Gotta love the Americans and their baseball expressions: "Sometimes life throws you a curveball". Well, I'm about sure that life has throws me a fecking SKIPPYball with the way my life's been going recently... Today I have been surprised by my closest friends in three separate occasions. That's life, I guess. Never quite what you expect.
On to more mundane things: there was a fire in the building opposite of the youth heim today, and I had the perfect view from my room. I was about to leave for Tokyo when I saw the smoke coming out of the building, and less than a minute later I heard the first sirens. Lots of firetrucks, an ambulance and a police car arrived at the scene. They extinguished the fire rather quickly, and from what I could tell it didn't seem like anyone was seriously hurt.
When the worst was over I finally departed to Shinjuku in an attempt to sell my camera and lens. I left the train one stop before Shinjuku to do some exploring, and I soon found my way back into the camera shop district. The first shop I tried told me my camera was worth exactly 0 yen (converted to Euro's that about 0 Euro's!), and the price they named for the lens was about half what I expected after looking up the prices online. Crap. I went to another store, this time trying to sell only the lens. The saleswoman took a good look at the lens. So good in fact, that she found dust inside -___- Estimated price: 500 yen (about 0 Euro's, rounded DOWN..). It seems that the cost to repair the lens would be almost equal to the price that I could get from selling it, so in other words it's not worth it at all to get it fixed OR to sell it. Who ever said that lenses always keep their value? Even if the lens had been clean I would only have gotten 1/4th of the original price. So much for that idea. So now I've got 5 cameras. Great....
Truths learned today:
- Don't try to sell hardware or camera equipment in Japan. They've got more than enough of it
- There is always some place in Tokyo that you haven't been to yet
- From rv Pausch: "Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you"
- It's all fun and games until somebody gets hurt!