New car, Pizza Hut, and Video Games

The next day (the 23rd of December) we all went and picked up their new car. (The Jaguar was having problems and wasn’t worth fixing.) It is an Alphard, which I think might be made by Toyota, but I’m not sure. Either way it isn’t model you’ll be finding in the U.S. It is pretty much a minivan; it seats 8, has a DVD system, and a bunch of other bells and whistles. We grabbed lunch at a local Italian restaurant, Flour, which happens to be one of my personal favorites. After that I had a plan to hang out with Ken (the other guy from UW-Madison) and Tom, a friend I met here. We met at the Book-Off store in Tenma-cho. Book-Off is a wonderful chain of stores that buys and resells used books, comics, CDs, DVDs, and video games. I found Christmas presents for Yugo, and my host mom and dad. All of which were Playstation 2 software. My host dad had recently bought a Playstation 3 and the Gundam game for it, but since there are only a few games out for 3, I thought I’d pick up some old 2 software to beef up there library. I made a really good find for Yugo, as I found a Kamen Rider (Masked Rider) game that features V3, his favorite iteration of the series. I bought a large chunk of the Full Metal Alchemist series that day, but more than that, Ken randomly found a comic series by the name of ‘Super Mario-kun.’ Considering they were about $2.25 a pop and there were over 20 of them, I decided to try out the first one before throwing down the money for the whole series. We then killed time waiting for Young-kyu (or Pak-san) a classmate of ours from Korea, to meet us. Once he arrived we rode the subway to Kurokawa to grab dinner at the Pizza Hut there, which was the main mission of plan for the evening. It is the only Pizza Hut in Nagoya where you can actually dine in, and I hadn’t had real pizza for a while, so I was looking forward to this. Since almost everyone gets delivery, they just include that expense in the normal price, so I if you eat in, you get a discount off the menu price. After that, a medium cheese pizza only cost 800yen, which is about $7. You can’t get that stuffed for 800yen anywhere else in Japan-I’m convinced of it. They were pretty busy, so the lady at the counter asked us if we minded waiting a half a hour, and then looked even more horrified when she realized we were all ordering a pizza for ourselves. I had almost forgotten how good the grease on Pizza Hut’s pan pizza tastes. Mmm…all that artery-clogging goodness. After an extremely satisfying dinner, we headed back to Tom’s apartment for some serious video gaming. We tried out the new WarioWare game for the Nintendo Wii, which was extremely fun. After giving ample time to that and WiiSports, we hooked up his PS2 for some Guilty GearX2, and boy had it been awhile. I was a bit out of form but still dominated hard, only losing one match to Tom at the end. After that it was time to hook up his Sega Saturn, and we tried some games Ken had just picked up. I finally got to try out the Saturn version of Symphony of the Night, along with Gunstar Heroes and Golden Axe: The Duel. I apologize to any family members who may be reading this for all the video game lingo I just put you through.