My laptop broke :(

Bit of a rubbish time, really, what with the most expensive time of year coming up (and because I'm part-time I'm not getting paid at all during the holiday period). I'm trying to get a new one, but find myself stuck in the middle of a few imperfect options - buy a laptop with a Japanese keyboard (workable, but the delete key is so tiny), import a laptop from abroad (posting anything to Japan containing lithium-ion batteries is illegal) or type everything on my phone forever. Being temporarily cut off from the world of tabbed browsing is useful in a way, I suppose, opening my senses to the Earth and enabling me to hear birdsong and rat feet and shit like that. Nonetheless, I want my computer back. Waaahhh.

In good news, I will be going to Taiwan for New Year, which will be my first trip out of Japan (apart from my one visit home in May). In neutral news, I still don't know what I'm doing for Christmas. There might be an attempt at a traditional roast dinner done in my tiny impractical toaster oven. I found Brussels sprouts here for the first time recently, so maybe I'll have some of them, even though I don't really like them. Could set up Netflix and put The Great Escape on loop. Who knows. Merry Christmas.

It's a New Find! - Imaike Cinematheque

I found a new cinema!

Nagoya has a few cinemas that screen films in English, including a few little ones with a tendency to screen interesting smaller films (there are often foreign films in non-English too; unfortunately I can't really go to them since the subtitles would be in Japanese and my reading skills aren't quite that tip-top yet). The Fushimi Million Theater is a favourite - they've a really cool selection of films and hot jasmine tea at the drinks counter. It's also super-easy to reach from my house, and next door there's a really fancy cocktail bar, if you like pretending you're the sort of person who goes to cocktail bars. It's on the second floor; when you leave, the waiter takes you to the lift, says goodbye to you, and then runs down the stairs to say goodbye to you again when you come out.

But until last month I'd never heard of Imaike Cinematheque, even though it was about two minutes' walk away from Saizeriya. (You know how I feel about Saizeriya.) To be fair, it wasn't easy to find - down a murky side-street and up the stairs of a very questionable building. Even though I had it perfectly pinpointed on Google Maps, it took me a while to find it, and when I did it looked like some sort of Acme trap from a cartoon, designed to lure foreigners into nets with the promises of independent films.

Once I was up the stairs, the corridor didn't make me feel any better.

But once I was inside...

Hey, actually all right! Definitely a cinema, albeit one that seems to be run by a man in a room held together by sellotape.

If you're curious, I saw Starred Up, a British prison drama which was very good, and made me feel very smug as I looked around at the eight or nine other customers and thought about what chumps they were for having to read the film. I also got amused at some of the attempts at translating British swearing and prison slang - Japanese doesn't really have 'swearing' in quite the same way as English, so a line like "**** *** you *****ing ***** ********" ends up translated as "sore wa dame yo", which is the kind of thing an incompetent parent might tut at their child to try and get them to stop throwing cereal boxes at supermarket staff. Made me wonder what kind of nuances I miss whenever I watch foreign-language films though.

Nagoya Cinematheque's website is here.