Yay, I'm officially employed (in a not quite gainful way, but anyway...)!! Had my interview/meeting with the Being a Broad/Weekender folks today... Left the house at about 12:30 for the two pm meeting to make sure I had lots of time to get lost. In the end, I didn't so I had about half an hour before the meeting to spare. I ended up checking out this amazing home/design/book/etc. shop called AXIS which is GORGEOUS! Pretty expensive - 90$ cheese graters for instance, but truly everything you could ever need to turn your home into a gorgeous European spa style experience...

Anyway, finished drooling over the amazing stuff and then headed up to their offices, where I met Kieron, the head of marketing and sales, and Helen, the editor. It was a pretty short, informal meeting, no real interview aspect at all (I wasn't sure what to expect before I got there). They're probably going to split me between marketing and editorial, with some design work thrown in. I might get to do some movie/food reviews for the editorial side which would be fun :) Since we've run into Christmas/New Years, etc. I'll be starting the day after my birthday, January 10th, (at 10, since that was nice and matching). Sounds like the hours are fairly flexible, probably 3-4 days a week... Their last intern worked 3 days a week from 1-6, so I'll probably work a fairly similar number of hours.

That week is going to be pretty exciting (and good for the blog!), since on the 8th, I'm doing the 'coming of age day' ceremonies (Hitomi called, and it's OK for me to go, and she can come to translate for me), and then the 9th is my birthday (and getting a bank account at Shinsei day), and then work starting on the 10th! Pretty cool :)

After the meeting, I headed back to AXIS and checked out 'Bibliophile', their design bookstore. It was amazing!!!! They had such a complete and varied selection of books, I was busy spending thousands in there! They had, for instance, two retrospectives just on Josef Mueller Brockman (we talked about him in Critical Issues last year, which is why they caught my eye), a book on Equestrian Design, an entire shelf of typography books, etc. Pretty fantastic!

Wandered up to Roppongi Hills to eat lunch, and read my current book for awhile. It's pretty fascinating! It's called 'a man with no talents; memoirs of a tokyo day laborer', and is about, as the title suggests, the life of a day laborer, living in San'ya, which is an area of Tokyo with a lot of day laborers of fairly transient lives (he, for instance, lives in a shared dormitory in a Doya. Previously, he lived in a 'one mat' room, which is literally the size of one tatami mat, and had no windows. It's beautifully written, (it won the Kaikoo Takeshi prize), and very interesting!

I then walked up to the Canadian Embassy, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but about half way through the 35 minute walk, it started raining fairly heavily, but I wasn't really near a station at that point, and besides, I am from wet and wonderful BC and don't mind rain that much, so I kept going, and ended up at Tully's, where I bought a present for Peter to take to Hitomi's office's bounenkai (sp?) or year end party, which has a gift exchange component... (I'm not going, but I think I'm going to a different one in Koenji, so it's all good :))

Anyway, sufficiently dried off and warmed up after a hot cocoa, I headed to the Canadian Embassy theatre for another movie (that's where Jordon and Peter and I saw the movie about pottery that Lisel was in on my second or third day here). Today, Peter, Scottie, Hitomi and I all went to 'The Rocket', which is the Canadian movie about Maurice 'the rocket' Richard. It was good (esp. for a hockey movie :p) and very Canadian! I thought it was really well shot and produced, and Roy Depuis, the actor who played Maurice was really good - he won Best Actor (I think) at the recent Tokyo International Film Festival. The movie was mostly in Quebecois, with English and Japanese subtitles... I can't believe how they used to play hockey without helmets...Nutters!

After that, Peter and Hitomi and I headed to Tony Roma's, where we sat one table away from a famous Sumo Wrestler (from Bulgaria of all places!), Kotooshu. Peter recognized him because he'd just seen a segment about him on CNN's Talk Asia a couple of days ago! I could see his arm through a gap in the screen thing between tables, it was definitely bigger than the biggest part of my thigh...crazy! Our meal was also made more entertaining by 'Tiger' a very good, and quite bilingual magician who randomly came up to our table to do about ten minutes worth of tricks. He was very entertaining! He did card tricks and coin tricks, and did one where he had Hitomi hold a deck of cards between her hands, and then switched it for a block of Lucite. She swears she didn't feel him do it, and has no idea how it happened! It was pretty cool to watch, he was very good at it, and since we were so close, we could really examine what he was doing!!

Just arrived back home after that fairly eventful day, not sure if there's anything else going on, but I'd suspect not too much of anything!! Next couple of days there's a few things coming up, but mostly getting ready to go, and then on Saturday evening we leave! Pretty exciting!

D.