Simple things

Who'd have thought buying a phone would have felt like such a mission?

Today, myself and Daniel went to collect the temporary forms for foreigners, which we can use until we receive the actual registration card in a couple of weeks. With that, we'd be able to buy a phone and open a bank account, so right now it's quite important to have.

For me, it was back to Shibuya again, while Daniel headed off to Ikebukuro. The reason I wanted to go to Shibuya was because there's a Softbank phone store which has English speaking staff, and I'd been told previously that it's quite a complicated process and therefore it's quite important to have a fluent speaker with you. I wanted to bypass that completely and just get a phone as easily as possible, so I headed there quite quickly.

Problem was... I wanted a prepaid model, rather than a contract one. I found out today that these are possibly quite high in demand, or there just isn't that many of them. The English speaking store informed me, in Japanese, that they have no stock at all, and suggested I headed to a nearby Bic Camera, which I had walked by beforehand. So, I headed there, and found that they too were out of stock. Thankfully the staff member was kind enough to provide me with a map where I could find any Softbank, Docomo or other similar stores.

All in all, I headed to about six shops in total, and only in the last one did they have some prepaid phones. They didn't have the model I wanted, and with what they had, they didn't have the colour I liked the look of, but by that point I was actually beyond caring. I just wanted to be done with it, and honestly, the worst phone they had would probably be better than the LG Cookie I used up to a week previously in England. Nothing can be worse than that.

The whole procedure took about... an hour maybe, and they checked my passport, student ID and registration certificate, and then I almost happily paid 11,000円/£90, and then I was the very proud owner of a Softbank 821SC. I've already attached my Phoenix Wright charm to it.

The main thing is though, I did the vast majority of my search for a phone in Japanese, along with the purchasing of, and even understood a fair bit of Keigo. Simple Keigo, obviously, but the fact still stands that I managed something I didn't expect I'd be able to do.

It's been a good day.