Lithiumstate

There’s alot of interesting stuff in the history of my country such as the 80 year war with Spain, mastering water to create new land and use it as a force of industry. These days you can still find alot of history in Zaandam a small city on the border of Amsterdam seperated only by a few bridges. Having “been there done” that extensivly in the past (and whilst showing friends from abroad) i haven’t really went to the old parts of Zaandam like the world famous “Zaanse schans” area to see the 200 year old windmills, which to this date are still producing  products like Mustard or Mayonaise.

Coming home from a long hard day at the office I was pleasantly surprised by a certain box the mailman delivered.
I knew who it was from and what was in it and proceeded to strip the box of it’s protective tape to get to the goodies inside. And oh my ! What goodies we have here ! This you see is a “Conbini box” it’s a little project started by the author of Shibuya 246 ; a website you definitly have to bookmark if you love Tokyo. One of the featured series of articles there is the “Conbini monday” where the author Alan; a person who’s been living in Shibuya for the past 20 years trodds in a typical Tokyo convienance store with his camera to show us the wonderfull,crazy,fun and plain yummy experimental food you can get there.

As around any good site online; a strong-growing community of Japan-o-philes from all over the world formed. And before long the idea was offered up to start sending out packages of bliss to the community. So here it is !
If you want your own conbini box, I suggest becomming part of the Shibuya 246 community; as this will (if all things go allright) be a monthly  (non-profit)  event. Again; I cannot thank Alan enough for his time and patience with setting up the Conbini box project. Honto ni arigatou gozaimashita !  – OH. I’ll leave you guys with some more awesome pics. Had to do that before starting eating y`know :)

Winter came quick and hard in December 2009 for us Dutch people. They say that we’ve never seen as much snow for the past 35 years- woah ! And alot of snow it was indeed. I don’t mind snow myself you know, or the cold; I’ve always been resistant to the cold to a great degree but what i absolutely hate – is when trodden snow becomes ice on the streets and then the slippery slidey journey to and from work starts. I simply hate it, no longer can i sleep till the last second to make a run for the bus as i’d fall on my feet if I didn’t move like a snail. Going out drunk is a definite no-no and it’s just a complete hassle to move around in, especially when you carry a lot of (expensive) daily gear you definitly don’t wanna fall with.
Quite to the contrast with cars, cars are fine. Our roads are salted daily in the winters so usually you don’t see a spec of white on our roads and cars can cruise about their usual speed; whilst the poor pedestrians like me have to slide left and right with fear of falling down. Why the hell can’t they salt the pedestrian roads too , just hte main ones offcourse. It shouldn’t be that hard a task really as the main pedestrian roads are neatly lined up next to the car roads here.

The last few days it hasn’t snowed anymore, and thank god for that. I’ve already reached my breaking point last week when both public and regular transport were frozen to a standstill, and I was forced to walk 2 hours home trough a snow blizzard; needless to say I was sick the next morning.  Oh well, at least i’ve taken a few winter snaps last weekend; that’ll be the last of the winter snaps you`ll see from me for quite a while – this guy is staying inside this winter and giving his console gaming some much needed love haha !