last post full of love
as the taxi was pulling onto the bridge to kansai airport, the matchmaker came for hachi! it was truly the last chance for her to bring a japanese suitor for hachi. this hanatchi is from osaka, the raunchy port city. (^O^) they had a little girl together. hachi & her daughter will be crossing the pacific withus: two families together!this is officially my last moblog post from japan. we're in the airport now. ja, ne!

battery change in kyoto
i can't remember who it was who reminded me - was it rose? - to bring batteries with me, but i have to thank you. while we were doing some last-minute shopping on shijo street, hachi's battery died. we're at the hotel now, waiting until the taxi arrives. i borrowed a mini-screwdriver from the girl at the front desk. she was quite amazed & said she hadn't seen a tamagotchi since grade school. so tamas are seen the same way here as in canada.
soon i will have to put this phone in a mailbox & send it back to the rental company. i will miss my trusty phone!
see you back in north america!

Problems with comments
Mood:  d'oh
It's come to my attention that Angelfire is being lame about comments... it sometimes rejects your captcha input (when it asks you to write in the numbers and letters to verify that you are human) even if it is correct. I'm sorry about this! Feel free to post comments on my Blogagotchi, or on my profile at Little Beeps if comments don't work for you here. Sorry!

This is my last chance at a computer until I get home, so all future updates will be on this moblog from my phone. Later! ^_^

hachi grows up
yesterday we went to himeji castle, the grandest castle in japan. hachi was very impressed with the armoury of old rifles, and all the little rooms where samurai would lie in wait to jump out and attack any invaders. i liked the hatches that they used to drop rocks or hot oil from the tower onto invaders trying to scale the walls. i could tell what an influence the place had on her today, when she grew into an adult.we're in a shared taxi right now (like a sherut in israel) on our way to the airport; we're going to okinawa for a few days with my grandparents & great aunt. as we pulled in to a rest stop, i heard the transformation song. she had grown into a masktchi! maybe the matchmaker will bring her a strong & healthy okinawan gotchi boyfriend while we're there. o(^-^)o

hachi becomes a teen
i'm on the ferry now, on the way back to the mainland after visiting miyajima. i just checked on hachi, in her new pet pouch. she had grown into a hinotamatchi. i imagine that she was influenced by visiting the shrine of a great dragon spirit & seeing the statues of fierce oni.

generation 91!
congratulations everyone! we made it to generation 91! i glanced down at my hand just as the train went into a tunnel, and little hachi was flashing in transformation. she's a bilingual little marutchi now. o(^-^)o

insane tama success
i'm writing this slowly & laboriously on my phone from the shinkansen (bullet train) to miyajima, so please excuse my lazy grammar.
yesterday was the insane culmination of my wildest tamagotchi dreams/expectations.
we spent the day at nikko, an extensive temple complex north of tokyo. i met the thousand-armed buddha that watches over everyone born under my sign: year of the mouse. this lunar year is the year of the mouse again, so it's a very auspicious year for us mice. i bought an omamori (lucky amulet) from the temple, & a lucky bracelet for mouse-people.
all of this luck really accumulated for me & produced results that have startled the skepticism out of me.
on the way back to tokyo, we found ourselves with a bunch of time to kill before our next train. we were in an unremarkable town called utsunomiya. i had thoughts of finding a toys r us; we wandered into a mall with a department store. toys were on the 7th floor.
i went down one of the aisles, & then-
"MOM! camera!! quick!!"
i had found the tamagotchi section. there were pegs & pegs of sukus, plastic figures, pouches, even kakeibos. photo albums, plushes, even trading cards. most of the stuff i'd never seen on ebay before, & what i had seen was always too expensive to be worth getting! here, it was priced to move!
i bought one of each thing i wanted for myself- basically everything mametchi, because as you know, mametchi is my favourite of the connection characters. the japanese pet pouches are a much better design than the north american ones. i'll make a video showing you, when i get back to canada.
but the sukus & kakeibos were such good prices that i couldn't pass up the opportunity. i bought a basketload of extra tamas. ($B!t(B^.^$B!t(B) be prepared for some SWEET deals on these tamas when i get back to toronto on the 21st. (special discount for little beeps members!!)
as if that wasn't insane enough: at the checkout, there were TWO store dekas! i was flipping out. i took extensive photo documentation. o(^-^)o all the photos will go up on little beeps as soon as i get internet access.
in my opinion, this is a real scoop for the world of english-speaking tamagotchi collectors. all your questions about tamas in japan, answered! i will be sure to start a forum discussion about it on little beeps as soon as i have regular internet access, b/c there's so much more to talk about.
still another bit of amazing timing: last night, nine left her daughter behind. i decided to follow rose's advice & name her hachi: the japanese word for 8. i'm about to raise her on the shinkansen. (^_^) i'll post again when she reaches toddler stage. o(^-^)o later everyone!

close call omg
Such a close call story to tell...!
We ran into some people at a bus stop who told us about an express bus that would get us to the train station a smidgeon faster. This resulted in a mad dash to the next stop before the bus passed it. I wasn't paying attention; I looked up when my mom yelled, "run!" - they were already down the street. -_-
As we were running across a street, my mom cried out, "Elana, you dropped your Tamagotchi!"
There it was, Pink Tama, on the ground, forlorn! It fell out of my pocket! I dove back and grabbed it and hugged my mom as we ran.
This is like that time when she saved my Pocket Pikachu. That story is back in my log on TSS.
I hate running for buses. Imagine Pink Tama left there on the sidewalk alone... Now I keep her in a zippered pocket of my purse.

Arrived in Japan
It's our first full day in Kyoto and I feel like I'm in heaven! Everything is so beautiful and the shopping is so good it hurts. I want to tell you so much but I have to write this on my phone. I haven't been able to get Internet access to set up Twitter or blog properly.
In Tamagotchi news, Nine! grew into an adult on the plane toVancouver. She became a Memetchi!
The planes we were on had seat-back touchscreens with lots of movies on demand, so I didn't hatch anything; I watched like four movies instead. So far I've seen no dekas here anyway.
We've been visiting temples all day, and I'm bringing back one gem of Tamagotchi-related info: the meaning of "kinakomotchi" is a type of soft, squishy and sweet rice cake that I saw a little girl eating in a tea room.
So far there have been no Tama sightings.
I'm glad I rented this phone because it is really hard to get Internet access here! I'll keep sharing with you however I can.

First post
I'm just testing out the moblogging feature of this blog. Angelfire
isn't terribly stable, but it's an account that I already have and
ought to make some use of.

I'll hopefully be able to configure Twitter on my Japanese cell phone,
while will have shorter but more real-time thoughts on my trip. Unless
my cell phone carrier (Softbank) supports Twitter, I'll probably have
to wrangle Twittermail to plug to my phone's email, in which case I
can send out Tweets, but not receive anything. If I get to an Internet
cafe, I can set it up to email me any @-replies, but not direct
messages, or regular Tweets of people I follow, without emailing them
a prompt (i.e. "send me the last twenty Tweets from my friends"). I
don't think I'll want to spend five cents a message checking on
people's Tweets - sorry! So only @-messages to me will get sent to me
in real-time.

The best (free) way to reach me will be to email my phone directly, of
course. I posted it on my Facebook page, in my notes, so only people I
actually know will see my email address. ^_^ Please break up your
messages into pieces that are less than 384 characters so that they
will be free for me receive. ^_^

If I have Internet access, I'll use it to update my Blogagotchi. But
if I only have my cell phone, I can use this to blog. ^_^ I know it's
pretty basic, but it serves my purposes. It has an RSS feed too (see
the column on the left).

I hope I'll have a lot to talk about when I'm in Japan! ^_^