This following week is Golden Week meaning a week of resting and hanami for me. Golden week is a national holiday week where almost all japanese go somewhere special making travelling very difficult and expensive for you. If you are hitch hiking however, it is a great week.  

After looking for a rice cooker for some while I finally found a recycle shop with one. As it happens it was the shop across the street where I live. It was quite cheap at 3000 yen and it is a 99´ model. There was one for 2500 yen but that one didn´t have automatic timing. This one automatically decides the cooking time and then switches to heating when done. I was really satisfied with my rice cooker for two days. Then Kaku told me a friend of his would give me one for free... Well well. The one I bought is perfect so I don´t regret buying it. 

After school on Friday I went to Susukino to party with IFA, the international friendship club at Tokai university (the university where I studied as exchange student last year). Nikke came there too and we had a great time. I met most friends since last year and chatted a lot. The party started at a very strange place. We entered an old building and walked down some stairs which led directly to a room with a large table with food on. It was very basic and homey. I have never seen such a place before. The only bad thing was that the free drinks didn´t include beer, so Nicke and I drank a not so tasty mix of shochu and cider. But the food was great. Yakiniku and a variety of other food. I also met the two present exchange students from Gothenburg at Tokai university. They only stayed for a while and there was a lot of people I hadn´t seen since last year, so we didn´t talk much though. After that we went to a karaoke place where I made a futile attempt to sing a japanese song that is popular now. It´s called Ashita ga aru sa and is a remake of an old song by the deceased singer Kyu Sakamoto, who also made the world famous song Ue o muite arukou (known as Sukiyaki in English for some reason). If you´re swedish you may have heard Ue o muite arukou in a commercial for Verum Hälsofil (if I remember correctly) a couple of years ago. I first heared the new version of Ashita ga aru sa with a group named Ulfuls on tv in Tokyo, but since then another group called Re:Japan also released released that song, so now both videos are played on tv. The latter is also a soundtrack for a new drama series with the same name as the song. The people singing in the video are people from the drama series actually.  

Talking of music, there has been a Morning Musume craze on tv lately. Morning Musume is an all girl group with about 10 members from the lower teens to twenty something. The oldest one recently left the group and there has been a lot of programs about that. For some reason they still keep appearing in different programs together. Today there was some show where they were divided in teams and had an okonomiyaki-making competition.