There's the normal mini market down the street and there's this produce store that plays Enka music every day.  Kinda neat to hear it while walking to the station on Tuesday/Wednesdays and pretty much every other day since I'm always going into town. 

Stepped into some different directions from my house yesterday for the first time. Walked into a restaurant for a quick fix, grabbed a magazine and sat down.  Although nothing new, I enjoy how I'm always the catalyst of real deep discussions on the changing faces in Japan.  The men speak in a "matter of fact" tone of voice while the women keep a quiet and rather sad sounding voice, as long as they're with their men. 

Today is the first day of a 5 day break for Golden Week.  Tokyo is in the plans for mon/tues, but other than that I'll just be skating and studying and eating lots of cheap food until then. The mini-market down the street seriously has the best muzak in the world.  It's all midi versions of American classics, but not exactly midi like we know it. There's a particular keyboard in most of the songs that's also in Ween's "blue balloon", and they really go wild with the pitch bender. "never gonna give you up" was perhaps the funniest thing I've ever heard the other night because the lyrics are done with the keyboard, and with constantly abusing that pitch shifter, the lyrics half out of tune is an instant classic.  I really need to start asking the workers where they get the music, etc etc.  Since my camera is currently down, I have no way of capturing the it, but it's a personal promise.  This morning was Queen's "queen killer".