The Road Less Traveled

Cellphones

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 by Rintaun | General

So yesterday did not go at all as planned. Well, at least according to my plan. I’m sure it went right according to plan for some people. In any case, this, of course, means that I’m not going to be writing about food like I said I was going to be, but instead I’m going to write about something that took way too much time and was extremely exhausting: getting a cellphone.

The good news is that I did get a cellphone. It’s actually pretty nice. Not only does it have a camera on the back like normal phones, but you can press a button while in camera mode to switch to another camera on the screen facing you to make it easier to take pictures of yourself. It works surprisingly well.

Another thing that I like about the phone is that you can, if you want to, input in Japanese also. I guess this is a given for a Japanese phone, but to me this is a plus. Another odd feature that the phone has is a barcode reader. It can read normal barcodes like those on products, but this is actually not the general usage. It’s genrally used for reading square barcodes, which can encode longer sets of data, like urls and such. These are actually called QR codes, and they’re much more common in Japan than America… you know, since their cellphones can read them.

Another great thing is that we ended up getting a number of awesome discounts… meaning that while we had to buy our phones, our base rates for the actual plan ended up being 0￥. The only things that will raise this are making calls to non-Softbank phones and making calls to Softbank phones between 9pm and 1am. Yes, that’s a measly four hours. Oh, and sending e-mail messages.

Speaking of which, Japanese cellphones don’t generally use SMS, or text messages as we know them in the States. Instead, they use fully-fledged e-mail messages. From my phone, I can both send and receive e-mail messages from and to any e-mail address, including other cellphone e-mail addresses.

“So,” you say, “this is all good… what’s the problem?” Well, the problem is that we got to the Softbank store (the place we got the phone and the cellphone plan) at about 10:45am. We got our cellphones, however, at about, oh, 6pm. Yes, that’s seven hours later. “But that’s absurd!” Yes, yes, I know.

An what were we doing that entire time? We were waiting. Luckily the people at Softbank actually told us that it was going to take about that long, so we didn’t have to wait there. And also luckily, there was a nearby mall not too far away. Unfortunately, everything in Japanese malls is ridiculously expensive. Well, not everything, but suffice it to say that the tiny round change purse that I bought in Takashimaya (a 13-story department store [read: mall] in Nagoya) cost me ten dollars, and it was the cheapest in the lot.

So that meant browsing the mall for seven hours. Well, whatever… as they say in Japanese, shou ga nai (trans: it can’t be helped). So we finally got our phones, great!

Well, then me and Mike (and then two other people, John and James) decided to walk home instead of taking the bus. This was… probably a stupid decision. We were at a place called Chuu-ou-dai, which is SEVERAL miles away. And by several I mean at least 4 or 5.　So it took quite a while, and we had to hurry in any case because we had to be back to the dorm for dinner before 7:30pm. This didn’t quite happen, but we made it back only about 5 minutes late.

So it was a really, really long day, but I can say that there were two definite benefits to it all: 1) I got a cellphone. That’s rather handy. And 2) I slept extremely well last night.

That’s all for now. I think I’m going to stop making promises about what the next post is about, because something always comes up and it always turns into a lie. Sorry about that.

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