Japan Journal Mega Post (I still forgot what day)

It has been a while since I last posted on here. I have been having fun and completely forgot to do this (To be fair, the day after the last post I was so tired I went to sleep immediately after running to the hotel from karaoke). Anyways, so much has happened, and frankly I don't remember it all. I'll probably be referencing the photos (I have not taken very many) I have taken and WhatsApp group chats to figure out what happened. However, downtime has claimed my phone already and I cannot look at WhatsApp, so I will do that later.

Starting from the day after the last post (June 14th) I bought a booster box of Pokémon cards and had someone record a 10-minute video of me opening it, which I find not very worth watching because I only got like 9 hits from 30 packs and the set (I would later find out) was not worth buying at all. They are like filler packs you would find at a supermarket that no one wants.

The next day (June 15th) I got 5 packs of Black Bolt and 5 packs of White Flare to open, a habit that would become very common over the next few weeks. I got 9/10 hits from the packs, so I was pretty happy. That same day, I went to a cat cafe with a friend and when I tried to pet the cats, they all bit me. They don't bite down though, they just kind of nibble on your hand. Except for one, and it had this really angry face but started licking me when I pet it. Its tongue was so dry, but it was pretty soft as well.

The day after (June 16th), a scavenger hunt event was announced where we have to go to different locations in Kyoto to get points (the person with the most points gets something(never found out what it was)) so my roommate and two of my friends were dragged out to go around, and it was pretty fun for a bit, until my roommate started getting really competitive and ran everywhere instead of just trying to sightsee, which I think was the main point of the scavenger hunt. At one point, we got lost and ended up at a very large graveyard, which actually took us way higher up the mountain we needed to go. Eventually, me and one of my friends got tired of it and went home to rest.

The next day (June 17th), I convinced two of my friends to buy Pokémon packs (Battle Partners) with me, and we all ended up pulling the same card, which I found really weird, but funny.

During this time, we also had to design and make a board game, and the next day (June 18th) we had to present it to high school students. Me and 1 of my friends were making a board game where it was kind of like DND, where you face monsters over and over until you get to the boss, but it was 2v2 styled, where the first team to beat the boss would win. All the monsters had special abilities, and the boss room was a 10x6 grid with movement. Each person deals damage by rolling the dice and if both players on a team rolled the same number, they would get an Ability Card, which boosts the team's abilities in some way, whether it is +1 damage, or healing the party by 3 HP after they end a fight. However, we had only began making the game two days prior and had to rush everything the night before. Needless to say, it did not go well. Since everything was written in Hiragana, it was hard to write down quickly, and everything had card arts as well. We were not able to finish all of the cards and only had a very limited variety of monster and Ability Cards. Some of the cards had the arts and name, but no ability written down, which we had to explain to the students when it came up (I had to write Hiragana for the first time on a train for one of the cards to prevent more than 50% of the cards having no ability description). When the time came, we presented the game and let the students play (they were my age, only behind by about 6 months or lower) and they were having fun! During the whole thing, we had icebreakers to help introduce ourselves to the students, and we ended up finding a bunch of people who knew each other in the school. Also, Japanese students all know English (to an extent) so there was little need for translation. After this, we began on making our actual games in different groups.

The next day (June 19th), I did not take any pictures, so I have no clue what happened.

The day after (June 20th), I bought what I like to call "wafer packs" of Black Bolt and White Flare Pokémon cards since they had 35 cards in them each and kind of look like those packs from various animes that will have some card and then a wafer inside of them. The wafer packs are pretty cool, since they have guaranteed hits, and are basically like buying 5 regular packs. By the way, packs only have either 5 cards or 7 cards in them. No 10 cards like they do in America.

The next day (June 21st), we all went to Nara to pet deer. All the deer are so nice and friendly, they let you pet them and don't pay much mind. UNTIL. you pull out the deer crackers. Then they become vicious monsters that attack you. I regret paying 200 yen for a stack of deer crackers just to get attacked. 10/10 would do again. I actually got a cut on my knee from one of the deer's hooves that tried to ram me because I didn't have any more deer crackers. The deer's fur are pretty rough, but I found that ok because they were cute too. For some reason, my friends started doing this thing where they would put their camera at 0.5x zoom and put it really close to a deer's nose, so I did it too and it looks pretty funny. Some gripes about the place other than getting rammed and bit by deer was that the whole place smells like poop since there is just 1,250 some deer running around a section of a city, so there is almost no way to consistently clean up all the deer poop everywhere.

The next day (June 22nd) my roommate's bed was really messy because he put all his dirty laundry and other things on it and the very large pile often fell on the floor, right next to me. So, I asked him to clean it up, and he simply told me that his method "organized". I took a picture to put it as a caption like a meme (i.e. white box on the top with black text saying "organized" with the quotation marks and then the image of his pile on his bed on the bottom). I never did that, because I am lazy.

The next day (June 23rd) I bought more Pokémon packs and pulled a pretty cool Special Art Rare (SAR). I didn't think much of it at the time because the set (of cards) that I pulled it from (Battle Partners) it seemed no one wanted and was very cheap (180 Yen per pack!!!!) so, I was always buying it because the English version had come out 2 months prior and I saw and liked one of the arts. I had just pulled that card. It was Lillie's Clefairy EX. Since it was the Japanese version of the set, I thought nothing of it and thought it was like 30$. Fast forward like 2 hours, where we are about to go back to the hotel and do nothing for the day. I was in the elevator with a bunch of other people, and I looked at the prices for the cards from the set, just to see the worth of all the cards I got. I flipped out when I saw the price tag of 176$ on the card I had pulled 2 hours ago in the elevator. I literally went; "WHAAAA" (-Me 2025) and everyone was very confused, so I showed them what I was looking at and why I said that. They had a more or less similar reaction to me.

Anyways, next day (June 24th) in which I took no pictures whatsoever.

June 25th! We went to a samurai museum where I got to hold a 300-year-old katana (isn't that crazy?) and a pairing 300-year-old wakizashi (short sword samurais used to kill themselves for honor (a lot of history in Japanese weaponry)). They also let us throw shuriken at a wall with targets, and whoever was closest to the bullseye got to keep the shuriken (they were like 300 yen). I also ended up buying a 900 plastic kunai to fidget with because it had a ring hole at the bottom. On the same day (June 25th), I bought a Rowlet Pokémon plushie because it was cute (don't worry its small so I will have space) and one of my friends also bought one.

The next day, (June 26th) I seemed to have bought Pokémon cards because I just have three photos of 3 sets of 3 of the same cards (mouthful, I know) and I found it funny that I had that, and not other not previously owned cards from the set.

The next day, (June 27th) we had a professional artist for games come in to give a presentation to us named Molly Heady Carroll. She actually gave a not boring presentation (the last one was an hour long and it was on localization so you can imagine how boring that was (everyone was sleeping)) and she ended up doing a thing where she drew a monster from scratch using our input, and we ended up with a gremlin monster with a toothbrush looking thing on its head called an Orthosaurus (peak name by the way, which was named by one of my friends). After that, we headed to Osaka, where I fell asleep on the train ride there. After we got off and went to our hotel, I headed to the Daimaru (basically a giant 14 floor shopping mall) to go straight to the Pokémon center. All the cool game stuff is on the 13th floor, and I had trouble finding the elevator, so I ended up going up 12 different sets of escalators (ground level is for some reason the 2nd floor????). When I got there, one of the PLs (still don't know what that stands for) texted me asking where I was. I was like "oh I'm in the Daimaru" only to find out I was not supposed to go alone at all (for reference, it was only an 8-minute walk so I thought I was ok to do that). I was supposed to rest for like an hour then meet up in the lobby with all the other people who were going to go. Eventually, they just told me to stay at the Daimaru, so I bought some more Pokémon packs. Turns out, they have this little area where you can sit down and play the Pokémon TCG or open packs on tables. When I was there alone, there was a couple that was opening two booster boxes of the set that I thought was not worth it, but they seemed like they were having bad luck because they laid out all their hits on the table and they had nothing good from what I saw. I sat down nearby and pulled out my packs that I had put in my bag earlier. They just kind of glanced at me weirdly, probably like "wtf what is a teenager doing alone with that many packs" (around like 20 packs maybe). I began opening them, when I received the text that I was not supposed to be there at the time. After I responded and was told to stay, I resumed opening every pack I had. I went through the Black Bolt ones first. Nothing too crazy, just some EXs. White Flare packs came next. I got a cool looking Genesect EX full art, so that was cool. The Battle Partners packs came last. Around the 7th pack, I pulled another Special Art Rare (SAR) and flipped out (in public this time!) because I actually knew how much it was worth. It was a different one than the one from last time, Iono's Bellibolt EX but it was still worth 70$ dollars and looked really cool. I can only imagine the concerned and confused looks of passerby strangers and the couple that was like 2 seats away from me as I was flipping out. Later, when all the people from the program came and I checked in with the PL I headed back upstairs to the Pokémon Center, where I found a few of my friends who were Pokémon fans and were buying packs. Just to join in, I told them about the little space for opening packs and playing the TCG and got one of my friends who was not buying packs (he was buying something else) to buy packs for me using my money. I only did this because there was a buy limit on the packs, there always is. After he bought them, I gave him 100 yen from the change for his services and thanked him profusely. I gathered all my friends who bought packs (3 people) and a ton of friends that just wanted to watch, including a PL. We started opening packs at the little area, which ended up gathering random people who also wanted to watch. There were these two Chinese dudes (I only know because they were talking in Chinese to each other (for some reason it is really easy to tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese even though Japanese uses a lot of Chinese characters and sounds for their words, isn't that weird)) and watched for almost the entire time. It was fun, and after a while we had to meet up to go to Namba for a boat tour. We ended up meeting at the Glico sign (I have personally never heard of it, but apparently its super famous?) only 8 minutes away from the actually big Osaka Pokémon Center DX (I assume it stands for deluxe), but we had to time to go, so I hope I can go in the future, since it seems to have really cool stuff there. After the not very notable boat ride in Namba, the person guiding us there got us lost, and we had to stand in the same place for like 20 minutes before they figured things out. Something to say before I say anything else, I had built up a reputation for being weirdly lucky within the past few weeks, so one of my friends had found a convenience store selling One Piece TCG packs. He got me to buy like two packs (it was like 440 yen, not very much) and open them to test my luck. I opened them and ended up getting a pretty decent card that was worth like 500 yen. I guess I am lucky for some reason. Also, two of my friends wanted to drag me to Vegas as soon as I turned 21. Eventually we got home.

Today, (June 28th) we all went to Universal Studios Japan!!!! It was very fun, but also a lot of waiting in line. I was only with one group for just about the entire day and did a lot of browsing on Reddit while talking with my friends. I went on a Jurassic Park ride where you are parallel to the ground at the start of the ride, and you go upside down a lot. There was other stuff, but I will talk about it later because I am very tired and thirsty.

p.s. I got one of the PLs and one of my friends addicted to Balatro,