Christmas 2008!!

Christmas of this year has just passed. For Japanese, Christmas is a event for couples, so the mood is a bit different to the western style. In London, it’s for family, so every public transport stops. I’ve got no family in London, so I had nothing to do on Christmas, but some friends of mine invited me to their family party, so I joined it. They were really fantastic time. I’ve almost lost family, so the feeling of family is quite precious, and it reminds me of there being happiness of family.

I hadn’t drunk mulled wine, which is sweet and hot wine, in Tokyo, but now it’s one of my favourite drinks. Mince pie is a traditional dessert for Christmas, and it’s also good. The content in mince pies is called mince meat, but it’s actually not meat but chunks of fruit.

I stayed overnight at my friend’s place and watched some films. One of them was called “Alien Raiders”, which seems to be a low budget film, but it was interesting maybe because I’d expected just a little. Another one was “The kiss of Dragon”, staring Jet Lee, and why we chose the film to see is to know how different the behaviours of western guys and Asian guys are in films. Western guys usually get some girls laid even though they are Asian girls, but Asian guys hardly do that!!! It’s interesting because it might be cultural difference, and sort of manipulation of impressions of cultural appearances. The third one was “The shepherd”. The main actor is Jan-Claude Van Damme, whom I haven’t seen for ages!! He got older, but his action was still high quality. The quality of the film itself was… I shouldn’t say anything.

virtual meeting

We had a kind of virtual meeting for our presentation. Each member put some ideas on BBS in our social networking site. We use ning.com for creating our website for collaborative work.

Basically I don’t want to rely on some virtual meeting technology, because sometimes the communication is too fragile and not productive, but this time should work well, but no one knows until next “real” meeting.

A friend of mine went to a seafood market in London, and bought and brought a big piece of salmon and cod to our dinner. The salmon was really nice, quite tasty and contain a lot of fat, which made salmon feeling softer. I never thought I could eat such nice row fish, but actually it was as good as in Japan if not better. The U.K. is also island and a bit cold so it might be not so difficult to catch good fish.

We had a lot of topics to talk, such as our career, love and so on. A friend of mine told us we should strongly pursue what you want to be in the future even if you have to choose very dirty way in order to achieve it. I’m not sure I can do it if I’m in such a kind of situation, but basically I agree with his opnion.

One of those days and Ken Ribinson

I went to university a bit too early yesterday. When I arrived, the building was closed because the electricity had something wrong. The staff told the students there to come back around twelve, so I texted my classmates about that, and I went to a café near my college to kill time.

I chose a bad café since they put the message of “Free wifi” and actually it had but the quality wasn’t good. Then my classmates called me and told that the college was open now and I could come back now. It was almost the starting time of our class. When I went to our studio, there were few classmates and they told the class was cancelled because there were too few people. On top of that, the afternoon session was also cancelled because the morning was cancelled. I thought I shouldn’t have texted and felt guilty. It was meant to be good, but it turned out the bad result. Sometimes quick responses are good, but sometimes not.

Maybe, yesterday was one of those days. I planned to go to a short film event, but something urgent came up for a friend of mine and she suddenly became unable to make it. I asked some other friends of mine but unfortunately they were busy, so I decided not to go. We had had an English class but the college was closed earlier because of the trouble of electricity. Finally I moved to other campus and kept studying.

We usually have a presentation for sort of cultural knowledge sharing every week. The next theme is “DIY”, so I gathered some images of “Okonomiyaki”. Okonomiyaki is a kind of Japanese hot cakes. The thing is that when you go to an Okonomiyaki restaurant, you have to cook it yourself. I thought it was not special, but when I saw “Lost in Translation” I realised that it was a bit wired for foreigners. I hope it would be a good example of Japanese DIY…

One of classmates recommended me to see the following video of Sir Ken Robinson:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
“Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it at the same status.”
It was really interesting. I think creativity is really important in education in especially developed countries to empower their economy and quality of life. The problem is education for creativity is very difficult and not formulated yet. It might be quite smart, and it might be quite humorous. At least, this video was really funny, but I couldn’t listen to his jokes because of my English skills. Improving my English listening skill is a really big problem for me. I became a bit concerned, so I accessed BBC learning English pages and listened to some audio contents. The handy guide of Business Gurus was interesting:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/work/handy/
Maybe reading their books are very difficult and takes ages, but if you just know the points of them, this contents should be really useful.

Chelsea vs Arsenal

Chelsea lost yesterday… The game itself wasn’t so good. The score was 2-1, but the one of Chelsea was own goal.
I went to Sports pub with a friend of mine and watched it together. He likes Arsenal. The first half was no so bad, because Chelsea got the first goal and finished it with 1-0, but actually Arsenal mostly controlled the game.

During the half time, we went to McDonald’s and ate fried chickens and potato. For the promotion of “Madagascar 2”, if you buy some specific set, you can get a figure of the characters. A friend of mine wanted to get it for his girlfriend, so he ordered it. He got the same one which they had got already, so he asked the staff to change it… he’s a really nice boyfriend.

The figure was made in China. Everything comes from China now. The figure was a hippo, the quality wasn’t so bad, and if you shake it, it speaks something. I was a bit surprised, because when I was a kid, it never spoke. I wondered how effective this kind of promotion is. There must be a kind of synergy, so it should be difficult to measure it.

Then we were back to the café and started to watch the match again. The second half was really bad for Chelsea. Van Persie got two goals and the game was turned back. I hoped that Chelsea would turn back again but it didn’t happen. After the match, many customers left the bar.

This kind of bars is really interesting, because they serve not only food but also a sort of mood. They might be able to sell some sports accessories or something. It’s not stadium but it proposes similar mood. I think you can appropriate this kind of services to other services. Sports might be special, because for sports, whether it is live or not is really important, but on the other hand, whether it is in Stadium or not is sometimes not important. Sharing the moment of victories on time is one of the important factors to enjoy sports. It should be special for sports. Films and theatre are a bit different. Theatre might be a bit similar, because if you watch it with some recorded media, you might feel the value is lower. You might be not so excited. The different point of Sports and theatre is the importance of places and time. For sports, in my opinion, time is more important, but the theatre is not only time but also places are important. Of course, watching a match in stadium is the best experience, but sharing the moment of the game would be more important, but for theatre you should be in theatre if you really enjoy it. The level of expansion of experience for the content are different and it should be a key factor to how to take advantage of it.