Delicious Smoothies, 37 Steakhouse Roppongi, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and much more

First of all I need to correct a little something. My last blog wasn't really meant to say I was overall unhappy or anything. It mostly just illustrates I've been thinking about the meaning/purpose of life, been searching for my true passion, but most of all been fiddling around with the best way to schedule my life as an Entrepreneur in Tokyo, rather than a Poker Player in London. I've pivotted again since my last update and made some adjustments, but it'll be a few more weeks before I update about that particular subject again.

This blog will mostly be an update about what I've been up to in the past month or 2 and contain a ton of pictures. First some random life stuff, then more towards the bottom a full business update.

Workout Routine and Smoothies!

First of all, I've gotten back into a solid workout routine courtesy of http://www.workoutbox.com/! 6 days/wk, 2 hrs/workout like I used to in London. And a sick workout routine goes hand in hand with a (mostly) solid diet. Which in my case means quite a few smoothies. Here's the recipe for my post-workout shake:

-100g Blueberries(I use frozen ones)
-100g Pineapple(I use frozen)
-150g Watermelon
-1 Banana (~100g)
-300ml 2% Milk
-60g Whey Protein Powder Strawberry Flavor

Nutritional Facts:
-640 Calories
-85.5g Carbohydrates
-55.7g Protein
-11.6g Fat

Very healthy and very delicious! A perfect post-workout meal!

Home Cinema Theater

Furthermore, I've got my entire projector setup complete and I got a ton of awesome new blu-rays! I promise to shoot a few proper pictures and even a video of my entire apartment fully furnished and my home cinema in my next blog, but for now here's a few pictures I took a few weeks ago, before the screen arived. Projecting on the wall looks great too though.

 Love Lord of the Rings. Gotta do a marathon again at some point!

Waseda University Tour

 This past week, I got a tour of Waseda university from an American professor who's been in Japan for well over 30 years! Unfortunately enough it was summer vacation so I didn't get to meet any students, but the prof was a very kind and interesting man and although not as beautiful as the university I saw in Seoul the main campus Waseda campus is quite nice.

 The founder's statue

 Library

 Waseda's iconic tower.

Such peace in Tokyo's city centre!

Best Unagi Ever

Last but not least, I had a few great meals. First of all I went to a very popular Unagi restaurant and had the best Unagi experience of my life:

Unagi is a pretty small meal, but I love it and I need to eat it a lot more often. The world's most renowned Unagi restaurant is walking distance for me and still high on top of my list of must-visit restaurants. Unfortunately enough it's not really a place you go on your own, so if you're reading this and you're interested in going, get in touch!

Great Fish Restaurant with my Landlord

The second one was a great fish restaurant which my landlord took me to. The sushi's rice was cold, which is usually a very bad sign, but in this case it was quite good. What stole the show however, were the starters. I got served some Natto(fermented soy beans) on Tofu and although when asked if there's any Japanese food I don't like, Natto is usually on top of the list, this time I actually liked it! Highlight of the night was the fried fish, which was the best piece of fish I've ever tasted! No pictures were taken unfortunately enough.

37 Steakhouse Roppongi

Lastly I went to a friend's favorite steak restaurant in all of Japan(and quite possibly the entire world), 37 Steakhouse in Roppongi.

 The Oysters weren't that tasty, but the Prawns were great! Superjuicy!

 Awesome salad!

 American Prime Beef

 Australian 35 days aged

 The above 2 and a piece of Australian 21 days aged

Me and 2 friends ended up splitting 3 slices of meat, American Prime, Australian 35 days aged and Australian 21 days aged. I'm not sure if it was the fact I got to taste 3 different kinds of steak or what, but this was quite easily the best steak I've ever had! The seasoning was especially SUPERB! I started off liking the Australian 35 days aged best, but after I finished eating I liked all of them equally. All 3 fantastic pieces of meat!

Unfortunately enough the side dishes(creamed spinach and fries) were very disappointing and very blend, but the steaks were so outstanding, I will definitely return here!

FrankPeelen.com

Business wise, I've been working on a few projects. As I mentioned in my last blog, I decided to drop the referral project, but my own personal website is finally up and running! There's a Japanese version coming very soon aswell, but for now you can check out the English version here:

http://www.FrankPeelen.com/

Meishi

 

aka business cards.

 

Language Link

Language Link is still progressing sort of on schedule. I had hoped to be able to start actual coding this past week, but hopefully we can finalize the specifications early this next week and get started on the actual coding towards the 2nd half of this week.

I've also made some minor additions to Language Link's website's wireframes and I've hired a team to build this website. It's a slightly more complicated website than FrankPeelen.com and thus will cost a bit more and take a bit longer, but it should be up and running in 4 weeks. Something which I'm very excited for.

On top of this, Language Link's Facebook page and Twitter page now have professionally designed graphics. You can check them out at:

https://www.facebook.com/LanguageLinkApp/

and

https://twitter.com/LanguageLinkApp/

There's not a ton happening on these pages yet, but as the application gets closer to launch there will definitely be a lot more exiciting stuff on LL's social network pages.

Tokyo 2020 Olympics

Last but definitely not least, me and a close friend are working on a very exciting project for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. I can't really say much yet besides the fact that our vision is grand and we plan to make some big things happen in Tokyo leading up to and in 2020!

The Lean Startup

I've also been reading this great book by Eric Ries on his approach to building a company. It has really resonated with me, because it's very scientific and analytical and reminds me of playing poker. I'll definitely be taking a lot of things away from it and can already recommend the book to anyone interested in business, startups and entrepreneurship.

I think that pretty much brings you up to date! Next time I'll post a video of my fully furnished apartment and whatever else I've been up to.

Frank

Dissecting my own Psyche

In my blog post about my first week as an entrepreneur I mentioned that I had started using this To-Do-List template to plan my days:

On top of that I've been using a file on my computer to list what I want to do each week and month. I've been using this system for about 5 weeks now and for half of it it's been amazing for me! I got an unbelievable amount of stuff done. During the first week of September for example, I did almost everything I had planned for the first 2-3 weeks of the month!
On the other hand, there have been weeks where, although I still got a decent amount of work done, I wasn't particularly motivated, felt a bit sluggish and wasn't all that happy overall. So I set out to find out what was causing it.

First I blamed sleep. I have been sleeping less than the 9 hours I used to, but by now I've realised this is not the issue. The 8 hours of sleep I get each night are enough, because there were also weeks where I did completely fine sleeping 8 hours a night.

Next was the lack of exercise and healthy food. I hadn't been to the gym in 2-3 months, due to 2 injuries, spending time in Europe and moving to and getting settled in Japan. I had also been eating out the vast majority of my meals for the past 6 months. So 3 weeks ago I finally started going to the gym again and eating superclean and healthy 90%+ of my meals. But regardless of the 6x2 hours/week I've spent in the gym and the healthy food, I still have had the same periods of sluggishness and unhappiness since then.

At this point I started to question what it was I actually want to do. I figured, maybe I am not enjoying what I'm doing. I am very confident that entrepreneurship suits me. I've never had a regular job and always made my own schedule. On top of that I really need to be challenged.
However, I did start to question exactly what kind of business I want to build and asked myself: "What is it you want to do with your life?". I still don't have the exact answer to that, but I do know that I'm very excited about my  Language Link project. Especially building out the website and the millions of different marketing possibilities excite me to no end!
Another project I was working on was an affiliate website for Udemy.com. Udemy is a website where you can take a wide variety of courses ranging from 'Learning How to Build a Website' to 'Learning Photoshop' to 'Photography' and 'Management' courses. I completed a course on building websites, which was fairly interesting and should prove useful in the future, but I found myself not so excited about building the actual affiliate website. Especially when the affiliate program turned out to work differently than I originally anticipated. So I've pretty much decided to drop this project.
{However, if anyone reading this is planning to sign up for Udemy, hit me up! Got some referal links and I'm happy to share the money with you that Udemy pays me for refering you!}
I was also planning on playing quite a bit of poker, but after playing 1-2 sessions, I've noticed it's just not gonna happen. I may play every now and then if I really feel like it, but mostly for fun. I don't expect to do any serious online poker playing anymore.
In the end I decided that it'll come to me eventually. I'm only 24, so I have plenty time to figure it out. And for now I'm very excited about my Language Link project, so I will be working on that whenever I can.

This still left me with the periods of sluggishness and lack of motivation. So I started to ask myself a few slightly different questions. "What excites you?", "What do you want to do right this instant?" and "What if this was your last day alive, how would you spend it?". Worringly enough I still wasn't able to come up with any clear answers and I began to realize not much TRULY excites me at the moment.
Sure, there's things I really enjoy such as good food, movies, socializing and certain parts of the Language Link project I'm really looking forward to. But the food has to be really outstanding and there's only a handful of movies out of the 1000+ I've seen that truly get me to jump out of my seat.
Possible causes are for one the remaining effects of having been a professional poker player. I developed a lot of skills that'll serve me extremely well throughout my life, but I also feel like I've surpressed my emotions quite a lot. Secondly, I've already experienced a lot of pretty big things for a 24 year old, which has been great, but it makes it harder to find newer and bigger things to be excited about.
Last but not least, I've always liked to be challenged. The issue with that is that I may be overconfident in some ways. I feel like there's almost nothing I can't do, everything seems so possible and within reach and thus not much of a challenge and less exciting...

I think lacking a true passion is definitely one part of the problem, but on top of that I've definitely spent time doing some things I was clearly unexcited about. Mainly the affiliate project and poker I wasn't that excited about. So I've decided to make 2 main changes on top of dropping the projects I'm not excited about:
1) Change the entire way I schedule my days.
Throw out most of the to-do-list as is and instead after I finish up a few things that have to happen that day, I just do whatever I feel like. No joke! Usually these are useful things like working on Language Link anyway. I think I'll be focussing a lot more on Japanese studies again aswell. I haven't progressed that much as of late. I've especially been speaking Japanese very, very little despite living in Japan.
2) Get out of the house more and meet more new people.
Take my laptop with me and do work from coffee shops more, so I don't spend too much time at home behind my desktop just like I did in London for 2 years playing poker.
And since I rarely have a bad time when I'm socializing, I've decided to go out of my way and try to meet more people. Which I was sort of planning to do anyway for networking purposes.

For now I think making these 2 big changes, should have a big positive impact on my life, but we'll see how it pans out for real in a month or 2.

I have a LOT to update you on regarding my Language Link project, life in Tokyo, my totally furnished apartment, some movies, some dinners and possibly upcoming trips too. However, I think this blog is long and dense enough as it is, so I'll promise to update you on all of that as soon as I can. Hopefully within a week or so, although this week is really busy so don't expect it before the weekend!

If you actually got through all of this, I'm impressed. Maybe my writing isn't as boring as I thought it was! Leave me a comment if you did, especially if any of this resonates with you I'd be interested in hearing from you!

Weekend Productivity

I've never really been someone who's taken weekends off. Especially during my time as a professional poker player I often worked weekends, because that's when the best games were running. However, as of late weekends have blended together into my normal workweeks even more so than usual. Here are the 3 main reasons.

1) Workout Schedule

I recently started a new fitness program and it happened to be convenient to start this on a Saturday. My fitness program is a 6 days/wk split, which means my only day off is Friday. As a result, my Saturday feels like the start of the week and thus like Monday.
Don't think for a moment that this makes Friday feel like weekend though! My friends, business partners and the companies I interact with still work on Friday, so I still deal with people working and do a lot of work myself, because I get important emails that need responding to.

2) I enjoy what I do

A lot of the time what I want to do is work! Even if I had clear and defined weekdays and weekends, I would still do work on weekends. I am very excited about the things I'm working on and making progress on those is a lot more fun and rewarding to me than my hobbies.
However, like any other healthy human being I too take breaks from work, but...

3) I schedule non-work time

Definitely not all of it, I still decide to call it quits when I'm tired and decide to go out with friends when they ask me last-minute, but I do schedule breaks here and there to stop myself from burning out. For example, next week I'll join a university baseball team in their practice and most weeks I schedule going out for some food and such.


I believe that on top of my strange work schedule in the past as a professional poker player, these 3 things have recently made the line between weekdays and weekends even vaguer for me. This has made me more productive during the weekends and best of all I really enjoy this kind of schedule!

My first week as an entrepreneur 起業家的な生活

 大事な家具を買ったので、ついに事業家として働き始めた。最近非常に良くて起業家に向けの本を読んだが、本の勧めのおかげで自分の生産力が増えて来た。To-Do-Listを使うと言う勧めは特に便利だ。この前にもTo-Do-Listを使ってたけれど、今もっともっと役立つTo-Do-Listを使っている。
To-Do-Listと言うのは毎日何をしなければならない事が書いてあるリストである。こんな漢字だ。


Since I had bought all the important furniture I needed, I was finally able to start work as an entrepreneur. I recently read an extremely good book aimed at entrepreneurs, a few of which tips increased my productivity by a LOT. Especially the To-Do-List recommended by the book has helped me a lot. I've already been using a To-Do-List for quite a while, but this one is much more useful and organized.
A To-Do-List is a list with all the things you need to do for the day. Here's an example of what mine looked like last Tuesday.

The Art of the Hustlerと言う本なんだけど、興味があれば、このサイトに行った方が良いと思う。

The book is called The Art of the Hustler. If you're interested check out this website.

http://landing.theartofthehustler.com/



今週は発達するモバイルアップのデザインを終えて、色んなモバイルアップを作れる会社に連絡をして、アップを作る手続きを相談し始た。来週の終わり以前制作をし始まると良いんだけど。後は自分のツイッターとフェイスブックを作った。フォローとライクをしてもらえませんか？たまに起業家的な事や国内のニュースや面白い記事や自分の生活などについてのメッセージを書き込む。

This week I finished the design of my mobile application, contacted various companies and started discussing the options of the application's development with them. I hope to start development by the end of next week. Furthermore, I created my own Twitter and Facebook page. If you're interested, please give me a like or follow me. I'm posting regular updates about entrepreneurial things, news in Japan, various funny things and some things about what's going on in my own life.

Follow @FrankPeelen




その上今週浅草とスカイツリーに行ったり水族館に行ったり花火をみに行ったりした。花火は特に凄かった！欧米のより日本の花火の方がとっても美しくて偉い！

On top of that I did a few others things this week like, going to Asakusa and Tokyo Sky Tree, going to an aquarium and going to a fireworks show. Japanese fireworks are WAY WAY better than western fireworks by the way!

 マグロってなかなか大きいでしょ！

Tuna are pretty big, eh!

 Wait till you see the Grande Finale!

何と言う音か知ってると、教えてください！
If you know the name of this song, please tell me!

グランドフィナーレ！！！
Grande Finale!!!

来年女の子と一緒に行きたいなー！素敵なデートである気がするんだ！ ^^

Seems like a great place for a date, so I'll aim for that next year! ^^

働き続けた方が良い！

フランク

Aight, time to get back to work!

Frank

Moved across the world to Japan! 日本に引っ越しました！

SO much has happened in the past 4 months, which helps to explain why I didn't update in so long. To be honest, another part of it was that I realized that the longer I postponed updating my blog, the longer it would take to update it. Nonetheless, here goes!

For the rest of April I was mostly extremely busy studying Japanese. I studied for about 6 hours a day for 3 weeks missing maybe 1-2 days. At this point in time I also became very busy deciding whether I wanted to move to Japan permanently or not. I knew that if I was going to decide to move I had to do it as soon as possible, because there'd be a lot of things to take care of. I don't even remember what was holding me back, but part of it was the language. I had always liked studying and talking Japanese, but to say I'm anywhere close to fluent would be a flat out lie. In the end though, I realized that I possesed more than Japanese skills to live in Japan and thus I shouldn't worry too much. Just study here and there and eventually I'll get fluent over time. I have no doubt that I'll eventually be able to get there. Having decided I'd move permanently, I went to search for an immigration lawyer.

During this time period I also did a couple fun things. First of all I went to a research institute of a friend that held an open day. They had a not-so-mini mini particle accelerator which was very impressive, they showed off a number of cool experiments, I got my picture taken with the discoverer of element 113(if I remember correctly) and one of the top 10 yo-yo'ers in the world gave a sick demonstration! Here's some pictures and videos!

 Massive machinery!

 Danger!

 My Friend, the Genius and I

SO many wires!

Yo-Yo Champion

How is that possible?!?!?

Upside down aswell?!?

 How Japanese people learn English

Wedding between a Japanese girl and some foreign guy at the Meiji Shrine

Making new friends at an art gallery

Writing Kanji

And of course I ate a TON of food!

 Almost daily sushi lunch

 Tsukemen Ramen

  Tsukemen Ramen

 Unagi

Best Tonkatsu ever!

One of Tokyo's best Soba restaurants. The Tenpura there was SICK!

After having decided I'd move to Japan, I found myself a lawyer. I've met with him a bunch of times for various reasons. First of all he set up my company in Japan, since then he's been working on my Visa, which should take another 4 weeks or so from now.

After that I started looking for an apartment. After doing some research I decided I definitely wanted to live in Ikebukuro, preferably West-Ikebukuro. I walked into a random real-estate agent and asked them to help me out. I was shown a lot of apartments, here's a selection of pictures.

 Bit small...

 Better!

 Sick view on the 32nd floor!

Even bigger.

SICK living room, too bad I disliked the rest of the apartment.

Eventually I ended up going with the 2nd one, deciding that was the best value for money. The negotiating process was quite hard though. My application ended up being rejected, even though I showed them all the money in my bank accounts, more than enough to cover the rent for years AND I offered to pay the entire 2 years rent up front! Nonetheless, they wouldn't have me for some weird reason. Probably because I didn't want to pay for a guarantor company... I don't really see the point if I pay 2 years up front... STRANGE!

Before spending a few weeks in Europe to sell furniture in London and take care of some final things before leaving, I went to my friend's awesome hairsalon and took a few pictures of one of my favorite views in the world, a certain spot in Shibuya.

Not only is the hairsalon very nice, she's SUPERskilled at cutting hair too! (^_^)

After that in the middle of June it was off to the Netherlands and London for a bit. First up was London, where I stayed with my pro poker player friends for 2 weeks. Sadly enough I somehow injured my knee doing nothing on the very first day, which severely limited my mobility. Nonetheless I had a blast staying with them. We had a lot of good meals, played a lot of Wonders(amazing boardgame!) and in general caught up and hang out a bunch. I also took care of my furniture and had my PC and 30" monitor shipped to Japan. I surprisingly enough also got excited to play some poker again and won a decent bit of money during my stay in London, which was a nice bonus!

After 2 weeks in London there was about 1 week left in the Netherlands. I continued rehabbing my knee which was still far from 100%, I relaxed a lot with my family, saw a few friends and prepared for the move to Japan.

It was really good to see my friends and family in Europe, but at the same time I definitely realized that except for those connections there's not a lot left in Europe that interests me. There's not nearly enough to do and the food is way too bad in Holland. In London on the other hand, I just don't like the overall atmosphere/vibe of the city and the people all that much. So all in all, I'm very confident I've made the right decision to move to the other side of the world!

About a week or 2 into July when I got back to Japan, my main priority was getting a place of my own as soon as possible. Unfortunately at this point in time I heard that the application to the other apartment had fallen through and thus I took a look at 2 new apartments. This time in East-Ikebukuro. One of them I liked a lot and I decided to apply for that one instead.

The next week I met with the landlord in person. He turned out to be a really friendly businessman and superimpressed with my Japanese ability. I actually did most of the house searching process on my own in Japanese. He was extremely friendly and seemed genuinely excited to have me live in his apartment! That's my kind of landlord!

Unfortunately enough I did hear it'd take another week or 2 before I could move in, which meant being stuck in the tiny hotel room I had moved into after staying with friend for a week for a while longer. I spent most of my time preparing for the move-in.

Last week on the 1st of August it was finally move-in day! Unfortunately enough the apartment was still COMPLETELY empty. And by completely, I really mean completely. No fridge, no bed, no lamps, no curtains, no microwave, no furniture, no nothing. Which meant a lot of work was to be done. I got to it straight away and have worked about 14 hours a day since then. After a few days, on Monday, I had most of it done. The last few days I've been busy getting organized, finishing details and even some preparations for the getting back to the gym, getting back into a routine of studying Japanese and making some preparations for my businesses.

I actually have an idea for a 2nd business aswell now, although a smaller business. The first one will be a mobile application on which I'll get properly started within a few days. As far as the apartment goes, I'm only missing lights, curtains, a bed and a laundry machine right now. The laundry machine and the bed will arrive within a few hours though, so it's really only curtains and lights that I still need to go after.

 

What it looked like on Saturday

 1-2 hours later

What it looks like right now!

 Nighttime balcony view!

I want to use the currently empty living room as a theater room and put a projector in there and a nice couch etc. It will take me a little while longer before I get to that though, because I still have a TON of stuff to do! So I better get back at it.

Frank

P.S. Also check out the AWESOME restaurants I went recently when 2 poker player friends visited me in Tokyo.
http://tokyofoodjournal.blogspot.jp/

Not quite fluent at Japanese... yet

The past 2 weeks since my last blog I've mostly spent doing 1 thing, studying Japanese. Nearly every Japanese person I meet says I'm really good at Japanese, but I completely disagree. There's a few areas in which I do fine, but mostly it's still pretty terrible. I'll start off by listing the things that I do think I'm quite good at.

Online messages/Text messages

Pretty much fluent. Pretty much anything I ever want to say in online messages and text messages I'm able to express with what I believe are relatively few mistakes. Some sentences structures are possibly still slightly unnatural and I'm sure you could notice here and there that I'm not a Japanese person, but those are minor things and I'm honestly fluent.

Understanding online and text messages sent to me is also quite easy. There's the occasional Kanji(chinese characters) I haven't learned yet or even a word I haven't learned at all, but it's pretty easy copy and pasting a word or 2 into a dictionairy every now and then. It's quite rare that I see some grammar used that I don't understand and I can't remember the last time there was something I didn't understand at all.

1 on 1 conversations with people

These aren't too bad either. Obviously this is more difficult than messaging, because you have to think more on the fly and be faster constructing sentences. Nonetheless I believe I do an overall okay job and I'm able to get most things across, even some reasonably long stories I manage to explain, although I'm sure I make a bunch of mistakes in the process and undoubtedly have a bit of an accent, although I've definitely come across foreigners with (hopefully) far worse accents than mine.

Understanding the person I'm talking with in 1 on 1 conversations usually isn't too hard either, since they quickly get a feel for how fast they can speak and what kind of vocabulary I have and if I don't understand something I can quickly say so and they can repeat it slower, explain it in a different way or sometimes I look up a difficult word in my phone's dictionary. Overall not too bad and especially when first meeting people, the kind of topics you discuss are super easy and it's really rare for there to be any sort of misunderstanding.

Conversations in public places like restaurants/supermarkets etc etc

I rarely have issues saying anything I need to. It's not too hard ordering things are asking where something is in a store. However menus can pose an occasional problem and I usually try to look at the menu of the restaurant before actually going there. Things like Sushi and Tonkatsu are very easy. I've eaten them before and the menus aren't so hard. When there's pictures accompanying the menus it also is pretty easy, but there's definitely types of food and restaurants that I mostly haven't been to, where I could not order food on my own. Sometimes it's written on a chalkboard in a handwriting that's nearly impossible to read and sometimes it's a type of food that I haven't eaten before and I don't know any of the Kanjis(Chinese characters) used to describe that food. Never poses a huge problem though.

Understanding people in these places is mostly not much of an issue either, but this is in a big thanks to that I actually know what kinds of questions people ask and often they also use body language or signal to what they mean. As an example, in the supermarket they often ask if you want a bag, I'm pretty sure they use another word for bag than I've learned, but I still haven't been able to catch what it is, because they speak so quickly. Nonetheless I've always understood, since it's the obvious question to ask and they always grab the bag, so I can see what they mean. Generally the rule is, if it's something expected I'm fine, but when it's something unexpected it's a lot harder and I'll need to ask them to repeat it.

TV/Movies

I haven't watched that many as of late, but the last 2-3 days I've noticed a serious weakness in my listening ability, so I've been doing more of this to work on that. There's the occasional TV program where I understand a shocking amount. Like recently there was some sort of super simple course about computers and computer software, where I don't know how, but I was able to understand a shocking amount of it. Furthermore there's the occasional old lady on TV that talks really slow, which is also semi-easy to follow. There's also inbetweens like some news items that are fairly simple and I get the main lines if what they're saying, but there's definitely also some programs that I don't understand a whole lot more than people that don't speak any Japanese, simply because they talk so fast and there's often lots of background noise in these too. The talkshows are a prime example of this. Movies/TV Series also vary. I definitely have subtitles on still, but I do find myself listening to the Japanese in all but the fastest/most complicated parts and usually catching the main structure of the sentence with the verb at the very least, sometimes even understanding a couple of simpleish sentences in a row completely.

Group conversations

This is the thing at which I want to get fluent at the most, but it's also the thing which I sadly enough think will take the longest. The main issue is that to properly participate in group conversations you need to be able to follow everything that's going on　completely. You need to be able to grasp every nuance and understand everything that's going on. This would be hard enough if I was talking 1 on 1 with a Japanese person if he/she wouldn't adjust the speed at which he/she talked at all nor the vocabulary used, but in group conversations, since it's usually me and multiple Japanese people, it's only natural that they talk faster and more difficult Japanese. Furthermore in group conversations, things go back and forth a lot more and it gets really hard to 'follow all the action' and keep up with what's being said. When that happens, it gets hard to properly participate too, because if you don't know what's being said... well it gets hard.

It's probably also partly the contrast to English group conversations where I tend to talk quite a lot and simply being unable to express myself the same way as I am in English is kinda of shitty, but I guess it's simply unrealistic being able to this this after 13 months. If I remember correctly even when I had just moved to London and spent 6 weeks in Vegas during the summer it took me a little while to really get all the nuances in these types of conversations.

Apart from studying Japanese, I've gone to the gym a decent bit, ate out quite a lot(lots of return visits to this EPIC Sushi Bar, eat there almost daily now... it's impossible not to!) and I even played about an hour of poker. I'll probably try and start playing a bit more when I'm well rested and when I find the time. Oh and I bought a chair(to play poker), some shoes and started trying to dress better because everybody here does:

Anyway, that's it for now. Still enjoying everything about Japan that's better than the west(which is a lot), but I do wish I was as good at Japanese as I am at English(and Dutch) and I of course miss my friends living in other parts of the world!