Category: Irl

Sara’s Lalaport Book Swap

On Saturday I went to a Book Swap at the Lalaport Yokohama shopping mall with my dad. At the book swap you can take books freely, you don’t have to donate any yourself. This book swap is organised by Sara Kumagai. In Janurary I met her brother, Daisuke, who runs Our Living Room Café. You can read about my visit to his café here:
https://www.kidsnews.fun/2024/01/25/going-to-our-living-room-cafe-in-chofu/

When I got there my dad and I looked at the art books. My dad chose some for his friend Yuko who is interested in art and is a good artist. He also found 3 books for my sister Jessica who is 10 years old. He got an MC Escher book, a book about illustrations in children’s books, and a book about the illustrations in Tintin.

After that we found Susana(Sara’s mum) and talked to her a bit. We then talked to Sara who organised the event. Sara is a couple of years older than me. She is very friendly and is good at organising events. She does the Book Swap outside most weeks but I think this was the first time for her to do it at a shopping mall. We met her father Antonio and also saw Daisuke again.

I found two books that were interesting and decided to take them home. The first one was called “Task Force Black:The explosive true story of the SAS and the secret war in Iraq”, it’s about the war in Iraq in the 2000s. It’s written by Mark Urban who is a BBC journalist. The second book I found was a novel called “Death in the Andes”. It starts off with mysterious disappearances from an isolated community in the Peruvian Andes. It’s written by Mario Vargas Llosa who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010.

I really enjoyed the Book Shop and would really like to go again. My favourite thing about the event was how relaxed it was and you could chat to people or just find the books you want and go home to read them. It’s also amazing that all the books are free and you don’t have to worry about giving them back.

You can find out about Sara’s Book Swap events here: https://bookswapjapan.org/

Hunt For The Wilderpeople(2016)

I watched Hunt For The Wilderpeople(2016).

It’s a comedy adventure. The film is set in New Zealand and is about a foster kid called Ricky Baker who gets into trouble often and gets rejected by foster families. At the beginning of the film Paula Hall from the state services drives Ricky to a house on a little hill. Ricky’s new foster mother, Bella greets them but Ricky is unimpressed. He goes straight back to the car which is funny and sad at the same time.

Ricky is used to living in cities so feels a lot of freedom in the countryside. On Ricky’s 13th birthday Bella makes a happy birthday song while playing a toy piano which was very funny. Ricky gets a pet dog as a birthday present and names it Tupac.

Ricky tries to run away and burns a fake corpse of himself but manages to burn down an entire shed which was funny too. Hector finds Ricky in the morning and while they’re having an argument Hector trips on a tree root and twists his leg.

Hector makes a camp and rests for a few days. But then they start getting chased by the police and military because Hector is suspected of abusing Ricky. Ricky doesn’t want to go back to his jail-like life in an orphanage so Hector and Ricky go on the run.

The landscapes in the film are really beautiful and dream-like. I thought Ricky was a very funny boy and Hector was amazing at navigating in the wilderness. The actor for Hector was Sam Neill who was Dr. Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films. Hunt for the Wilderpeople was a very chaotic funny film that made me want to go and explore in the New Zealand wilderness one day.

The film is based on a book called Wild Pork and Watercress by Barry Crump which I would like to read one day.

What are your favourite comedy or adventure films?

“Going Solo” by Roald Dahl

I read “Going Solo” by Roald Dahl. The book is about his life after school. When he was 18 he wanted to work for Shell Oil Company but also wanted to go somewhere exotic. He was first offered a job in Egypt but declined. After that he got offered a job in Africa which he very eagerly accepted. The contract was for 3 years in Africa so after he said farewell to his family he went on a ship from London to Mombasa which took around two weeks and many stops.

When he got to Africa he got his own servant called Mdisho who comes from the M Mwanumwezi tribe. He had to learn Swahili to talk to Mdisho and his other members of staff. One day Salimu(The gardener) was raking Dahl’s gravel garden when a 6 foot(around 183 cm) long black mamba slithered towards him as fast as a running man. Roald Dahl who was shaving when he saw this and shouted at Salimu who had his back to the deadly snake. Salimu turned round and waited for the black mamba to get very close and then stabbed it in the back with his rake. He jumped up and down pushing the tines of the rake deeper into the snake. After the snake became a bit weak he hit it on its head and killed it. Roald Dahl had saved Salimu’s life.

Another time the cook’s wife was nearly eaten by a lion. The lion had put the cook’s wife into his mouth and ran away. Roald Dahl’s friend got his gun and shot near the lion and the lion dropped the wife and ran away. The cook’s wife was unharmed and she was just playing dead.

There was also a time when Roald Dahl had gone to visit an Englishman name Fuller. When he got near the house he saw a huge green mamba gliding into Fuller’s house. He was so surprised that he as stunned for a few seconds before quickly running around to the back of the house and called for Fuller. Mrs Fuller popped out of the upstairs window and asked what the matter was. Roald Dahl explained to her that there was a giant green mamba in their living room. Mrs Fuller called for her husband and he came. He lowered his wife and two kids out of the window first before hanging on the windowsill and jumping onto the soft grass. Mr Fully went to fetch an old Scottish man who was nicknamed “The snake man” who caught snakes and sold them to zoos and laboratories Unfortunately the Fuller family had forgotten about their dog Jack who had been silently killed by the snake. The snake man caught the green mamba with a very long pole around twice the length of a grown man with two rubber forks on the end of it. He moved the rubber forks up the snake until the snake’s head was between them. He dragged the snake into his large sack and took him home. I think this sounds so hard to do and you have to be unafraid of the snake to do anything this dangerous.

Roald Dahl was also in the RAF and had many encounters with the german bombers. He had a near fatal plane crash when he was flying around looking for an airbase he had been told about and got blinded for months. Dahl had so many accidents in his life and it’s really amazing that he lived for so long regardless of the injuries. Going Solo was a really amazing journey through Dahl’s life before he decided to become an author. I really liked this book as it was easy to read, very exciting and sometimes surprising. I also want to learn more about Africa and maybe even go there some day.

Would you like top read Going Solo? Or have you already read this book? Please let me know in the comments below.

“Boy: Tales of Childhood” by Roald Dahl

I read the book “Boy” by Roald Dahl. The book is about Roald Dahl’s childhood to 18. I’ve read a of Roald Dahl’s books. One I really liked was “Fantastic Mr.Fox”. It’s satisfying because Mr. Fox manages to gather so much food for his starving family and friends.

Roald Dahl was born in Wales in 1916. The book is mainly about his life in Wales and England, and his time at school. The contains lots of incidents from his childhood. For example he was in a car crash and nearly had his entire nose cut off. He very luckily had it sowed back on. Also his worst memory in Norway was when he went to the doctor and got his adenoids taken out and had tons of flesh and blood falling out of this mouth and it was very painful and shocking for him.

When he was 7-9 years old there was a sweet shop he liked to go to with his friends. But the sweet shop owner was a nasty old woman who always had very dirty fingers when she picked out sweets from her jars. One day Roald Dahl found a dead mouse underneath some floorboards in his classroom where he had been hiding sweets with his friends. He decided to put the dead mouse in his pocket and went to the sweet shop. When he got there he put the dead mouse in the gobstopper jar while the nasty old woman, who was the shopkeeper, was selling some other sweets to Roald Dahl’s friend. The next day the shop was closed. The same morning the shopkeeper came to the school and found Roald Dahl. The headmaster took him and his friends into his office and hit them on the bottom many times with his cane until they bled. When Roald Dahl got home his mother was very angry that her son had been hit and he couldn’t sit on anything without yelping. The mother went to the headmaster’s office and had a long argument.

On summer holidays Roald Dahl and his family always went to Norway to meet their relatives. Dahl’s mum first had a big rowing boat to visit many minature islands in Norway. But when she upgraded to a motor boat they could go to islands much further away.

The book “Boy” by Roald Dahl was a very interesting and detailed story of Roald Dahl’s childhood and life in general from 100 year ago.

Have you read any of the Roald Dahl books? If you haven’t, are there any you are interested in, like Boy? Please leave a comment.

Going to “Our living room café” in Chofu

On Monday this week I went to “Our living room café”. The café is in Chofu which is around 1 hour from my home if you don’t get lost on the mind boggling journey. My dad and i had to change trains 3 times and 2 of those times had to walk quite far between stations.

“Our living room café” is run by a 16-year old boy called Daisuke. He welcomes people to his café in his living room where he serves hot drinks for free. You can relax there and chat with him. There are books and games too.

When I arrived Daisuke said he had been finishing his assignments for a big test for the online high-school he goes to. The online school happened to be the same one I’m planning to join in April. He showed me the website and the Slack groups for the school. He was very helpful and good at explaining how the school works and he said he will tell me anything I ask him when I join it.

I think he has run the café for over 2 years. For 1 year of that he ran his café in an empty house because he thought that empty houses shouldn’t be wasted when they could be turned in to something useful. He wanted to make a place with a welcoming atmosphere for people to make friends and get to know each other. And in December after a few months break he started his café again in his own home.

I stayed there for around 2 hours and after about 1 hour a Japanese man came. It seemed like he had come there often. He was very interesting and friendly. He didn’t speak much English but Daisuke worked very hard translating from English to Japanese and vice versa for us.

It was nice to sit there and talk about many things with friendly people. I would like to go again soon. Maybe next time we will play a board game as they have a lot of them at the café.

The café is open three times a week:
Mondays 14:00 to 18:00
Tuesdays 14:00 to 18:00
Fridays 14:00 to 18:00
You don’t need to make a reservation, you can just turn up but it’s important to check on X(Formally Twitter) to see if the times have been changed: https://twitter.com/livingroomchofu
This is their website(currently only in Japanese): ourlivingroomcafe.mystrikingly.com

Daisuke’s sister Sara, helps with the café but she wasn’t there when I went. She runs a weekly book swap and you can find her X(Formally Twitter) page here: https://twitter.com/BookSwapChofu

Yokohama Baseball Game

My friend Patrick took me to a baseball game in Yokohama Stadium with his Japanese teacher and one of the volunteers from the YSHP called Minoru. I arrived at Kannai station at 4:15 and Patrick and his Japanese teacher were waiting there. A few minutes after I arrived Minoru came as well.

The game was from 5:00pm to around 8:45 pm.

This baseball game was the first ever baseball game I went to and even the first professional sports game I’ve been too.

We walked to the stadium and Patrick and the others bought some Yuzu Beer from a store. Yuzu is a round Asian fruit that’s a bit like a lemon. We got into the stadium and first went to our seats.

The stadium where the baseball game was held was in Yokohama. The home team was the Bay Stars and the away team was the Giants.

The seats we were sitting in were on the wing of the stadium which are the highest seats.

Inside the baseball stadium there were some people with tanks on their backs filled with beer and a hose attached to them. They were selling the beer to the people watching the game.

For dinner, l had Chinese fried rice and shumai, which are steamed dumplings. They were sołd at a shop in the stadium.

There were quite a lot of drunk people at the game, and after the game, on the trains.

On the train home there were so many people from the baseball game that it was hard to find a carriage with space.

The weather forecast said that it was going rain but it only rained just after the baseball game.

The game was a bit confusing because I don’t know much about baseball and l didn’t know who the members of the teams were.

Playing Japanese Drums For The First Time

Yesterday I went to a Japanese Drumming Lesson with my sister. We went with our friend Risa and her three children.

It was my first time and I didn’t even know there were different types of Japanese drums. Some of them are small drums that are for getting everyone in the same rhythm and there are big ones for the main sound.

The teacher gave each of us individual drums to play. The drum sticks were short and thick. After trying our drums out we went round and played the drums that other people were using. I really like the smaller drums because the sound is less hollow. There were a few elderly people and all had a lot of energy and were playing the drums very hard and fast and I was quite surprised. The teacher showed us how to play the drums by moving our hands in a circular motion.

The teacher taught us how to play with a group with all of us playing at the same time. It was hard for some of the children but most of them were quite good.

It was a really fun first-time experience and I would really like to go to another one of the lessons again.

Showa Memorial Park

I went to Showa Memorial Park in Tachikawa with my family. It’s a extremely big park in a suburb of Tokyo.It had been a long time since I had been there. When we first got into the park were given a free Uber Eats balloon but my sister gave it to a young boy who had just popped his one.

We then went to check a bicycle rental place but there were no tandem bikes so we went for a walk. When we finally got a tandem bike at another rental place. we cycled to a garden area with lots of flowers and sakura(Cherry Blossom). I went on the tandem bike with my sister but it was very heavy and hard to steer. The basket on the bike was attached to the front stem, not the handle bars. It felt really weird on the bike because it didn’t turn with it.

We had dinner in Ikea, I had salmon and ketchup rice.

Joining the Yokohama Spring Homeless Patrol

Yesterday I joined a volunteer group called “Yokohama Spring Homeless Patrol” for the first time.

My dad’s friend, Elena, is an early co-founder of the group. Elena looked after me a lot when my dad was in hospital. And I hadn’t seen for quite a while so I was very happy to see her.

Patrick Curtin and Elena started this group about one and a half years ago. They get food and beverage donations and give them to the unprivileged  and homeless people of Yokohama(City in Japan).

When Elena and I got to Kannai station in Yokohama at 17:35 we met Patrick, the founder of the group. There were a few people that came to the patrol meet up for the first time. They were all very talkative and kind. There were 14 of us altogether.

We were split into groups to give out food and drinks. I was in charge of handing out some Cherry Coke and some vegetable juice drinks. There were around 100 people queuing for the food and drinks. They were very patient and I was amazed. Some of them had been waiting there for  over 3 hours to be the first to get the food and drinks. This is because sometimes there is not enough food and drink for everyone.

After that we went into the station to meet some people living in cardboard boxes. We handed out crackers and chocolate biscuits.

It was basically what I had expected except that almost all the volunteers were non-Japanese. I wonder why there weren’t many Japanese people helping other homeless Japanese people.

It was a very good experience and I would love to join more of these events. They do these twice a month on Saturdays. Why don’t join or donate some time?

You can get more information about this group, the people in it and see some photos here:
https://www.facebook.com/mutualaidsolidarity/

Tokyo Game Show 2022

I went to Kaihin Makuhari in Chiba City for the Tokyo Game Show with my dad. It took 2 hours to get there. When we got there it was a Friday so there weren’t that many people there. We went to a curry restaurant for lunch and we both had the buffet. The food was quite good and I ate a lot.

Then we went to queue for the Tokyo Game Show. The queue was quite long but we got there early so it didn’t take longer than 20 minutes. After queuing for a while there was a bag check for security. We opened our bags and there was a rough check and the security staff didn’t look that well. After that we showed out tickets but my mum had put HER name instead of MY name on the ticket so we thought we couldn’t get in. As we got closer I got more and more nervous. When they did check the ticket they didn’t worry about the name so that was quite lucky.

When we entered TGS my dad was so shocked at how big it was. First, we just walked around getting some free bags, pens and notebooks. When we took in the whole place we looked at some booths. There were lots of famous companies like Sega and Konami and FaceBook Meta Quest.

When we went to the Sega booth there was a new samurai game. It was called: Like a Dragon: Ishin! 

and it was an adventure/quest game where you fight people and go to shops and explore Japan in the 1880s.

We didn’t try the Meta Quest because of the super-long queue. It was an Among Us game in 3d. There was a model of the emergency button from Among Us as well.

The show finished at 6pm. We bought some dinner at a Family Mart convenience store.

We had some Mc Shakes at a Mc’Donalds and I had a sweet potato flavoured one.

We stayed at a business hotel. It was 3 stops away from Kaihin-Makuhari, at Inage-Kaigan.

The second day was a full day so we played a lot more.

We put our stuff in a locker in Makuhari Messe. My dad used a pasmo card and it was 300 yen approx: $2/£1.8. It had an interface that talked to you and told you how to use it. My dad got a code on a receipt to unlock our locker later.

We played Wanted: Dead in an American diner. There was no food but you could sit and play there game. It was hard to aim and I don’t like TPS games so it was a 6/10.

I played an indie Pinball game called Infinity Pinball. It was quite fun but a bit hard. My dad talked to one of the translators for the game.

We went to a Gaming Chair section with a lot of gaming chairs. There were a few that I liked and a few that I didn’t. Most of them where red or black but some were green or pink. After looking at some gaming chairs I tried out some RealForce keyboard and mice. They were quiet and didn’t make a nice sound. I prefer custom linear keyboards. Some tactiles are nice but they don’t sound as good as linear ones. Tactiles are easier to lubricate because even without being perfect they sound quite good and when you press them they click smoothly and are good for accurate typing.

For lunch I had Tonkotsu Ramen from a cafeteria. I quite liked it and the soup was quite good as well.

The Indie Games area was my dad’s favourite section. He really liked how you could actually talk to the people who made the game. He played a Japanese learning game called “So to speak” where you go round cities and towns learning new Japanese words. It was a bit complicated but was easy enough for a normal foreigner learning Japanese.

I played a skiing game where you control it with the gyro sensor in the Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons. It was quite hard because the controls weren’t very good. You put on a harness on your shoulders and the controllers fit into that.

The Steam Deck was my favourite thing because you could play a lot of games. I played Stay and StarDew Vally. I liked both of them very much. Stray was a game where you are a stray cat and explore a little city. It had some puzzles and parkour. The graphics were really amazing so I loved it. StarDew Valley was very fun as well. I made a little farm and gathered some wood, stone and some grass. It was my first time to play it but I can easily play it for hours. The Steam Deck itself was really good. You could play a lot of pc games like Apex Legends and Cyber Punk 2077

I looked at the Asus ROG gaming gear. It was okay but I prefer Roccat or Razer. I played Apex Legends and Valorant but it was very hard because it was my first time to play it on pc.

There were a few Competition/Giveaways at TGS like a Steam Deck giveaway and some others. I only registered for the Steam Deck one but there where many others.

At the Monster Energy x Apex Legends booth you could get free Monster Energy drink. I got free Monster Energy drinks both days. I don’t love the taste but it was still pretty good.

After that we went on the train home.