My roommate Will had invited me to the library one evening last week, I think Thursday night, so I went with him Friday morning. We had to bike down bike down because Will won't take the subway since he is likely the cheapest person in the world (hence going to the library, though cheapness is not necessarily a bad thing). To put his cheapness into context, the night before his good friend was about to leave to go back home and was having a farewell dinner, and despite this being the last time that he would likely see her before she leaves, he declined because he thought he would be expected to buy himself and a portion of her drinks while they were out. So he's a good person to get money-saving tips from (though maybe not advice on having friends).

We biked down to the library, which took about an hour. I really hate libraries. I strongly agree with what they're trying to do, but the whole free aspect of it somehow brings in all the trash off of the street, sullies the books and encourages the destitute to camp out in corners. They had an English area which had a great section on Japan, as well as a section where they seemed to bring in a bunch of the best-sellers (a la Da Vinci Code). There was what looked to be a small but popular biography section, though all I can remember was seeing Judge Judy's "Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining" before moving on. There was also a CD section in the basement that Will was browsing, though it looked dated, grimy, and packed with old people.

So I moved on and biked back up to Umeda. I found out where I could buy contacts (I need new ones soon). I had decided to wait until I got here before buying them, because in Hong Kong they were really cheap and they would test my eyes for free each time I bought them. Here they were cheaper than home, but they wanted to charge me 5,000 yen just for the check-up, so I declined and am going to keep looking. I promise this won't become another big side-plot, I'm bored already.

Friday, work was funny. For some reason most of the students decided not to show up and my schedule was listed as:
VOICE - Free Class - VOICE - 1 student - 3 students
No one showed up for the first voice, so I had two hours where I just stamped flyers for the staff and read a magazine. There are some free magazines here that are for English-speakers in Japan... Kansai Time Out, Japanzine, etc. They seem to be surprisingly anti-Japanese and sometimes take that stupid British expatriate attitude that you see around the world of "we're superior to the locals".

Right before my last class, the staff came to me and said that for my last class I have to speak really slowly and that Kazuko was "really nervous". Kazuko is what Franky from work refers to as a Nova Superstar. A Nova Superstar is a student who comes to classes all the time, but is so nervous that they are unable to move on to the next level, so they just keep doing the lessons over and over again. It seems horrible. To make this worse, they also made me announce to another student of that class, Masamichi, that he had passed and was moving onto the next level (without having even completed half the lessons, he was just that good). I got to the class and went through the exercises. Of course, Masamichi was acing everything (it all comes down to how brave they are to participate in the activities with confidence). Kazuko, on the other hand, shook whenever I talked to her or whenever she tried to give me an answer. At the end of the class, I tried to slip Masamichi the note saying that he was being upgraded without anyone else noticing, but pulled a big "Wha?? What could this be?!!" and the other two students crowded around him and made a huge congratulatory commotion. I didn't want to see Kazuko's reaction so I rushed out of there and scurried down the hall to the teacher's lounge.

That night, I had to go to bed early so that I could get up at 5:30am the next morning to be in a movie. I don't know if I mentioned this already (probably), but last weekend someone approached me in the Nanba subway station and asked if I'd like to be in a Japanese/German film Saturday for 9,000 yen, they needed 200 Caucasian males and I agreed.

Anyway, that night I read my book to make me sleepy, it's a fail-safe method. I'm getting to the end of my book, a Bill Bryson title called The Lost Continent about his travels in small-town America, I recommend it. If I finish it this week, as predicted, then I will have finished it in an astonishing two months. Sagoi (wow).

So I didn't sleep much. I probably fell asleep at 1:30am and woke up again at 3:30am, knowing that I had to be up in two hours and unable to comfortably go back to sleep. Despite being awake so early, I was still late arriving for the 6:40am pick-up at Umeda postal office. I was supposed to meet Australian Mark there, but he had already left on the first bus so I had to take the third one (for the late-comers).

The movie was being filmed on Shikoku Island, about a two and a half hour drive away. The fact that it was being filmed on Shikoku was the biggest reason that I was going. I wanted to visit that island anyway and this was a free trip. Driving out of Osaka was tedious, the city goes on forever. We passed over "the longest suspension bridge in the world", which connected Shikoku to another island, I believe, though I'm still not sure of the credibility of this claim. It didn't necessarily seem that long and I had heard the exact same claim about Tsing-Yi bridge in Hong Kong (it's shown somewhere in the January photos of my HK pictures - www.hku.8m.com - Tsing Yi hike with Jason). Maybe there's just different criteria, I don't know.

Shikoku was really impressive, I hadn't realized how urban Osaka was until then. Osaka, as I'd explained before, just stretches on as city in every direction for hours... this municipality has more than a third the population of Canada. Shikoku was beautiful, full of endless hills with different coloured trees. Apparently, Canada is known for its fall because of the turning of the leaves, but Japan has been more impressive than I ever remember Canada being for it. Probably because most of their trees are not pine trees.

The movie set was great. It's going to be called Bartu no Gakuen (Bart's Paradise) and we played German prisoners in a p.o.w. camp. Here's the plot:

During World War I, Germany, for some reason, sent some troups into China. These troups were crushed and rounded up by the Japanese and tossed into prison camps around this area. This one Japanese general, however, was really kind to the German prisoners, letting them sing and play the violin. That's about it, as far as I can tell. It stars some famous Japanese actor and a famous German actor, the guy who played Hitler in a recent German film called Hitler.

They had us change into costumes right away. I was a German sailor! Mark was dressed as some kind of German commando. I took some pictures and will upload them when I figure out how. The camp was pretty well-done too, it looked real, though it was my first time in a Japanese prison camp circa 1916. Our scenes basically just involved us standing around in the courtyard and various things happening (i.e. role call, speeches by the general, and so on). There was a big scene at the end where they announce the war is over and we all throw our hats up in the air and celebrate and I'm excited to see this scene because I think it primarily features me since I made an effort to keep eye contact with the camera the whole time.

They gave us Bento boxes for lunch. For part of the day, Mark and I snuck off to explore (as I like to do around movie sets) and we found a warm little building that was set up like a bar that was empty, so we just sat around there. Soon enough, we were joined by the main German actors who sat next to us and started to play cards. I got some sneaky close-up photos with my phone of Hitler, who was sitting right next to me. He really looks like him in person. Suddenly, a Japanese film crew burst in, they were filming the behind-the-scenes shoot of the movie and seemed to think that we were among the big actors, so they wanted us to act naturally and carry on our conversation. Mark and I discussed as inappropriate topics as possible, so we're hoping it makes it onto the Special Features section of the DVD.

Walking around off-set was funny. The locals there had obviously had little to no contact with foreigners and as we were walking around in costume, they made enough of a commotion to make it clear that they thought we were big Hollywood actors. Mark has bright blond hair so he really sticks out, and as we were passing a crowd of old ladies, they broke out into applause.

At the end of the day, we all lined up to collect our 9,000 yen. They had a massive envellope of cash and were just handing it out and I could have easily lined up four or five times, though I only did it once. I wonder how many people did go through a second time, though. The ride back to Osaka took forever. We hit rush hour traffic (6pm) and it was took about four hours total in a cramped minibus (so full that there were people sitting in the aisles). I'm lucky I had barely consumed anything that day, I don't know how these people can function without abundant highway rest-stops.

So it was about 8pm when we arrived back in Umeda. There's more, but my time just ran up on the computer here, so I'll continue again tomorrow.