To buy or not to buy..

Since coming back from Osaka, I have been to visit several cell phone shops. There are 3 main cell phone companies here: Docomo, AU and Vodafone. They each have a wide variety of phones available, with all kinds of neat functions. It's difficult to decide on one, and the fact that no one speaks any English at any of the stores/kiosks doesn't make it any easier.

Since I've also been thinking of getting an MP3 player, I thought I would get a cell phone that could double as one. I finally decided on the W41k. It was perfect. On top of having the option of adding a 2GiG card (hold plenty of songs!) it had a subwoofer built into the charger. It also had a 3.2 megapixel camera. And it looked cool :)

http://www.phoneyworld.com/newspage.aspx?n=1757

Oh yeah, and the phone cost $1. That's right, practically free!

I went down to the store during lunch to buy it today. It took a while to get through all the paperwork, (the sales lady only spoke Japanese, and I had to write everything in kanji) but eventually got through it all. For some reason, it took longer than usual to get it activated, and I needed to get back to school. So I said I would come back later on to pick up the phone.

When I returned after school, the sales lady handed me a bag with everything in it. She pulled out the cell phone and said she wanted to show me something. When I leaned over to take a closer look, I noticed it was still all in Japanese. I asked if she could change it to English, she said sure. She fiddled around with it for much longer than I thought it should take to change the language. She said she was having a little trouble finding the right menu to change it to English. She called the company for help. They told her that this phone doesn't have the option of displaying English!!

After having spent so much time looking into different phones, looking things up on the internet, and finally deciding on one.....it was really disappointing not to be able to get it. I was more than disappointed, I was crushed. I really had my heart set on this phone. Last night, when Iwata san came over, I was telling her all about it, and how excited I was about it. At school, I had spoken to many teachers about it, asking what they thought of it etc.

All the sales people were very apologetic, because the first sales lady for yesterday had said that all the phones could be used in English.

I was too disappointed to look at any other phones, I'll go another time.

The baseball team at my school had a big game today. Since I didn't have any classes in the afternoon, I thought I would go with them to cheer them on. Some members of the brass band were going, as well as a couple of teachers who didn't have classes. It was a big game, if they had won they would have gone on to koshien, where scouts come to recruit to play professionally..so it's a pretty big deal to make it there. Unfortunately, they didn't win...the final score was 5-7.

The TV crew was there. When I got back to school, I ran into kyoto sensei (the vice-principal) in the hallway, and he said he saw me on TV. All the teachers had followed the game on TV in the staff room.