The Battle for Bloadband

Friday 25th September 2009

AM

Least: At about 9:00am, I woke feeling completely dehydrated. The weather on Thursday was expectedly warm and created an uncomfortably hot night. I feared for a moment that the cool of a couple of weeks ago was an abberation. I felt as if I had a hangover, yet without any memory of revellry and this feeling lasted until well into the afternoon. No amount of water or staring at the playstation screen seemed to do any good. An utterly empty morning.

Most: Close to 11:00am, I peered through the netting on the balcony to find that my intermittent study of katakana was beginning to pay dividends. A sign on a mountain of tissue-related product over at the Drug-11 read something along the lines of  "Early Bird Special". The sign finally explained the ridiculously long queues on certain days of the week that had been the subject of intense speculation for seven months. Now it all makes sense and fits perfectly into the Japanese habit of being incredibly bargain conscious. Hazaar!

PM

Least: Sometime after 6:00pm, I enlisted a our friendly neighbour in an attempt to set up the already boring router. Despite his best efforts, my dream of wireless internet was shattered. I became especially discouraged when I read the box and it read in English "Wireless Bloadband". I should have smelled a rat back in Den Den town.

Most: At nearly 7:00pm, I dashed up to the bottle shop to raid its supplied of tinned tomatoes. Outside the barn-like shop sat thousands of cans of the hangover inducing Chu-Hi and as many cartons of beer. Incredibly, the shop also passes as an understocked supermarket that allows the drinking man to cook up all manner of junk food for his night in front of the TV. The most interesting thing about the store though, are the massive barrels of what I assume to be Shochu. By any measure, the Japanese seem to be extremely heavy drinkers and appear to revel in afterwork drunkeness. At least it keeps the can scavengers in business.