You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2007.
Hikkichan’s career has taken a rather unexpected upsurge recently. Her last single, Flavor of Life, sold nearly 300,000 copies in its first week alone and to put that into perspective, ERIKA’s (she of Kaoru Amane and Taiyou no Uta fame) claimed the number one spot on the Oricon weekly chart last week with sales of just over 50,000. Flavor of Life stayed at number for three weeks in a row and whilst this may not seem very long for Western people (Rihanna has been at the top of the UK singles chart for about two months now), this seriously is an amazing achievement considering the last solo female to do that was Ayumi Hamasakisan in 2002. Also, Hikkichan’s previous single (ignoring Boku wa Kuma although that did have a rather long chart run and eventually sold 150,000~ copies), Keep Tryin’ only managed to sell 125,000~ copies and also didn’t each number one on the Oricon weekly chart. Flavor of Life has currently sold in excess of 630,000 copies, the ringtone and video etc. has been downloaded literally millions of times, the biggest selling ringtone in Japanese history or something (I should add, the Oricon charts do not include legal downloads in their charts and only physical CD sales count). While I’m so ecstatic about this, I am really shocked… I don’t know why it’s sold so much. I can’t see the tie in with Hana Yori Dango being such an amazing marketing tool and I don’t think the song is one of her best (that said, Passion, the theme song to Square-Enix’s Kingdom Hearts II also sold poorly and it’s one of my favourite songs!), either way… I’m amazingly excited about her new single, Beautiful World / Kiss & Cry.
Kiss & Cry was released as a digital single some time ago already now and it’s also the theme song to the new Freedom Cup noodle adverts (think Pot Noodle), and recently the 2007 remix of her cover to Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon has also been released and can actually be bought from UK iTunes (as well as basically all her back catalogue) but EMI Japan has recently released a preview clip of the lead single (it’s not technically a double A-side) Beautiful World. I have to say, I immediately fell in love with it! I haven’t been this excited about a song for a long while now. In fact, it was probably Keep Tryin’ or This Is Love (both Hikkichan songs) which were both released more than a year ago. I didn’t get excited about Flavor of Life and while I was excited about Kiss & Cry, it’s not nearly as much as Beautiful World. I’ve set the preview clip as my ringtone on my phone I love it that much; it’s only 43 minutes but I already love it!
Hikkichan is really my favourite singer ever. I know I went through the whole Angela Aki phase last year and listened to her non-stop but I have a more enduring fanatacism for Hikkichan; I have a pretty bad girl-crush on her to be honest. I love Hikkichan! My favourite song, Sakura Drops, is a pretty old Hikkichan song but to me it still sounds amazing. I don’t normally buy Japanese singles (they cost about $10 each), but I might just have to buy this one, I love the song too much not to! Below is a link to where you can listen to a preview of Beautiful World as well as Kiss & Cry and Fly Me To The Moon (In Other Words) -2007 MIX-. Oh, and I should add that Beautiful Word and Fly Me To The Moon are both tie-ins with the new Rebirth Evangelion!
Click here to listen to a preview of Beautiful World amongst others.
On Friday, when my friend and I were coming home from the London Aquarium we stopped off (at my friend’s request, not mine) at some… household hardware store… type place. Whilst looking around the pointless stuff people buy I saw a muffin baking tray! It was only £4.99 (I’ve looked online and the trendy new rubber ones are about £17), so I was really stoked and bought it! Yesterday (Saturday) I decided to bake some muffins! I bought a muffin recipe book a while ago but that’s lost now… so I searched online and found a few recipes and decided to give them ago. I went to the supermarket (the not so local one might I add, but it was a lovely day so I enjoyed the walk) I bought everything I was missing at home and then set about making them.
I’m not sure if you’re tried baking muffins, cakes, anything before but I think it’s really fun! It’s quite time consuming but I had fun and at the end you get something yummy to eat. Below are pictures of the event! Obviously… my muffins don’t look that muffin like… but I think I know why: I probably used too much baking powder so they rised far too much and then not properly either; either way, they’re very yummy ^_^
Yesterday, my friend and I visited the London Aquarium which was pretty cool! I’ve been a few times before with school trips and the like but it was still fun! Instead of randomly talking amongst the pictures I’ll just post some of them (okay, a lot of them):
So basically… yeah! I had a fun time ^_^ My favourite bits were seeing the sharks; they literally swim right past your face and you can see all the teeth and their scary meaness! I also loved the moon jellyfish because they are so cute <3! There is a picture of two clown fish and a blue fish above, these are the exact same fish as Nemo and Dory from Finding Nemo! They’re really cute too!
About half-way through there is tank or pool type thing with no cover and it’s filled with fish and some crabs and some rays! We were lucky and got there when a staff member was giving a talk and about to feed them and you are allowed to touch the rays! It’s really cool! I touched them a few times, their skinny is like sand paper but a little bit slimy too, I loved it!
Sorry about some of the pictures, I spent half the time fighting with my camera to try and take decent pictures of the stuff as you’re not allowed flash photography but I managed to fix it in the end but still, some are pretty dark! Anyway, enjoy them <3 I recommend going. It was £11 something for a student ticket and whilst it’s pretty small and you can easily get around in like an 1 hour, if you take your time, take some pictures etc. you can spend quite a bit of time there.
Also, it’s located on the South Bank near the Saatchi & Saatchi gallery and right by the London Eye. After we left my friend and I walked across (I think Charing Cross Bridge) a bridge and I stopped and took a picture of the London Eye and Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and the River Thames and the tumultuous sky; it looks kind of pretty I think, a serene chaos ^^; The last picture is also of the little cute paper weight I got from the London Aquarium gift shop (although how many sheets of paper it can keep down is questionable – it’s so light!), which I bought because it was so cute and you gotta buy cheap tat from these kinds of places for mementoes <3
Okay so today I went out with my friend ^_^ Today was really nice; pleasantly sunny, a gentle , cool breeze and not too hot to make you sticky. My friend and I had originally planned to go out on Thursday, then Friday but we finally went out today; we had also planned to go to a pizzaria but when we got there it was closed T_T so… we decided to just head to Chinatown anyway (my friend is Vietnamese Chinese) with my friend trying to badger me into going to Wagamamas which is a Japanese style restaurant chain. Normally I find it yummy but I was disappointed I wasn’t going to get any yummy pizza so we passed this burger bar type place that supposedly sells gourmet(ish) burgers. Each burger is £6 – £8 but like… meep. I think I’m still recovering! It was yummy enough, I had a ‘Satay Burger’ which was basically beef with peanut satay, lettuce, some tomato relish in a brown seasame seed bun but it is just so heavy! Beef is hard enough to digest as it is! It was nice enough but I won’t be going back! Here is a picture of said Mammoth Burger (sorry for the quality of the pictures; they’re taken with my mobile phone):
So… as I mentioned before, my friend and I both went to Chinatown. It was pretty busy but still fun ^_^ My friend bought a Pandan cake which is made with the leaves of the Pandan plant which is why the cake has a green colour to it. I’ve never had it before and didn’t really want to buy one but I did buy lots of other yummy things ^_^
I’m not sure if anyone else has been to the Chinatown in London, but it’s relatively big with lots of shops, not just restaurants although they are the most common business there. There are lots of Chinese supermarkets selling things like fruit and vegetables, meats (fish too), sauces, noodles, rice, lots of different stuff, just like a normal supermarket – if you ever get a chance to go to a Chinese supermarket, definitely go ^_^ it’s very fun seeing all the exotic stuff, I’m sure you’ll find it hard not to buy something!
We went in a few supermarkets before I managed to persuade my friend to go into the confectionary store! It does sell other stuff too, like normal Chinese cooking food but the main stuff sells confectionary. There’s lots of different stuff, beverages, lots of gummy sweets, lots of pretzel based snacks, the ever popular jelly sweets and the traditional white rabbit sweets (which are one of my favourites!). Anyway, I bought an aloe vera, lychee flavoured juice drink… LYCHEE JUICE!!! Real lychee juice! *squeal* I’ve not tried it yet but hopefully it’ll be nice, there’s lots of bits in it… and it looks slightly jelly like; I’m hoping it’s yummy though… I also bought some strawberry flavoured Pocky which are pretzel stick snacks from Japan and some grape flavoured HiChus which are Japanese chewy sweets which are very yummy! Here are pictures of the stuff I bought =^_^=
After this I went to one of the Chinese bakeries in Chinatown; it’s my favourite one even though it’s a bit small ^_^ I bought four Cocktail Buns which are my favourite! They’re basically buns with some kind custard with grated coconut bits in it kind of… paste in the centre of them! The custard has little crystals in them and they’re yummiest when eaten freshly cooked or failing that, microwave them for a few seconds to make them warm and soft – they’re delicious. Whilst gazing at the yummy cakes in the bakery I also saw a rather bland looking, brownish sponge cake… and almost died! It was the exact same cake my Chinese granma used to make in abundence – like, every time we’d visit her it was like she done nothing else but cook (she was an amazing cook and my whole family nostaligically miss her cooking). The cake is really yummy, not too sweet and tastes almost like some kind of cereal. After a long time searching, I managed to find the cake’s name which is basically: Chinese Sponge Cake, Chinese Steam Sponge Cake, Ma Lai Gao, Ma Lai Koh or 马来糕. It has quite a heavy texture, not fluffy like more Western sponge cakes but it’s still very spongey and yummy and I love it! I’ve been eating my piece as I write this entry with a glass of milk and it just makes me think of my Chinese granma. I’m going to learn how to make it and when I do, I’ll nick name it Aa-Maa Cake after my Chinese granma whom I miss <3
Today I got my first year university exam results! I also found out the results of the three pieces of coursework which I hadn’t yet got back so… today has been very academic indeed!
I only done two exams this year, and they were both for two modules which also had two pieces of coursework each so those two modules had an exam and two pieces of coursework. Most of the other modules had either one or two pieces of coursework. I got an A- for one of the exams and a B for the other; on top of that, the three coursework marks I got were a B, a C+ and an A+ so… not too shabby at all ^_^ My average for the year is 65% which is a 2:1 (a B) which is okay I guess… Some of the results are pretty good considering I missed about two months of certain classes; I basically missed all of Sociolinguistics Semester II yet I got 73% (A+) for that piece of coursework and missed virtually all of Corpus Linguistics but still got 58% which is higher than my friends who actually went to the classes so I’m chuffed about that! I’m pretty stoked I managed to get 58% in that piece of coursework because if I never have to hear the words ‘Corpus Linguistics’ again I will be very, very happy; no one understood that lesson at all, I basically made my coursework up so I’m soooo happy I got a C+ and didn’t fail it. Overall, my marks for my coursework have been something like: one A+, one A, one A-, lots of Bs/B+s and one C+ which I’m happy about! My friends and I met one of our tutors (and the overall head of the degree) whilst waiting for the results and he said he thought I done well! Yay for relief!
After we got our results, we took the underground, said goodbye to one of my friends then me and another friend went to Chinatown for her to do some grocery shopping (she’s BBC). That was pretty funy; I love Chinatown, it’s so cute and cool. My friend who is far too kind for her own good bought me a real, proper pearl/bubble tea! *squeal*
Pearl tea (the common Chinese translation/name is ‘珍珠奶茶’, ‘pearl milk tea’, Bubble tea is the common Western name) is basically a tea based drink, sweetly flavoured and with tapioca balls at the bottom. I’ve had it before but that one was disgusting, this time my friend took me to a proper pearl tea bar (like a juice/smoothie bar), and she bought me one; it’s so yummy! Sweet tapioca balls are put into the cup first, then tea mixed with evaporated milk and then some crushed ice added at the end. You get an extra wide straw so you can suck up the pearls/bubbles and chew on them – they have a jelly like texture and are very yummy and chewy.
Here is a couple of pictures that I took on the bus home from Chinatown after saying goodbye to my friend:
Hopefully you can kinda get the jist of what I mean. If you ever get the chance to try some, go for it! They’re really yummy. I don’t particularly like coffee and whilst I don’t particularly like tea, these are really yum and fun and cute, especially the tapioca balls. You can get other flavours, especially fruit based ones, but this one tasted like a sweet, creamy tea – you get a hint of the evaporated milk which gives it enough sweetness without being sickly. Pearl Tea is so my favourite drink now!
