Hello and guten tag from Germany!
The convention is over, and as usual, we are dog-tired after hours and hours of standing, talking to anime fans and explaining about J-List. We brought a few thousand of our popular Japanese pocket tissues, with our J-List URL and information on it, but many fans who received it had no idea what we were pressing into their hands. Pocket tissue is a staple of life in Japan — when you walk down the street in Tokyo, you see girls handing out huge boxes of advertising tissue with company’s messages on them. Japanese pocket tissue weren’t very well known to fans in Germany, but thanks to us, the “tissue awareness” bar in Europe has been raised a notch. (Incidentally, every order from J-List comes with a free package of our tissue.)
We continue to enjoy the sights and sounds of the Old Country. Last night we had a delicious dinner in restaurant located in a famous 19th century Prussian fort with my sister and her husband, who live in Germany (we’re a very international family). I’m typing this update from my iBook while cruising up the Rhine with Chiharu. Germany is a beautiful place, and the Koblenz and Rhine area especially lovely, with a great mixture of Roman ruins, beautiful castles, beautifully designed streets and parks, and more.
We continue to notice “little differences” (to use a Pulp Fiction phrase) between our home countries and Germany. All shops seem to close too early, and practically nothing is open on Sunday at all (just restaurants), which is quite different from the States, with its Super Walmarts that are open 24 hours. Taxis are nearly all Mercedez Benz, and are beautifully maintained by their drivers. We have yet to see a single McDonald’s (so I can’t have a “Royale with Cheese” experience), and we’ve yet to see a single policeman in any capacity, at least that we’ve recognized. There appears to be very little German music (apart from folk music), and all the radio we’ve heard has been American, mostly oldies and eighties hits. The food is very good here, and of course the beer is absolutely delicious. You never seem to get enough ice in your drink, though.
Happily, the J-List server shift is going well. The bug which kept new customers from checking out has been clipped (we think, anyway), and the problem with images not displaying was also fixed as well. The new server is much faster, and there are many “under the hood” improvements which will make things much easier for you and us. For starters, it’s now easy for you to update your on-file shipping and billing addresses, and credit card on file too.
And we have a new update for you, too, a whole slew of new products from Japan, courtesy of our staff in Japan. There are many newly posted items, including magazines, photobooks, several new volumes of manga (along with fresh stock of previous posted issues), a large number of new and back-in-stock DVDs, and more. We’ve also got new anime and toy items, several new Japanese snack and gum items, fresh stock of snacks, new “wacky things from Japan,” and more. We hope you’ll check out the site — thanks in advance!
Well, we’re off to Frankfurt tomorrow, after a wine tasting tour in the morning. We’ll be back in Japan by Thursday — we’ll see you then!
