My Life – Kids News

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

Watching Dr. Who

Recently I’ve been watching the British Sci-Fi series Doctor Who with my dad.

We started watching from the 7th Doctor(played by Sylvester Mccoy). We’ve watched the first three stories: Time and the Rani, Paradise Towers, and Delta and the Bannermen

My favourite story so far is the third one, Delta and the Bannermen. The main reason I like it so much is because it’s the most interesting and complicated story. Also, the Bannermen had very funny suits and some of them have weird flags on their backs. But the Bannermen were very strong and could vaporise anything with their guns.

I think it’s the most funny story because the Doctor and his first assistant/companion(Melanie Bush AKA Mel) go to Earth but in the year 1959 and they are on a holiday with some aliens to go to Disney Land but end up in Wales at a holiday camp and as the story progresses, they find out that one of the aliens on the holiday trip is actually a alien called Delta that has escaped from the Bannermen who were trying to kill her entire species but she escaped with a princess in a strange green egg.

The Bannermen find out where Delta is when one of the aliens on the holiday trip tells them where they are, so that he can get the bounty prize for Delta, but in the end he gets vaporised and doesn’t get anything. And the Doctor and a local citizen overheard the conversation after going to a dance party and warned everyone at the holiday camp about the Bannermen attacking.

Everyone at the holiday camp evacuates and the aliens on holiday try to escape in their space ship but get destroyed by the Bannermen and all die(except Delta, who stayed). So to escape the Bannermen, the Doctor, Mel, Delta and her princess, all hide at a bee keeper’s house. The bee keeper and the Doctor decide to make a trap for the Bannermen by luring them into a room with lots of honey. When the Bannermen think they’ve found where Delta is, they get covered in honey and the bee keeper’s bees all attack them. After that the Doctor and the others go back to the now empty holiday camp(because all the Bannermen are still at the bee keeper’s house).

Delta’s princess uses a special attack of high pitched screaming and the Doctor uses a megaphone to amplify the sound to make all the Bannermen temporarily unconscious and tie them all up.

When the Doctor and Mel get to their Tardis, they find out that the leader of the Bannermen had fallen into his own trap, he had left a force field around the Tardis so that no one could get in but, all the energy of the force field was lost when the leader of the Bannermen fell into his own trap. So, the Doctor and Mel could get into their Tardis without being vaporised by the force field. One of the locals, called Billy, joined Delta and her princess to go back to Delta’s home planet. They used one of the space ships of the Bannermen to leave Earth.

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.

Minecraft Moonwalk Bridging Tips

Here are my Top 5 tips for Moonwalk Bridging in Minecraft!

When you place the blocks, strafe at the same time.
eg. Hold S(Walk Backwards) and tap A(Strafe Left) at the same time as placing blocks.
Learn timing.
Try practicing the block placement timing by making a normal bridge, and then pretending to place the blocks that are already there.
Try different clicking methods:
eg. Drag Clicking, Double Clicking or Single Clicks
Don’t butterfly click if you’re not timing the clicks, the chance you can place a block properly will only be around 5%.
One of the best times to use Moonwalk bridging is when you’re either being chased or you don’t have time to aim for God Bridging.Also, I think that Moonwalk Bridging is easier than God Bridging. You don’t have to aim at the top of the block you’re starting from, and also you don’t have to reset your movement like in God bridging where you have to Jump, Strafe, Shift or stop moving for an instant and start bridging again.

My favourite Houses in Hypixel Housing!

A few days ago I found an amazing 2 player parkour house in hypixel housing. It’s quite a hard but really fun! Everyone is so kind and are always helping each other out. I recently learned that you can fish to get the in-game currency called “Gold”. I use my Gold to buy fishing rods and sell the fish I fish for 500 Gold each. The fishing rod is only 1000 Gold but you can fish a lot more than 2 fish. I think it’s quite a good way of earning gold but it’s not as good as completing the parkour.

When you complete the parkour you get 50,000 Gold and 1 Trophy. You can use Trophy’s to buy ranks. For example the Myth Rank lets you teleport anywhere and the Immortal Rank can let you fly. I currently have Legend Rank which costed around 125,000 Gold and 3 Trophies.

If you would like to play this, open Minecraft and go to Multiplayer, Click “Add Server” and put in the address “Mc.Hypixel.Net” Then type “/hub housing” then all you have to do is “/visit Jayznn

My 2nd favourite Hypixel House is Mining Simulator 3, it’s a house where you have to mine different blocks and level up. There’s also pvp(which is called Warzone in this house) which I am not very good at keeping a streak.

I haven’t got a rebirth which I don’t know much about but I’ve heard you can rebirth once you get to rank 1 mil. I’m currently rank 500,000 which took around 2 hours of grinding but was worth it. I only have a standard pickaxe which was 1 mil Shards but I hope I can buy a better one once I reach Mining Lvl 6 + 50 mil Shards.

I met quite a few people in this house. I first met IGN: TheEighthArchon who is quite nice and gave me some diamond gear for battles in Warzone. I met another person called IGN: Royal_Bellz who was first using me for kills when I was trying to mine so I got a bit annoyed, but we made a deal where he grinds me for kills then he will let me mine with peace. After he killed me around 20 times he gave me a pet that gave me a 1.4 mil booster so I was very happy.

I also am making a new Hypixel House called Lava Parkour. It’s still being built but if you wanna try the beta version just /visit oItzBlack on Hypixel.

Minecraft Parkour

Recently I have been making parkour maps in Minecraft. I will link the file when I have finished a good map.

Right now my favourite Minecraft parkour jump is the “triple neo”. It’s a jump where you have to jump around 3 blocks. It’s quite hard but I’m getting okay at it. I can do it in around 10 tries so as a percentage it’s 10% chance usually when I try doing it.

Also I’ve been making a parkour course on Hypixel Housing. It’s quite hard because it’s version 1.8 blocks but still you can make a basic parkour course. I really like using ladders in 1.8 parkour because it makes the parkour more challenging.

I like Hypixel Housing parkour maps where the jump are easy to understand and are not confusing. eg. I don’t like carpeted slime blocks or hidden ladders and barrier blocks in super random places. I don’t like it when people don’t have check points but I don’t mind if the parkour course is short.