I need to start blogging before Pete gets home, otherwise we start watching Friends, and then all of a sudden its like two am and I still need to blog!

Anyway, today was much better! I got a ride with Pete to Yoyogi Uehara on he way to a meeting, and then went to Shibuya with more 'working in a Starbucks' plans. This time, I actually found power in the upstairs of the Starbucks beside Tokyu Hands. Of course, none of the outlets were close to the big work table, but you know, you can't be too picky!

I spent a couple of hours working on my internship application and then headed over to the Swedish Embassy to see one of the movies they are showing at their film festival this week, Zozo. Unfortunately, they were sold out, but I got to see a cool exhibit of Swedish textile design anyway - They had a lot of really cool designs - one pattern showed the choreography in a famous movie fight scene, and another was yellow, with a braille relief pattern on it that describes the colour yellow, making it more usable for blind people, and completely unintelligible for those with sight.

I came back home and then finally printed out some meishi, YAY! and Venus and I basically just hung out doing some cruise research and stuff, you can never be too prepared! When Pete came home, we both really wanted pancakes for dinner, but a multi cupboard/many person on the phone search resulted in a severe lack of pancake mix, so we had to walk down the street for pancake mix - so worth it though!

We also discussed some pretty shocking information that Venus and I dug up while waiting for Peter to come home... I've been thinking that Venus needs a friend, so when Metropolis had an animal shelter advertising in their classifieds, I went to check it out, and discovered lots of OLD abandoned dogs, including this one, who was about to be gassed before he was rescued!! (Taro). The whole, about to be gassed line kind of shocked us, so we did a bit of research on the ArkBark website, and found out some pretty disturbing things about dogs in Japan - for instance:

"The breeding and pet shop business is controlled primarily by gangsters which is why, needless to say, the authorities and police are reluctant to intervene, let alone take any positive action to control the trade."

"Indeed the pet shop business operates on a 10-20 % turnover, that is to say, they make a profit from selling about 10-20% while the remaining 80-90% that are unsaleable are 'disposed of'"

"Over 400,000 dogs and 300,000 cats are gassed in the hokensho of Japan every year.
Over 73,000 pet dogs and 13,500 pet cats are used in laboratory experiments."

"It can take upto 20 or 30 minutes for a dog to die, according to its size. In many hokensho the system is so automated that animals go directly from the gas chambers into the furnace at the press of a button, no one checks if they are dead or not"

"They are kept in the hokensho from 3-5 days before being gassed."

etc. There is some pretty shocking and disturbing crap going on here! Venus spent the night sucking up and looking generally grateful that she didn't join 80% of her liter mates in the cosmetics scrapheap! I think that Venus needs to take one for the team and give up her only child status, so that we can rescue another dog like Taro.

Yeuuugh! Anyway, we needed something to cheer us up after that, so we watched another disc of season five, in Friends...what a great show!

Tokyo Writer's Day tomorrow...
D