Today was a good day indeed. What was waiting at the post office was none other than the mini Aria figures that only come with volume 7 and 8 of the manga. Though it has been a long time since these were released. I saw these in Toranoana #1 in Akihabara as volume 8 was released when I was there, but stupidly enough I did not buy them at the time. Alas what other way but to venture through Yahoo Japan Auctions to find what I wanted.
This was also a good time to try out some deputy services that were available and the ones I chose were Rinkya and Shopping Mall Japan. My impressions of both services are good. There is one down point and it applies to both services, their site layout. On Rinkya’s homepage when I first started using it, I could not find the Login link to view my account details. It is situated at the top right-hand corner with a BIG sign up logo and a small login logo underneath it. SMJ on the other hand does what it needs to do, but its not as fancy as Rinkya’s. To me, SMJ wins in this case. Depending on the amount of items you have in storage, once you request for shipping of the item/s, regardless of the shipping method you requested, they will use the cheapest and most suited. In my case, I request for regular SAL, but SMJ found out it was cheaper to mail via EMS. Well 3 days is better than 2 weeks right?
Now this is the first time I’ve done a post with an image, so we’ll see how this turns out. I also made a make shift lighting setup composed of cardboard boxes, white paper and sticky tape. Looks like it paid off but I’ll see how it goes with other items later. Anyway, in the picture we have Akari, Alice, and Aika on the left. They were from volume 7. On the right we have Athena, Alicia, and Akira. They were from volume 8. And when these two figures combine…
