be here somewhere if I really search in strange places where they sell reserve parts to almost everything but the truth is that I can spend days if not weeks looking in those places without finding it. My computer isn’t of a known brand, thus making the search so much harder. So I gave up, I will probably search some in Sweden and if I can’t find it there I will probably sell her as I sold Mars, my laptop before her, and by another computer. I’m even thinking about buying a Mac here, since I saw a laptop here that only costs about 7,4k SEK and in Sweden it costs about twice that.

Anyway after this I met up with Drak and Aya that has came back from the Sea World thing. We decided to go and eat something called “Shabu Shabu” and so we did. It showed to be similar to fondue. But instead of boiling your meat and vegetables in oil you just boiled them in a big water pot instead. I think I like fondue better but this was nice and different, which was good. After this we walked around a little before we parted for home around 23:00.

As according to our new agreement with Higuchi we now have access to internet in the same building where we’re sleeping. We bought a router in hope to have internet in our room, but since I this time bought a pretty weak router it’s only barely possible to use internet in the apartment. We could buy a more expensive router and that will definitely work (I tried this last time) but since we have to pay for it ourselves we think we can manage with this weak router instead. We still has internet in the classroom which we can use from 20:00 to 16:00, which is quite much time anyway.

Best Regards,
Herid Fel

1. Just translated the world ‘Magkatarr’ ↩